Library Technology

Whenever there is an opportunity to learn more about the people on the other side of the screen you should take it. I am referring to ordinary people with a malicious agenda who have the skills that enable them to get around ordinary security settings. They are continually testing the vulnerabilities of your Operating System. They prey on ordinary computer, especially users who aren’t aware of the danger lurking around the corner. That doesn’t mean attacks and malware intrusion incidents only occur to computer users who don’t know better, they really can happen to anyone.

If you are connected to the internet you are vulnerable. It is possible to put into place monitoring software that detects what it perceives to be suspicious activity. You can put into place Firewalls that prevent basic attacks, and demand that your computer stops every little change from happening on your computer. But… users get annoyed very quickly when they are asked to approve every action they take. After awhile you don’t even notice the box in the corner asking you to approve something with a name you don’t even recognize, but is associated with an action you just took. The best thing to do is to ask yourself if you really did just do something that would require a change in your system.

Unfortunately their are programs that you have installed that update themselves automatically. The problem here is that you may find yourself preventing a normal installation. It can be even worse if you stop the process mid-way through an installation and your program is left hanging.

If you are at work and you are notified by your Virus Protection system that something bad has been detected then you should immediately notify your IT team. They might not be able to save any of your data, but they can stop your computer from spreading its sickness to others. Make sure that you have a regular backup schedule for your important files.

I plan on going to a class that UF is offering on March 23rd called: Cyber Awareness

I recommend everyone going to a similar instructional seminar if it is offered. Do not convince yourself that you know enough already. There is no such thing as knowing too much about internet security.

If you are reading this at UF and before March 23rd. Please follow this link and sign up for the class

Trying out the bnew Google Toolbar.

“The new version of Google Toolbar for Firefox adds the features that were available only in the IE toolbar and a special bonus.”
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/12/google-toolbar-3-for-firefox.html

Already I notice that it doesn’t automatically copy the text I am highlighting on a page.

Scatter and Decay E-journal usage patterns

Carol Tanopir

Abundant Data – too much?

Easy access to use of ejournal collections
 
There is a need to gather more data, because as good as it is now we have to gather info from users to find out what they use and why and what other things they use (web, subject repositories) to get a fuller picture.

Max Data funded by ilms funded to get data about data about selected libraries and look at whole picture.
They want to look at the story behind the data, what can we conclude with confidence about the different methods of data collection.

Ultimate outcome will be a cost benefit model for the different methods of data collection. What is worthwhile to use for the different things you want to find.

Goals to help libraries make the best use of data, they are sharing what they have collected today.

3 teams
Dave Norris London looking at deep log data, logs from all of Ohio link libraries, they isolated 4 libraries that they also surveyed.
1    Research intensive, 1 research extensive and 2 masters heavy.

Log analysis of ejournal usage only

With survey you can better identify survey base, you can separate out by rank and degree.

Negative thing about surveys is that it is self reported, but you can find out why they did things and what the values

Gail from Tennessee survey reports

 2 findings for today: scatter and decay. Looking at how you measure use in libraries.

Scatter: relative dispersion of points on a graph in respect to a mean value, (used loosely today) want to look at how reading varies by subject discipline.

Looked at how many journals used in last month multiplied it by 12 to get a year.

Medical and health students and faculty have read many more articles 434 for faculty and 222 students, many more than other disciplines. Variation in number of articles or reading done found.

Downloads by subject in Ohio University, found by logs
Medical journals first followed by other sciences. Looked at subject are of journal to come up with this distribution.

Used counter data and combined it to come up with a list of titles and used info from link resolver to come up with subject headings. Medicine did not come out on top this way. Medical school located in Memphis, and they use separate databases from Knoxville location, this would account for the discrepancy.

The Arts/humanities section looks high because link resolver put new/fashion entertainment into that category.

File had 17,000 unique titles. Log report had 7,000.

In addition to counter reports they also had other info from aggregators which came through here.

Pointed out that some titles had multiple subjects.

Couple titles in top 20 use, billboard and rolling stone, history of rock class is very popular there (Tenn.)

You have to look behind stats to find out where information is coming from. In the future it would be good to pull out scholarly titles and look at the distribution.

David looked at downloads by subject staff and faculty vs. student use.

Student use is much higher to online articles. This might be because Faculty has other sources for info, personal sub-reading rooms-colleagues.

