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ICSTI: news items
- To: epc@iucr.org
- Subject: ICSTI: news items
- From: Pete Strickland <ps@iucr.org>
- Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 15:05:53 +0000
- Organization: IUCr
------------------------------------------------------- Subject: HighWire launches "Shop for Journals" Stanford University's HighWire Press announced the launch of a new feature for institutions, 'Shop for Journals'. 28 society publishers, with content hosted on HighWire, have banded together to create an easy way to select from an initial list of 60 journal titles and create custom packages, with more titles expected to join in the New Year. To support this program, these publishers have developed a standard set of Guidelines for Institutional Access (defining authorized use and users), and have agreed to use a common tiered pricing model, based on type of institution. http://highwire.stanford.edu/shopforjournals The Shop for Journals Open Package is a way for institutions to pick and choose which titles they want, obtain the correct pricing for their institution, and to purchasethem through one simple mechanism. ------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Report of the Report of the Online Meeting and Exhibition, London, 2-4 December 2003 by Barry Mahon There is an English tradition that dinners of official bodies and clubs etc., have an after dinner speaker for their annual get together. A subset of this is the rugby club dinner, usually after a big match. The after dinner speaker at these dinners is of a different type to the more conventional speaker. I recall this tradition not because England won the world cup of rugby but because the first keynote speaker at the 2003 version of Online reminded me of an after dinner speaker at a rugby club. The speaker was Ian Angell the Professor of Information Systems at the London School of Economics. His speech was largely content free although he did tell a lot of jokes. His purported theme was the uselessness of most computer systems - he feels that most of them do not do the job they should. Strange really that he should be so negative - he has been Professor of Information Systems since 1986, according to his biog., so he is directly or indirectly responsible for the education of a lot of the people who implement computer systems. Professor Angell was the victim of a very unfortunate series of technical snafus with his slides. It is really quite unacceptable that a conference where the early bird minimum three day fee is over £600 ($1,000) that the organisers cannot get the slides right. Another small point, according to the attendance list, almost 50% of the delegates are non-English, so I wonder how many of them appreciated the jokes, your understanding of a language needs to be very good to appreciate jokes. Equally unacceptable is the fact that a series of sessions on Information Architecture was so overcrowded that more than half the audience was either left standing or forced to sit on the floor. Information Architecture is a hot topic, the 'competing' session held in the main auditorium was on news information services, probably a less popular subject. By the way, talking of IA and Content Management, topics of the Conference, the web site of the meeting had the 2002 programme for the first two days displayed?..instead of the 2003 programme - the page URLs give the game away, same page titles, I suspect, in both years?. Last rant; the index of the printed Proceedings was a disgrace for a meeting of information professionals, probably created automatically from MSWord - it has entries such as:- Deutsche Bank ??.127-130; or Library of Congress??.179-186. You may have the impression that I didn't think much of the Conference. On the contrary most of the sessions I went to were good, professional speakers speaking professionally to a professional audience, pity that the organisation didn't match. The session of most direct interest to ICSTI was on customer support in STM information services. There was a representative panel from suppliers, users, agents, etc., and they covered many of the well known issues. The most interesting input, anecdotally, was from Blackwells who gave us an interesting insight into the wide range of customer support questions they get. In fact the really interesting bit was that this level of customer support in new to them, agents fielded a lot of this when they were the principle interface to the customers in the days of paper based publications. One of the points that came up was the likely future role of agents, who might be considered an endangered species, but who may have a whole new set of activities in identifying where open access material is being published and acting in their old role as an agent in getting access to the right materials for the clients. A good session, no sales stuff, down to earth practical input and discussion. Another of the keynotes was on Content Management (CM), given by Bob Boiko, a guru of the scene, author of the Content Management bible. He spent 15 minutes talking about himself and his career. He said he would not use 'geek speak' and then told us he had invented a new term - metatorial??which he has registered ®. The rest of his talk was comprehensive, perhaps too much so, it was more like a seminar, a teaching input, not much comment on what CM actually achieves. Again, I wonder what the audience felt, maybe they want to be taught. One of the most revealing moments of the meeting for me was the tiny number of attendees who put up their hand saying they were in 'business' when polled by Bob. I attended a session on content management which illustrates the nightmare of conference organisers in dealing with such a broad topic. The papers covered digital preservation, a BBC public access