Open access publisher brings scholarship to developing world

In the summer of 2010, Amartya Sen, the Nobel prizewinning Indian economist, wanted to publish a book he had edited that explores why ethnic or religious violence erupts – and how it can be prevented.

Rather than approaching a hallowed university press, he turned instead to the open access Open Book Publishers in Cambridge.

He wanted Peace and Democratic Society to be freely available to readers and policymakers in the developing world so it would have a real impact on civic debate, said Alessandra Tosi, co-founder and managing director of Open Book Publishers and a life fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge.

Since its foundation in 2008 by a group of University of Cambridge academics, the press has published 42 books and has charted a dramatic rise in readers from just over 5,000 in 2009 to nearly 150,000 last year.

It is now seeing soaring numbers of readers from developing countries, including Professor Sen’s native India, Nigeria and Ethiopia (where figures show that there are more readers of its titles than in Canada).

All its books are free to read online, and a handful are free to download. In addition, the press sells traditional printed copies of its titles.

However, in poor countries internet connections are “generally unstable, which make reading online for any length of time, or even connecting, problematic”, Dr Tosi said.

So since May 2013, the publisher has made four of its books available to the world’s poorest via Worldreader, a non-profit organisation whose app permits digital books to be read on almost any mobile phone. It is now working to put all of its titles on the platform.

More than 8,000 readers in 113 countries have accessed these books on their phones – most of them from developing countries, particularly Nigeria and Ethiopia.

Open access publishing solutions for poor countries obviate the need to buy academic books at “prohibitive” prices with “lengthy and expensive” shipping, said Dr Tosi.

“Only a very small percentage of the population [in the developing world] owns computers,” she said. “But a very large proportion uses mobile phones for things such as banking. Increasingly these devices are used for mobile reading.”

There are already huge online libraries of free books, with Project Gutenberg, perhaps the longest-established such initiative, offering more than 45,000 titles. But Dr Tosi emphasised that Open Book Publishers, as an academic press, publishes only peer-reviewed titles with a “quality guarantee”.

With the university population growing rapidly around the world but academic material generally hidden behind paywalls, Dr Tosi fears that without open access, students in developing countries will have to rely on “unchecked” and “sub-par” publications available online.

Some of the titles in the press’ catalogue – The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts, for example – may not immediately appear to be relevant to developing countries, but Dr Tosi noted that it has also published three books on African oral literature. Other titles include Feeding the City, an ethnographic study of Mumbai’s 5,000 dabbawalas, who deliver 200,000 home-cooked boxed lunches to the city’s workers every day.

Open Book Publishers is also planning to team up with a South African organisation, Paperight, which makes digital books available to a network of photocopy shops so that readers can pay for part of a book to be printed locally, thus giving scholars in developing countries another way to save money.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/open-access-publisher-brings-scholarship-to-developing-world/2013833.article

What's Really Wrong With Google? And Why Librarians Rock!

Google is the 52nd richest company in the world, exceeding even Facebook at 510th place. The word "google" has even become a verb. What's not to like?

Well... Google often fails to serve people who search it or the people trying to get their sites noticed. All too often Google's results completely miss the mark.

Like when you want the black box theory in microeconomics and you get results about the black box on airplanes. Or when a patient on warfarin needs the amount of Vitamin K in a particular food, clicks links and finds nothing.

In my eyes there's plenty wrong! I'm an ex-librarian, privy to a world most people have no idea exists. Nor do they have any idea what we really do.

Doctors, lawyers, cops, and politicians all have numerous movies and TV series in which they are venerated for their skills, but the lowly librarian is relegated to the back of the bookmobile where she peddles not books but a laxative to constipated patrons (in complete violation of our profession's ethics).

The stereotyped image of librarians on TV and in movies is dismal. To find a facsimile of a real librarian, you have to go back to the golden era of Spencer and Hepburn to dig out the film, Desk Set.