Survey: how many minutes did you spend on the last article you read. Found that engineers spent twice as much time on medical articles.

Found medical articles are more widely read but they have been read through more quickly.

Average number of seconds of view per article was gleaned from the log data.

135 seconds time read by sciences viewers. Assumed that article is scanned over and decision is made to print or download.

Looking at the Counter data to see the entire collection. Found that 10% of titles counted for about 80% of use.

Decided to look at titles alone, and combined data on like titles, wasn’t fun matching on titles or unstandard ISSN. Ended up with 17000 titles and 11.5% counted for 80% of usage.

Highest use titles: science with over 8000 downloads. Nature 4,000, Tetrahedron, AMS archives (older chem. Data), USA today

Data from Ohio link looks somewhat different because they were looking at more scholarly titles (presumably)

–David –
Decay: process of gradually becoming inferior, gradual decrease. Or reading fails by age of articles

Did a lot of work on all 6000 Ohio link titles, good background on contextual use. There has been an increase in use of older material, because it is much more visible than it previously was.

Evidence shows that people who use search engines find older material.

Decay of article readings.
Carol asked people about when the last article they read was.

Looking at downloads

Looking at how data is triangulated and what does it mean?

Citation: Journal of the American society for

When we actually look at dowloads. We get a different picture

Conclusion:
No one perfect method for data collection. Need to look at sub discipline of reader and for items. Found so far that student assignments can lead to skewed data.
 
When looking at stories behind data there is a big difference based on sub discipline. Caution about log data.

Student reader skewed towards students, because faculty has other way to get info

We need to examine what are value is compared to our costs.

They will continue to look at possibilities for log collection. More work the more cost and more of your time is used.

The more effort you put in the greater story.

Massive Scale Librarianship

R.David Lankes IST 676

www.davidlankes.org

http://drew.syr.edu/MSL

big picture=every mile of roadway will generate a gigabyte of information a day.

As soon as info exists people will want to use it

Geometric progression—gladwell tipping point.

Predictable change

In the near term we will no longer have to choose what to keep because there will be so much storage at our fingertips.

Storage rate is exceeding Moore’s Law

Issues

1. privacy
2. ethics of involvement
3. commercialization and scarcity
4. unintended consequences
1. AOL
5. security
6. preservation –data sitting on tape drive on unsupported proprietary system that is broken.
7. culture and control
8. cognition and perceptual scarcity
1. more and more information produced but no more time to read it all
9. scalability and sustainability
1. power required to cool storage machines

Options?

Cataloging the information doesn’t work

Not every bit of info at there deserves this kind of attention

Ignoring the info is not an option

Other areas are replicating librarianship to deal with data

Is role of library to be curated collection of high quality work? That doesn’t work when everything is freely accessible.

Only true option is too embrace the problem and for libraries to assert themselves to the situation.

Participatory Librarianship

Iis.syr.edu

Requires shift in thinking

Our job is knowledge

Gather/sort/create

Facilitate knowledge creation of community

-Socratic method

-book groups

-collection development

Hidden item focus on grand unified theory of libraries

Bibliofundamentalism –Karen Schneider

-Role of library as a haven of order and quality

Participatory Librarianship

Constant evolution

Taken catalog and user data to create catalogs similar to amazon

Bringing all the info together in a mashup kind of a situation.

=true catalog (metadata based)+ community library

Anyone can move add or delete data

Conversations

Local, network, web, institutional, massive—DATA

MPOW decided to reclass the main libraries documentary films. In the past Feature films received an accession number while documentaries were cataloged using LC. The decision has been made now to convert all of the titles in LC to be integrated into the list of feature films. I can see how this would be desirable for staff access etc… but I can also see how the patron is losing a certain amount of access to categories. I just finished writing the macro that converts a report in Aleph to a list of titles with all the needed information (System#, Holdings #, barcode, Title, Call#, Item description). I then created a macro that assigns an accession number to the items in the list. The trickiest part was skipping titles in a series (pt.1-5 etc…) That wasn’t too hard though I just wrote some code that compared the call#’s and only increased the number assigned if there was not a match. This worked out well and I have the lists ready to go to Copycat where the labels will be made and then to Access services for labeling.

I will next write a macro that works in the catalog to alter the call# in the holdings to reflect the assigned accession number. The old (LC) call # will be placed in a non-public z subfield in the 852, because it is assumed (by catalogers) that next year they will want to reclass the videos again.