web project, an international plant genetics database, and a new taxonomy based software from Houston, Texas, quite a mix!! The loose connection was content but the subjects were so diverse that it was hard to keep one's concentration. . I attended an interesting and practical session on information metrics. The well known adage - cannot measure, cannot manage was the theme and the three speakers gave from their practical experience, especially Liz MacLachlan of the UK Department of Trade and Industry, describing their implementation of a records and content management system. As so often at Online the exhibition area provided most of the 'news' such as that Lexis-Nexis were not there neither were McGaw Hill nor Reuters or Dow Jones, except as Factiva. ICSTI Members American Psychological Association, British Library, CAS, CSA, Derwent, Elsevier, EPO, Ingenta, INIST, INSPEC, ISSN, were present and I hope they did good business. Overall the number of exhibitors was down, there was only one floor of the exhibition space used and I did hear that many of the smaller exhibitors, associations like ourselves, were offered free or heavily discounted space. Hard to judge about the audience numbers, there seemed to be less than usual there but people I spoke to seemed to have had a useful event. One other small thing - our namesake, ICSTI, the International Centre for Scientific and Technical Information was there, offering access to Russian STI. My general impression? Much as other years, a meeting place for the pros, still a significant event, but one gets the impression that the audience for the conference and the audience for the exhibition are moving further apart, the latter attracts the more commercial interests, the former the non-commercial, for the most part, users. I think the mix works but as I said the organisation is not anything like as good as it used to be, pity. ------------------------------------------------------- Subject: NFAIS Annual Conference NFAIS 2004 ANNUAL CONFERENCE PROGRAM NOW AVAILABLE: "THE BATTLE FOR MINDSHARE: INFORMATION ACCESS AND RETRIEVAL IN THE YEAR 2010". The preliminary program of the 2004 NFAIS Annual Conference, "The Battle for Mindshare: Information Access and Retrieval in the Year 2010", is now available. The objective of the meeting, scheduled for February 22-24, 2004 at The Ritz Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia, PA, is to identify the challenges and opportunities that are developing as a result of the new information environment being shaped now by Yahoo!, Google, and similar search engines. Everyone involved in any aspect of information distribution - publisher, librarian, aggregator, technology provider, host system - should attend this conference in order to better understand the needs and expectations of the new generation of information seekers. The meeting will open with a speaker from Yahoo! Search presenting a picture of the information future from their perspective. This will be followed by a presentation of case studies in which searches performed using both traditional resources and the web are compared, and by a panel of experts who will describe the current information usage behavior in the corporate, government and academic environments. The remainder of the conference will showcase how traditional information providers can leverage current trends to their advantage through innovative use of content, technology, text mining and new business models. Speakers from such diverse organizations as Microsoft, IBM, the British Library, BioMed Central, the U.S. National Library of Medicine, Dupont, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the American Museum of Natural History, the Universities of Maryland and Tennessee, and the Digital Library Foundation - among others - will provide insights as to how they are evolving to cope with changes in information usage behavior. The meeting is being sponsored by: The American Psychological Association/PsycINFO, BIOSIS, CSA (Cambridge Scientific Abstracts), Chemical Abstracts Service, the Defense Technical Information Center, Dialog, a Thomson business, The H. W. Wilson Company, The J. Paul Getty Trust, The National Library of Medicine, and Nerac, Inc. To access the preliminary program, registration forms, and other conference-related information, go to: http://www.nfais.org/events/event_details.cfm?id=25. Or contact Jill O'Neill, NFAIS Director of Communication and Planning at jilloneill@nfais.org or 215-893-1561. ------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Report on the STM market Again I am grateful to Jill O'Neill and NFAIS ENotes for the information about a recent report by UK based EPS (Electronic Publishing Services) on the STM market: an extract from the contents - "Despite restive authors and subscribers in the research community, the market positions of most STM publishers remain stable thanks to the abilities of their key brands to confer recognition upon authors and maintain authority with readers" you can view the contents page and other background information about the report at: http://www.epsltd.com/marketMonitor/pdf/EPS.Market.Monitor.STM.10.2003.exec.summary.pdf ------------------------------------------------------- -- Best wishes Peter Strickland Managing Editor IUCr Journals ---------------------------------------------------------------------- IUCr Editorial Office, 5 Abbey Square, Chester CH1 2HU, England Phone: 44 1244 342878 Fax: 44 1244 314888 Email: ps@iucr.org Ftp: ftp.iucr.org WWW: http://journals.iucr.org/ NEWSFLASH: Complete text of all IUCr journals back to 1948 now online! Visit Crystallography Journals Online for more details _______________________________________________ Epc mailing list Epc@iucr.org http://scripts.iucr.org/mailman/listinfo/epc
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