Hepburn is a head reference librarian battling Spencer's attempts to replace her staff with a machine. The film is a romantic comedy, but it makes it clear that people, not computers are the heart and soul of providing information -- computers are just a tool, one that Hepburn comes to accept, but doesn't let rule her efforts to provide answers to her patrons's questions.

Why Google sucks

Google will never equal the library in precision and accuracy because this company is too arrogant to even listen to a librarian. Google employees are young, so young they still believe that only they know how to do things.

I personally witnessed a speaker from Google tell members of The American Society of Indexers at a San Francisco conference that Google had gotten rid of the one librarian on staff in Palo Alto. She was a former cataloger; she was too "nitpicky."

Google's ignorance of the library world is as appalling as its prejudice against all librarians.

Catalogers must be nitpicky, i.e. precise. They belong to the half of the library that we call "technical services". "Technical" does not refer to computers -- it refers to improving the "discoverability" of materials or information.

To enhance the discoverability of books, etc., catalogers assign subject headings, i.e. concepts and meaningful compound phrases taken from an official list. On the other hand, Google uses "keyword-alongside-context" (KWAC) extraction.

KWAC word(s) appear in bold type in Google's descriptions under the links it provides you, along with the words adjacent to them You decide what relevance, if any, Google's KWAC entry (or entries) have for your search.

Catalogers and Google programmers are "apples and oranges."

However, the other half of a library is called "public services". These are departments like reference, periodicals, media, children's, young adults', the check-out counter, and inter-library loans.

These librarians and/or their staff work directly with patrons. Public service librarians are people types. They work face-to-face, on the phone, and over the Web to help people - people with questions.

The real problem with Google doesn't lie with the spiders that find and crawl sites - it's Google's interface, the results that you get on your screen. Google should have hired public service librarians to consult about its interface with the people who search it.

How should we be able to search the Web?

In the 1980s and 1990s DIALOG Information Services spoiled me forever. As a reference librarian (and book author) I could choose any subject and quickly find exactly what I needed in the company's 100+ databases.

Roger K. Summit, DIALOG's founder, is regarded as the "Father of Online Systems"; he's the man who "changed the information industry".

DIALOG lived up to its name. DIALOG allowed the user to to do a search and continue refining that search until we found just what we (i.e. our patrons) needed.

DIALOG understood that syntax, i.e., "the way words are put together" to form phrases, clauses. and sentences, was key to finding information in all-word-searches. The company included several keyboard conventions enabling librarians to specify exact word order and placement while searching its online databases.

For example, quotation marks meant exactly "together in this order". Not one word here, one word there, and another word way over there - like you get with Google results.

The speaker from Google noted that user studies found people only look at the first screen of its results. No wonder! The first screen is Google's best try - all those millions of other hits mean nothing when Google's opening monolog fails.

Google only provides quantity - the heck with quality of its results. Not so DIALOG. It sought answers.

For example, the letter "n" meant "near to". Not only could you specify two words near to each other, but you could specify exactly how near they had to be, e.g., "n2" meant with "two words" between them.

Believe me, keystroke commands like DIALOG's "n" separated all the "wheat from the chaff" - DIALOG didn't return junk.

Unlike Google, DIALOG didn't spawn a whole new industry, i.e., SEO (search engine optimization) to fight for its attention. DIALOG made all of its information sources discoverable, not just a few.

Computers can do amazing things, but Google's algorithms are about exciting as grandpa's decrepit old shovel caked with dried up -- manure. For all the billions of dollars Google rakes in, we all deserve something better -- way better!

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Wikipedia Is NOT A Doctor -- And A Study Confirms It

Your high school teacher said it best: Wikipedia is not a reliable source. 

The online encyclopedia that can be edited by experts and idiots alike is an easy source of information when trying to learn about a new topic. But a new study confirms what we all (hopefully) already know: Many entries -- especially medical entries -- contain false information, so don't use Wikipedia in place of a doctor.

