UKSG Conference, 7-9 April 2008 (official webpage: http://www.uksg.org.uk/events/conference08)
Catch up with what has been going on at the UKSG 2008 conference via Serials-eNews, the UKSG website and blog. Main reports of plenaries are on the blog, available via the hyperlinks in the introductions. This issue covers the six plenary sessions, with links to reports and comment on the conference blog. You can read about one of the breakout sessions, and others will be featured in the next couple of issues.
In Plenary Session 3, three speakers covered different aspects of usage data and user behaviour. David Nicholas posed the question that we are still working as if content is king, when we should be looking at the consumer as king - their behaviour is very different depending on who they are. Access is no longer the outcome - we need to go beyond making sure that access is easy and quick, rather we should be profiling behaviours in order to find best practice and see what works and what does not. This point was picked up by Ian Bannerman in his presentation which urged caution about the current state of, and reliance on, usage statistics and his concerns about the proposed usage factor work.......Herbert van der Sompel (LANL) gave an excellent presentation on the work they are doing in the MESUR project - a systematic effort to define, validate and cross-validate a range of usage-based metrics of scholarly impact by creating a semantic model of the scholarly communication process.
The focus of Plenary Session 4 was firmly on the challenges of large-scale digitisation in the third plenary.
The Plenary Session 5 addressed innovation and the challenges that confront us when technology enables new behaviours that require business models adapt to trends. Geoffrey Bilder at CrossRef highlighted the potential for the web to function as a database, linking related items such as an author on Amazon and a concept on Wikipedia. Peter Murray-Rust on the faculty at the University of Cambridge pointed out the issues inherent when publishers attempt to package data sets as if they were print journals.
Other NEWS:
* CrossRef and Plagiarism detection service
CrossRef and iParadigms, LLC are launching the CrossCheck service to which can be used to help verify the originality of scholarly content. Following the recent pilot of CrossCheck, the service is scheduled to go live in June. For more detail, read Key issue by Amy Brand, Director of Business and Product Development, CrossRef, in the March issue of Serials.
* CAB eBooks goes live
CAB International's (CABI) book collection can now be purchased digitally with the launch of CAB eBooks. By developing its own web-based portal, CABI can now provide customers with digital copies of its publications dating from 2000 to 2008. More than 140 titles in the applied life sciences are now available in the front-file collection (2005 - 2008), growing to 200 titles by the end of 2008. In addition, CAB eBooks is fully integrated with CAB Abstracts, the online bibliographic database. Each chapter is indexed and abstracted individually to ensure that specific slices of information can be easily retrieved. The e-books are available as a complete package or in six separate subject collections: agriculture; animal and veterinary sciences; environmental sciences; human health, food, and nutrition; leisure and tourism; and plant sciences.
* OCLC releases EZproxy 5.0
OCLC has released a new version of EZproxy, the software solution for serving library users remotely, that offers new features. More than 2,500 institutions in over 60 countries have purchased EZproxy software to provide libraries a solution for authenticating remote user access to licensed databases
* The Library of Congress Experience
The Library of Congress has launched a new project called the Library of Congress Experience, putting more exclusive Library of Congress content online and making material accessible in new ways, both in person and online. Touchscreen kiosks giving access to the digitised content are situated throughout the halls of the Library of Congress for visitors to use. This new content is also available online. To use the 'Interactives' online, it is necessary to download a free version of Silverlight, the Microsoft technology that enables the zooming and other exploratory activities. A companion website features the same interactive exhibitions with additional educational resources that teachers and librarians can use with young people.
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