Archive for September 2012
My latest book now available! From Science 2.0 to Pharma 3.0
Science 2.0 uses the resources of Web 2.0 to communicate between scientists, and with the general public. Web 3.0, in turn, has brought disruptive technologies such as semantic search, cloud computing and mobile applications into play. The term Pharma 3.0 anticipates the future relationship between drug makers and doctors with their patients in light of such technology. From Science 2.0 to Pharma 3.0 examines these developments, discussing the best and worst of Web 2.0 in science communication and health. Successes such as the Open Access phenomena and also less successful networks are covered. This title is divided into three parts. The first part considers the Web 2.0 revolution, and the promise of its impact on science communication and the state of Science 2.0. The second part looks at impact on Pharma and Health, including attempts to utilise digital in Pharma. The last part looks at the promising disruptive technologies of Web 3.0, including semantic search in biomedicine and enterprise platforms. The book concludes by looking forward to developments of ‘3.0’ in Pharma and STM publishing.
Readership: Those interested in Science 2.0 and Pharma 3.0., including researchers, information professionals, and managers.
Available from:
Chandos Publishing:
http://www.woodheadpublishing.com/en/book.aspx?bookID=2767&ChandosTitle=1
or from Amazon:
Librarians: from collections to communities (David Lankes at ILI 2012)
R. David Lankes is a proud and passionate supporter of libraries. In his book, The Atlas of New Librarianship, David outlines his vision for a ‘new librarianship’ which focuses on knowledge creation and learning…
In his keynote presentation at Internet Librarian International 2012, he “will be talking about how our libraries should act as platforms for community learning and innovation. Our spaces, our services, and our collections are tools that a good librarian orchestrates to allow the community to dream and achieve its aspirations“…
Instead of containing the service oriented expertise of librarians in a building or focused on a collection, librarians can now go out into the community (a city, a university, a school, a business) and engage in their original mission of improving society through facilitating knowledge creation. I get very excited when I see the brilliance and skills of librarians unconstrained by manual processes, and historical hold overs…
David says: “I believe in the future of libraries… I think it is bright. However it requires the profession to shape that future and communicate to the world that we are powerful, on their side, and innovators”
Extracts from:
Internet Librarian International: http://www.internet-librarian.com/2012/
Yes, some employees are rejecting SharePoint
“SharePoint is unquestionably a success from a licensing perspective, but dig behind the firewall and the picture looks more chequered. For example in a uSamp survey last year, 80 percent of organizations using SharePoint said employees continue to share documents as email attachments. (…)
Even where SharePoint is used, people aren’t truly collaborating with it. Team sites are often really document graveyards where content is stored once collaboration has stopped. Other social features such as blogs and My Sites have very low adoption rates or just pockets of activity. Even celebrated case studies are not about widespread adoption but localized success stories. (…)
To a large extent this rejection is passive, i.e. it’s a failure to adopt born of inertia rather than tasting the SharePoint sprouts and then spitting them out. This comes from years of ingrained habits about what workplace collaboration is: email, attachments and network drives. That in itself is not SharePoint’s fault – Google Wave hit similar challenges, for example. (…)
However SharePoint doesn’t help either. It’s highly complex, and some of the collaboration patterns are quite sophisticated, such as metadata, versioning and workflow. It makes it hard to selectively switch these elements off so that people can learn progressively. Moreover, the user interface is particularly unpleasant. It’s fiddly and lacks the visual appeal of modern websites. (…)
None of these issues are insurmountable…
Read further:
Are employees rejecting SharePoint? Melcrum, Available for free until 14th of September 2012 from:
https://www.melcrum.com/research/harness-digital-technologies/are-employees-rejecting-sharepoint
Opinion: Is open-access publishing the wave of the future?
“Yes, definitely. It solves too many problems with the existing ecosystem not to be fairly inevitable in at least some imaginable time frame”
Dupuis, John. Whither science publishing. Confessions of a Science Librarian, September 5, 2012. Available from:
http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2012/09/05/whither-science-publishing/
eBooks ROI (Springer)
An interesting study to read:
“ RoI can be defined as a performance measure used to quantify and evaluate the efficiency of an investment in library resources or to compare efficiency among different investments. While it may seem simply to be a question of money in versus money out, the real difficulty of expressing the overall value of this resource for an institution comes from many contributing factors:
- Time saved by library staff and researchers
- Convenience of constant access and online search capabilities
- Effect on research output and teaching
- Physical space saved in the library by using electronic resources
RoI can be articulated by libraries to provide justification for ongoing development of collections within an institution and to ensure that current resources may be prioritized in terms of the value they provide to the institution as a whole. (…)
For librarians and administrators working to meet competing demands with limited resources, understanding the value of eBooks will continue to be of great importance for the foreseeable future. The ability to evaluate the most cost-effective and beneficial scholarly content allows for librarians to prioritize resources for their patrons and demonstrate the ongoing value of the library for their institution. (…)
eBooks are anticipated to become as hugely influential over print publications as eJournals have been in the last decade. (…)
Our interviews showed that evaluating usage data is the most common and obvious method for evaluating RoI. Other factors affecting value such as time spent processing records and marketing eBooks to users are often more difficult to quantify. User surveys are a common tool for providing much more context for how library patrons are interacting with eBooks and their perceived value. (…)
eBooks are used much more for individual chapters rather than an entire book... (…)
With the move to electronic content of all kinds, a shift has occurred in the role of librarians themselves. For instance, much more time is being spent on technical issues than 10 years prior. Librarians are now required to have computer expertise, and are charged with training their patrons on how to best make use of these electronic resources to maintain the value of the content…
eBooks are relatively new, compared with 15 years of eJournals, but are likely to continue a rapid rate of adoption in the coming years. The industry is in its early development though, and it will likely be a few years before the percentage of book collections have migrated from print to electronic at the same level journals have. Once this happens, faculty and student usage is likely to increase dramatically…
Read the full paper on:
Scholarly eBooks: understanding the Return on Investment for libraries. White paper, Springer, 2012. 9 p.
Available from:
http://www.springer.com/about+springer/media/pressreleases?SGWID=0-11002-6-1381637-0
Social Media’s success is: technology + psychology
“A lot of what we are doing is as much psychology and sociology as it is technology”
Mark Zuckerberg
According:
http://www.zdnet.com/like-me-like-me-doing-business-in-the-facebook-age-7000003487/