Psych, Soc, Ling & Af Am @ the Library

I’d like to respond to a comment Emanual Donchin, a council representative to the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology, made about the ease of accessing journal publications for scholars with library privileges. (Don Dewsbury distributed his letter.)

Of course the entire policy is a bit bizarre, including the NIH policy. After all, any scholar with Library privileges can get these days PDF copies of just about any paper published in any scholarly journal. Who needs “Word files” of submitted manuscripts? And why should NIH, or the Universities, pay such huge sums for a service of nugatory value?

Being able to get ready access to journal articles is not necessarily this simple for every scholar. Certainly, most academic libraries try their darnedest to get the publications from APA. But libraries are less likely to hold or to provide direct access to journals with smaller circulations, less status, or those that began publishing more recently.

Also, smaller colleges are even less likely to have access to these publications. Usually they only subscribe to a portion of the journals from any given publisher. Instutional subscriptions, those that libraries pay, are much more expensive than personal ones. They may differ by thousands of dollars.

And with the big publishers hawking large packages, smaller schools (really most schools) decide to only subscribe to a few publishers — most get their electronic journals through databases from larger distributors, such as EBSCO or Gale (InfoTrac). These tend to be good deals, but libraries and librarians have little control over when wanted journals are cut and which years are included. Publishers may supress journals for several months to years, hoping that libraries will buy direct subscriptions of, often, rather expensive journals.

It’s difficult to buy both the individual journals and the large packages, with recent issues supressed, often libraries don’t have those which scholars want most.

Inter Library Loan is an option, but it can be expensive for libraries as well. Other countries, developing countries, have even less access to these resources.

Am I advocating for the fee? Nope. Just want you to know that easy access to library copies might not be so easy after all.

For excellent information and commentary on scholarly communication, read the Scholarly Communications @ Duke blog.

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The government now requires manuscripts written based on NIH-funded research to be placed in open access depositories. The American Psychological Association decided to deposit manuscripts from their publications in PubMed Central and impose a $2,500 desposit fee on the institution.

An email from the Association of Research Libraries has informed us that APA posted

an new (and well-nigh incredible) policy on the APA Journals web site informing NIH funded authors that the APA will be invoicing their insitutions a mandatory $2,500 “deposit fee”[emphasis added] and they are not permitted to make their own deposits of their works. In return for the fee, APA will deposit the author’s final manuscript in PubMed Central “at the appropriate time” while the author is required to review the deposit to validate its accuracy. The policy is silent on the embargo period that APA will set on the manuscript but there is no indication that it will be shortened from the maximum of 12 months required by NIH. No special open access to the article is received as a result of the fee - it is strictly a required deposit charge.

APA is currently re-examining it’s position and has not said when it will have a decision. But they will release more information “on the complex issues involved in the implemenations of the new NIH Public Access Policy.” [APA website listed below]. They are continuing to deposit publications.

The APA website is http://www.apa.org/journals/authors/pubmed-deposit.html

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One of the big projects this year for our library has been to look at our “brittle books” and decide what to do with them. Do we have lots of copies, so we can sell the books that are falling apart? Should we buy new copies? Do hundreds of libraries own the book, so if folks need it, they can borrow it? (Especially if no one has checked the book out in 30 years!) Should we digitize it? Or has someone already digitized it?

Well, yesterday I was looking through the brittle books in my areas. Here was a Working Paper by Peter Ladefoged from 1967 from UCLA. (For those of you who aren’t linguists, Ladefoged is probably the most famous phonetician ever. He wrote the book that most students have used to learn about phonetics for the last 45-50 years. And he’s been tirelessly working to protect and study endangered languages. He just died in 2006.)

Anyway, this was an old paper. Not held by many libraries, but variations on it are held by hundreds. I would have liked to digitize it, but UCLA has a large number of Ladefoged’s works online. (And a wonderful memoriom to him as well.) So I checked UCLA’s site and look what I found: an archive of UCLA’s Papers in Linguistics! Just wonderful.

Not only does it include Working Papers, but also Dissertations and Master’s Theses (Master’s Theses are usually not available through ProQuest Dissertations, by the way).

Of course, the greatest site to list the grey material in linguistics, generally digitized and often free, is

http://www.lingref.com/lwpd/index.html

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What is your first or funniest memory of a library or librarian? If you don’t remember anything pertinent, you’ll get points for creativity if you develop a great storyline from your imagination.

You can write short bits in comments below or write an article for this blog.

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I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to write about this…duh!

Last spring a UF graduate student, Joel Hartter, now an Assistant Professor at the University of New Hampshire, brought a project he’d become involved with during his doctoral work in Uganda, Books Open the World, to the Smathers Libraries.

As the website describes it, “Books Open the World (BOTW) is a non-profit, secular organization that seeks to promote and encourage education and opportunity in rural communities to children and women through community libraries, literacy classes, vocational training, support groups, and by supporting all levels of education.”

