Organization Monkey

let’s say your library subscribes to an e-journal package through a licensing consortium, a package that is licensed to grant perpetual access to the journal issues published during the time you are subscribed — that means you own the content forever. now imagine that you go to access one of those issues and discover that it no longer exists on that publisher’s website, so you go investigating to find what might have happened to it. you discover that another publisher has taken over that title, back volumes included, and that you don’t have access at the new publisher’s site. you email the consortium asking for assistance, which is forwarded to include both publishers to prove that you should indeed have access to the content. wait for some kind of response, the entire time without access to the content that you own.

this happened to us this week. i’m just trying to imagine how this situation is going to scale as more of these takeovers occur. my perpetually sunny attitude now has a termination clause.

when a researcher is in literature review mode, she is downloading tens of documents at a time to read later. the usual organizational scheme at the beginning of a research project -for me at least- is to save all those files into a folder titled, “to read.” i’m usually caffeinated enough to save the pdf of the articles with my standard file title schema: Author last name_First word of title.pdf. sometimes, if i’m sleepy, it’ll get saved to my downloads folder using the default file name given by the article provider. enter: a missed branding opportunity.

default file names

• elsevier: science.pdf
• routledge: 74848_751305302_903929832.pdf
• emerald: ViewContentServlet.pdf
• sage: 3.pdf
• wiley: fulltext.pdf

see where i’m going with this?  i wouldn’t have half a chance at figuring out what i had just downloaded if i didn’t make a conscious effort to rename my file upon saving.  if a provider really wanted to be marketing savvy, it would make the default file name “wiley” or “sage.”  even more awesome would be if they took the article metadata and named the file with the author last name.  ever hopeful!

for more about this, see http://atdotde.blogspot.com/2009/05/more-quality-journals-by-elsevier.html.

a wink and a nod to eagledawg for her advice on this comic.

what does one geek get another geek for a holiday gift?  a customized opml file.

an opml file is a bunch of rss feeds all crammed into one file.  you load an opml file into your blog feedreader and, bam, your reader is populated with a bunch of new things to read.

since i can’t give all of you librarian readers a smooch under the mistletoe i am giving you a gift from afar.  using the new ticTOCs service, i’ve put together a file of rss feeds of tables of contents from library periodicals that you can download from here (DIRECTIONS: click on link, save file to your desktop as .opml, import into your feedreader).  you will probably want to tweak the list of periodicals that i’ve included in the file, and in that case just head over to the ticTOCs site to pick and choose from the journals listed there and create your own opml file.  in the meantime, import this list into your feedreader, pour yourself another cup of eggnog and read what your colleagues are writing about.

these are the periodicals i’ve included in the linked opml file:

Advances in Data Analysis and Classification
Biomedical Digital Libraries
Building Research & Information
Collection Building
Ethics and Information Technology
Health Information and Libraries Journal
Information & Management
Information and Computation
Information and Organization
Information Processing & Management
Information Processing Letters
Information Retrieval
Information Sciences
International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics
International Journal of Information Management
International Journal of Information Systems and Change Management
Journal of Classification
Journal of Documentation
Journal of Librarianship and Information Science
Journal of Management Information Systems
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Library & Information Science Research
Library Collections, Acquisitions, and Technical Services
Library Hi Tech
Library Hi Tech News
Library Management
Library Review
Online Information Review
Performance Measurement and Metrics
Program: Electronic Library and Information Systems
Scientific and Technical Information Processing
Serials Review
Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community
Social Science Information
The Charleston Advisor
The Electronic Library
The International Information & Library Review
The Journal of Academic Librarianship
The Library Quarterly

to follow up on the blog post about becoming a manuscript reviewer for a journal i asked a couple of colleagues how they got to be reviewers: they volunteered!  granted, the people i asked are smartypants and have had their own articles published in popular journals, but they also took the steps to find a journal they liked and sought out the position of reviewer instead of waiting to be asked.

more cat pictures