Dr. Robert Hasty of Campbell University in North Carolina, along with a team of researchers, published the study in this month's issue of the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association. The study calls the information published in 20,000-plus medical-related Wikipedia entries into question.

For the study, researchers identified the "10 costliest conditions in terms of public and private expenditure" -- which included diabetes, back pain, lung cancer and major depressive disorder -- and compared the content of Wikipedia articles about those conditions to peer-reviewed medical literature. Two randomly assigned investigators found that 90 percent of the articles contained false information, which could affect the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. 

Now for those of you who are saying that it's not the doctors themselves checking Wikipedia, you'd be wrong. According to a pair of studies from 2009 and 2010, "70% of junior physicians use Wikipedia in a given week, while nearly 50% to 70% of practicing physicians use it as an information source in providing medical care."

Pew research suggests that 72 percent of Internet users have looked up health information online in the last year. False information on Wikipedia accounts -- like a edited information about the side effects of a medication or false information about the benefits of one course of treatment over another -- could encourage some patients to push their doctors toward prescribing a certain drug or treatment.

Moral of the story: Wikipedia can't tell you if those sniffles are a symptom of the common cold or the West Nile Virus, so consult your doctor if you have health concerns. If you're a doctor, we don't know what to tell you, except maybe get off Wikipedia. (Isn't that what med school was for?)

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Online Libraries Running Successfully in Cities

We have had books delivered at our doorsteps for a few years now, but at the present libraries also have caught on to the trend. Most of them go by the tag 'online libraries' but very few in the city deal in digital books.

You can browse through their catalogue online, pick out your favorites and go on adding to your wishlist. You could order and pay online, if you prefer it, but you borrow a physical book, have it delivered at your doorstep and even picked up once you're through with it. And there's variety too from textbooks to chick-lit, comics to political writing, magazines and everything in between, in different languages, for different ages.

They generally have a number of plans that you could pick from, and some even claim on their websites that they don't charge a late fee.

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Why the Smart Reading Device of the Future May Be … Paper

Paper books were supposed to be dead by now. For years, information theorists, marketers, and early adopters have told us their demise was imminent. Ikea even redesigned a bookshelf to hold something other than books. Yet in a world of screen ubiquity, many people still prefer to do their serious reading on paper.
Count me among them. When I need to read deeply—when I want to lose myself in a story or an intellectual journey, when focus and comprehension are paramount—I still turn to paper. Something just feels fundamentally richer about reading on it. And researchers are starting to think there’s something to this feeling.
To those who see dead tree editions as successors to scrolls and clay tablets in history’s remainder bin, this might seem like literary Luddism. But I e-read often: when I need to copy text for research or don’t want to carry a small library with me. There’s something especially delicious about late-night sci-fi by the light of a Kindle Paperwhite.

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Will the digital age mark another era of decline for libraries

On the turn of the century a library without books was unimaginable. Now it seems almost certain. Like so many other traditional institutions of intellectual and cultural life—publishing, journalism, and the university, to name a few—the library finds itself on a sheer drop at the dawn of a digital era. What are libraries for, if not storing and circulating books? With their hearts cut out, how can they survive?

The current years of austerity have not been kind to the public library. 2012 marked the third consecutive year in which more than 40 percent of states decreased funding for libraries. In 2009, Pennsylvania, the keystone of the old Carnegie library system, came within 15 Senate votes of closing the Free Library of Philadelphia. In the United Kingdom, a much more severe austerity program shuttered 200 public libraries in 2012 alone.

It  is not the first era to turn its back on libraries. The Roman Empire boasted an informal system of public libraries, stretching from Spain to the Middle East, which declined and disappeared in the early medieval period. In his book Libraries: An Unquiet History, Matthew Battles calls such disasters “biblioclasms.”