Here at UF, a group of librarians and some other folks have written articles for library magazines, garnered money from grants, inspired a young librarian to help develop the libraries in Uganda,  and developed BOTW’s website. We’re also collecting books for the libraries, getting non-profit status, and looking for more grant money.

We are sending many books from here, but the communities also want many books in the native languages. Those can only be bought in-country, so for that cash and grants are needed.

If you are interested in helping in other ways, contact the organization. It’s all quite exciting.

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In our catalog before, if you only knew the beginning of the title of a book or had a spelling problem, searching for the book might be futile or it appear anywhere on the list. Perhaps even on the second or third page! However, now we allow you to search for a title or author and get what librarians call a “browse” results list.

To use the the browse search, I click on the middle radio button on the library catalog search screen (Search begins with (browse)). I’ll search for a book I’m reading: Wikenomics.

See how cool? Even though I don’t know how to spell, I still find my book! (Actually, depending on the misspelling, this issue is often resolved in the basic search as well. You can get a “Did you mean ‘wikinomics’?” question that will lead you to the correct record.”)

But the browse should help you find books and authors when you know them already! Have a go at it!

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Recently, I’ve thought a lot about social networking sites, especially comparing Facebook with Ravelry.com (a site for Knitters, Crocheters, and Spinners) and how they relate to wikis and blogs by librarians and for libraries.

I wonder if I’m more comfortable at Rivelry because 1) it’s more structured or 2) it revolves my great obsessions. Facebook feels too amorphous to me; I can’t seem to get settled. But at Rivelry, I jumped in right away, setting up my own group — Guerilla Knitters (knitters who perform public art with knitting or crochet), writing to others, setting up projects I’m working on, and contacting people I know from other cities who are obsessed with knitting and spinning, too.

Ravelry allows each member to organize his or her knitting or crocheting projects, library, yarn, needles/hooks, and design plans online. Furthermore, each of these can link to other people’s projects that are using the same materials or patterns. So, you can find people doing similar work as you.

And you can find people in groups that others have founded based on geography, love of a yarn, a pattern, a style of knitting, spinning, or a movie that has great handknits in it (like A Christmas Story!)

Knitting becomes even more collaborative through the Internet. It’s how I became a spinner years ago through listservs and bulletin boards.

Social networking and collaborative work are both hot topics. Here are some sources:

Can our library work become even more collaborative in the same way? Students can communicate with each other about their research experiences — what works, what doesn’t — everything becomes richer and easier. Is structure the answer?

Could students set up their research projects with links that connect them to other students who use the same databases, methodologies, topics, or books? Is this already done with current classroom websites? But if it’s done across universities, there could be much more collaboration and students could learn research much like real professors and researchers do.

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September 4, 2007 NPR reported on both the unequal distribution of mental health services around the world and the good results gained when treatment for depression is provided. Their “I’ll shock you awake” statistic: “in Africa, there’s one psychiatrist for every 2 million people; while in Europe, there’s one for every 10,000.”

The Lancet launched a series on Global Mental Health, describing the poor coverage of mental illness all over the world, but of more extreme concern in middle and poorer countries. The panel also impressed on the journalists the concept of “No Health without Mental Health” by describing the difference in physical health treatment of mentally healthy and mentally ill persons. The press briefing, including questions and answers from journalists to the panelists, is available online at the Lancet.

NPR interviewed a Chilean psychologist, Roberto Araya, who found that poor persons with depression failed to be treated because health professionals blamed their depression on poverty. However, Araya found that treatment could alleviate depression even if poverty still existed. This allowed previously debilitated individuals return to their work, caring for and providing for their families, becoming contributing members of their communities.

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Getting Weird Results When Searching by Author in PsycINFO?

A psychology faculty member emailed me about a bug/problem/interesting he found when searching for articles by a specific author. Even though he typed in the author’s entire name, including middle initial, the results included articles written by everyone with the same first and last names. I repeated the search, enclosing the name in quotes and then in parentheses and got the same results.

But they probably do that because middle initials are pesky things that are often wrong in citations. Still..

Use the Author Lookup. Click on the link below the search boxes.

Then, type in as much of the name of the author as you know.

You’ll get a list of authors indexed in PsycINFO. Check those that might be your author; they’ll be added to a list on the right hand side of the page.

I was interested in finding Carol A. Padden. I entered “padden” into the Author Lookup. Several “paddens” were found. I clicked on Padden, Carol and Padden, Carol A. They were placed on the right hand side. If I want to remove either, I can just click on the trash cans.

Click on the red “Add to Search” button, and they’ll be placed in the search boxes on the search page, as below.

(Padden, Carol A) OR (Padden, Carol) have both been added to the search box in the “author” field. I can limit the search further any way I want and get articles only by Prof. Padden.

It’s very specific and focused, but requires a few more steps.

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