a simple example of why we need yet more standardization within Project COUNTER

Posted on April 4, 2008 by Marie Kennedy

i eagerly read the draft release 3 of project counter yesterday, hoping that there would be a mention of title standardization, but alas. the things that release 3 will do are fantastic: counting archive usage as a separate stat, database reports counting federated searches differently than single user searches, and removing stats generated by spiders are the big changes to the standard. maybe in release 4 we can deal with title standardization?

at my university our library subscribes to some e-journals and the main campus library subscribes to others. when it comes time to look at usage statistics i really only want to look at the titles i subscribe to, but publishers and aggregators supply all of our titles in one giant report. this means that i need to run a program of my titles against the vendor reports of usage for the campus as a whole to pull out statistics only for my titles. this can be simply done if there is one field in each report that can be matched. as the program runs, if the field from each report doesn’t match the information drops out. here’s a simple example of why this is a problem:

HighWire reports usage statistics for the e-journal titled Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America as “PNAS.” If I try to join my title list and HighWire’s list using the ‘title’ field as the matching field, the statistics for the Proceedings drop out because the two titles are different, i.e. there is no match. the Proceedings happens to be our third highest used e-journal, but if I had used an automated system to match titles the statistics for that journal wouldn’t have been reflected at all.

since titles aren’t a good matching field, i considered e-issn. of course not all e-journals have e-issns, so matching on this field is out. print issns present the same problem, as many e-journals are now only being published online and don’t have a print counterpart. so what field can be matched? there isn’t one at the moment. it makes the most sense to me to standardize the title data.

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del.icio.us

Posted on April 4, 2008 by Marie Kennedy

i should love del.icio.us.  this tool stores all of your bookmarks online, organized in whatever manner you decide to organize them.  if you want to pull all your websites about monkeys or organization together later, you just tag them with those terms when you save the bookmark.  you can even rename a bookmark to make it more meaningful for you.  the metadata behind this tool makes my mind googly with joy, and yet i’m not a fan.  the interface doesn’t do it for me.  it’s just so, i don’t know, blue or something.  i’m going to keep working with it and perhaps it will grow on me.

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Journal of Visualized Experiments

Posted on April 2, 2008 by Marie Kennedy

just yesterday i commented to a colleague that for a discipline as visual as medicine, the libraries that serve it still tend to be text-centric, and then, bam! i hear about a journal that embodies what i imagine is the kind of learning experience that works best in medicine: the journal of visualized experiments.  it’s a video-based journal with a focus on biological experiments, highlighting protocols and discussion.

thanks to the imaginary journal of poetic economics for pointing me to it. 

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organization punk

Posted on April 2, 2008 by Marie Kennedy

punkmonkey1.jpg

made at the punk rock jacket generator

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Archie McPhee sells monkeys

Posted on March 31, 2008 by Marie Kennedy

catmonkey.jpg

how am i just now learning about the archie mcphee website? they sell monkey items! if you’re looking for a present for a certain organizationmonkey, she may like to have some cocktail monkeys.

thanks, bob!

Posted in monkeys/bananas | 4 Comments

unexpected connections

Posted on March 28, 2008 by Marie Kennedy

last week i co-taught an online course on wikis.  i looked through a lot of the ones that were developed in the class to learn what my colleagues around the u.s. were thinking about or working on.  a few wikis stood out to me and i posted them on my blog as a reminder to myself to watch their development.

yesterday i joined in on a giant chat session that focused on the implementation of the new nih public access policy, and what it means to libraries around the nation.  near the end of the time alloted for the chat someone wrote that they weren’t done yet discussing and wondered where a likely place would be to continue with those that were interested.  someone mentioned that a wiki would be a good place to gather documents and have a place to continue chatting.

i realized then that one of the wikis i had been keeping an eye on, http://publishingbiomedresearch.wetpaint.com/, was about that very topic.  i pasted the url into the chat and wrote in that people could gather their documents and thoughts there.  i think it’s great that a wiki that someone developed for their own interest could turn out to be a watering hole for a large group.  this kind of software connects people in unexpected ways.

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