The most commonly invoked image of biblioclasm is the burning of the Library of Alexandria, probably the greatest-ever collection of Hellenic manuscripts, many of which are now lost to history. In most versions of the story, the arson was committed by early Christian zealots or by invading Arabs under the banner of Islam. Indeed, either group might have seen the burning of the pagan Library as an act of devotion and a net gain for civilization. Just as likely, however, the fire is a myth that obscures a long, slow decline, and the flames that brought down the ancient library were fed not by a single man or group, but by the winds of history—changing reading habits, political instability, and the decline of the administrative state.

Will the digital age mark another era of decline for libraries?

 http://www.slate.com/articles/life/design/2014/04/the_future_of_the_library_how_they_ll_evolve_for_the_digital_age.html?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly&utm_campaign=0f53566444-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0bb2959cbb-0f53566444-304595089

World Digital Library grows to 10,000 items

WASHINGTON: The World Digital Library lead by the Library of Congress in Washington reached a landmark, surpassing 10,000 items with the addition of prehistoric manuscripts from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Officials said the digital library's collection has grown to include 10,037 digitized manuscripts, maps, books, prints, photographs, films, sound recordings and other cultural items. The constant effort is a collaborative project that includes contributions from 102 institutions in 46 different countries.

The content can be accessed online in seven languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

The most recent contributions include an early 16th-century Gospel manuscript from Ethiopia and a manuscript containing an Ottonian Gospel book fragment believed to have been made in a German monastery in the 10th century. There is also a church calendar in Greek that was created in Byzantium around 1025 to 1041.

The Walters Art Museum has been using a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to digitize its manuscript collection.
Librarian of Congress James Billington said the digital library is making important and beautiful content available to a global audience.

"This project is of enormous benefit to students, teachers, scholars and lifelong learners, and I am gratified to see that it continues to grow," he said.

The World Digital Library began to take shape in 2005 with a $3 million gift from Google. It was formally launched in 2009 at UNESCO's headquarters in Paris with content from national libraries around the world.

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Seed libraries’ try to save the world’s plants

AAbasic principle of any library is that you return what you take out. By that standard, the new scheme at Hampshire College’s library is a roll of the dice. Since last November, librarians have been lending out packets of seeds, allowing people to plant them, and checking them back in if—and only if—the borrower manages to grow thriving plants in the meantime.

The Hampshire College project is part of a small but growing group of “seed libraries” across the country, local centers that aim to promote heirloom gardening and revive a more grass-roots approach to seed breeding.

The circulating-library model might seem like a strange fit with gardening. When you check out books and DVDs, you’re supposed to bring them back so others can use them, but with seeds, there’s a strong chance nothing will come back at all. And, in a world where fruit and vegetable seeds are available for just a few dollars a packet, free seeds aren’t a pressing need most places.

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How building a library of brains could save lives

A library is being assembled in San Diego with the help of some 300 brain donors; people from all walks of life, some of whom are healthy and some of whom have life-threatening brain disorders.

The patients undertake a series of tests during the course of their lives – and then donate their brains when they die. Slices of their brain are scanned and the images are digitally preserved, allowing doctors to search for clues to both neurological diseases and the secrets behind human longevity.

The Brain Observatory’s founder, Dr Jacopo Annese, says the library’s wealth of information could also help doctors discover the telltale signs of serious brain illnesses long before they actually appear.

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Amazon’s latest page-turner: book publishing

After forever changing book-selling, Amazon is now embarked on a wide-ranging venture that seeks to alter the book-publishing end of the business. Company officials see it as an experiment where they can tinker with new ways to connect authors and readers.

For more than a decade, Hugh Howey wrestled with writing about the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001.
Before Howey became the best-selling author of “Wool,” he worked as a boat captain aboard a ship docked in the shadows of the World Trade Center towers as two planes flew into them. Even as he began to make a living as an author, the idea of writing about the tragedy vexed him.
And then Amazon.com opened a creative door for him. The book-publishing unit at the online retail giant created an imprint devoted to fan fiction, Kindle Worlds, last May. Fan fiction is often dismissed as mediocre writing by wannabe authors.

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