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Implications of Default Search Options in Ejournal Platforms

In my last post, I reviewed a handful of ejournal platforms (and one ebook platform) to see what default options were available that affected whether the search results would show all content or only the content the library had licensed or purchased. I also wanted to see which platforms let the user change the settings for available content. There were some platforms that I think did this the…

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#Databases

Options and Defaults for Showing Only Licensed Content in Ejournal Platforms

Depending on the interface and system you’re talking about and depending on the user type you’re talking about (the casual searcher who needs just one or two sources quickly or the dogged searcher who needs an expansive search set), it’s an interesting question about how to handle default search options that control whether results show all possible results or just those your library has…

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#Databases

Selecting All Results on a Page of Search Results

I’ve been wondering about the pros and cons of having a search results page that lets the user select all the items on the page (so they can be saved, exported, etc.) A quick survey of some major database platforms, discovery services, and our catalog shows that this feature is not available in every interface:

Interfaces that have it:

Factiva

LexisNexis Academic

ProQuest

Web of Science

Interface…

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#User Interfaces

Advice for UX Shops of One in Libraries

On Twitter recently, I was asked for advice about setting up a new one-person UX shop in a library. I’ve only recently emerged from the UX-shop-of-one world, thanks to the addition of a part-time UX designer to my “team” and am not entirely sure how much my experience yields universal insights. So consider the following caveats about how institutional differences will affect the usefulness of any…

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No Longer a UX Shop of One

Last fall, I was given the OK to hire a part-time user experience designer, which meant that my library’s user experience team was no longer a one-person operation. For the past four years, I’ve been working mostly on my own, although I frequently did projects that paired me up with others in the library (such as the time I worked with the head of access services to set up our new online…

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#Project management #User experience #UX design

Publishers and libraries do not completely understand how changing information consumption patterns, especially in the transition to mobile, should affect their product, infrastructure, and acquisi...

Pull quote: “Limiting access to desktop versions, and encouraging engagement with the off-site experience, could be a very good way to startle one’s colleagues into an improved understanding of researcher needs and opportunities to improve the services offered to support them. The point though is not to cause pain, but rather to have the whole team engaged in the types of improvements that can be made.”

#Roger Schonfeld #User experience #Mobile design #Remote access

Newly arrived, Slack is already changing the way our workgroup collaborates, but the provisions for integration with other apps need help

Pull quote: “ It's great that Slack, IFTTT, and Zapier offer long lists of point-to-point integrations. But simply because I can make something out of a feed doesn't mean I should have to. Of course, most users can't or won't. But those lists can't grow infinitely long. There needs to be a general-purpose fallback. In theory that's still RSS/Atom feeds. In practice I find, too often, it isn't.”

#Jon Udell #RSS #Slack

Pull quote: “Google -- which Schorn notes is free and worked the fastest -- trounced both proprietary products. By searching for a string of three to five nouns in the essays, the search engine missed only two sources. Neither Turnitin nor SafeAssign identified the sources Google missed.”

#Carl Straumsheim #Plagiarism #Turnitin #SafeAssign

Pull quote” The long-term future of the scholarly record in its fullest expression cannot be effectively secured with stewardship strategies designed for print materials.”

#Brian Lavoie #Constance Malpas #Digital preservation #Scholarly communication

Pull quote: “Most OA journals (67%) do not add article-processing charges (APCs) or other author-side fees; they are funded through other means. But most of the articles in OA journals (64%) were in journals that do charge APCs, at least some of the time. Those statements are both true.”

#Walt Crawford #Open access

Barbara Fister, “Schooling for Scandal,” Library Babel Fish | InsideHigherEd

Pull quote: “One thought I’ve had is to have students trace the history of a retraction . . .. Find the original paper, see what news outlets covered it and whether they reported the research accurately, find out how the study was challenged and on what basis, and do an analysis of what factors played into the controversy. Then have them interview a faculty member about their experiences publishing research (something I already do pretty regularly) so that they get a perspective on how it normally goes. I hope that by learning how someone they know experiences the peer review process and digging into what happens when it goes wrong, students will be able to see some of the complexity of the culture surrounding scholarly work and where the failure points may be - without leaving them in a crisis of faith.”

(via Schooling for Scandal | Library Babel Fish | InsideHigherEd)

#Barbara Fister #Information literacy #Instruction #Peer review #scholarly communication

Researchers’ multiple and changing institutional affiliations create tangible challenges, both for the researchers themselves and for scholarly publishers as well.

Pull quote: “Today, most authorization is managed through institutional site licenses or through a user account that is controlled by the university or other content licensor. What if, instead, the researcher carried credentials associated with multiple institutional identities, so that one would have access to all the resources to which one is entitled? In this vision, we would need to develop a user account that is portable across institutional affiliations and across platforms, that is controlled not by either of those parties but rather that is owned or controlled by the researcher.”

#Roger Schonfeld #Alumni #Licensing #Authentication

A look at Facebook's Instant Article initiative and what it means for discovery and for publishers.

Pull quote: “What is the equivalent of Facebook’s Instant Articles initiative? If the indexed discovery services drive increasing amounts of researcher traffic to scholarly content, it is easy to see advantages to putting increasing amounts of content “inside” the discovery services, or at least on their affiliated content platforms.”

#roger schonfeld #Discovery services #Facebook

I'm going to say it: Librarians are rarely effective negotiators. Way too often we pay full prices for mediocre resources without demur. Why? First of all, most librarians are introverts and/or pea...

Pull quote: “The key to negotiation is not to fold at the first “no.” Initial price quotes and contracts are a starting point for negotiation, by no means the final offer. Trim unneeded services to obtain a price reduction. Renegotiate, don’t renew, contracts. Ask to renew existing subscriptions at the previous year’s price, dodging the 5% annual increase that most providers slap on products. And take nothing at face value!”

#Michael Rodriguez #Vendors #Licensing

The review article follows narrative conventions similar to other journal articles limiting its value in many types of discovery processes. Could the review article's organization and analysis of t...

Pull quote: “Could the review article’s organization and analysis of the field be used to improve discovery in other types of research workflows? There is extensive data implicitly present in such pieces about relationships among publications, which could be useful as a signal that articles are related to one another (offering up the possibility of implicitly curatorial in addition to semantic or usage based recommendations). A review’s annotation and discussion of individual sources would be quite valuable as signals for trust if incorporated in a discovery system, much as book reviews serve for monographs in online bookstores and licensed content platforms. Imagine seeing the one sentence blurb from a neutral scholar while conducting a search, or even the secondary social functionalities that could be developed.”

#Roger Schonfeld #Discovery services #Discovery #Review articles #Current awareness

I have been tracking one kind of discovery - what I will call the quest for comprehensiveness - that is widespread among researchers but seems comparatively quiescent in professional discussion abo...

Pull quote: “I also wonder if bringing co-citation analyses into discovery environments would be helpful. In such a case, a researcher could somehow upload to a discovery tool a list of the references seen as most relevant on a topic. An automated analysis of what is most likely to be cited with those works would be returned – not unlike the way that a social network can suggest additional friends.”

#Roger Schonfeld #Discovery services #Discovery #Literature reviews #Current awareness

Pull quote: “If the textbook playing field is ever going to be leveled, it won’t be through doling out shared copies like so many bowls of thin gruel. At the root of the textbook problem is an in unfair economic model in which end consumers (students) must purchase textbooks chosen for them by intermediaries (instructors) who are insulated from textbook costs.”

#Donald Barclay #Textbooks #Course reserves

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