Visualizing Email Conversations and Related Web Resources

In this note we explore the design of small visual images to represent email conversations about a particular web resource. A working system has been integrated within an Internet browser. While users navigate the web, it searches and displays relevant conversations from their personal email store, providing a visual summary via a thumbnail which depicts conversational participants and message flow along with related web pages and their relevance. Preliminary user studies show our visualizations of participants and related resources were more easily understood than the messaging display. Small image thumbnails have frequently proven to be convenient surrogates for larger pictures and we hope small conversational thumbnails may prove similarly beneficial for email conversations and related web resources.

+ Full Paper (PDF: 724 KB)

Source: HP Labs

Authorship, collaboration, and predictors of extramural funding in the emergency medicine literature

Of 5728 articles identified, there were 3278 (57%) original research, 1437 (25%) case reports/series, and 975 (17%) classified as others. The percentage funded was 22% for all articles (32% for original research). The literature had at least one EM investigator as coauthor 84% of the time. Article location of origin was the United States (63%), foreign (15%), and combined (22%). Multidisciplinary collaboration increased overall from 33% in 1994 to a high of 43% in 2003. Multi-institutional collaboration also increased from 16% in 1994 to 26% in 2003. The percentage of articles having 6 or more authors increased from 12% to 18% over the decade. Of all variables studied, only article type (original research: odds ratio, 4.8; 95% confidence interval, 4.0-5.6) and foreign source (non–United States: odds ratio, 1.3; 95% confidence interval, 1.1-1.5) predicted extramural funding.

Source: American Journal of Emergency Medicine

Proceedings — Fall 2008 Depository Library Council (DLC) Meeting

Download and view all the handouts and presentations from the Fall DLC Meeting.

PDFs include:
+ What Was Lost, Now is Found

Information from the presentation: What Was Lost, Now is Found:Using Digital Repositories to Rebuild What Hurricane Rita Destroyed presented by Rebecca Blakeley of McNeese State University.

+ The Bureau of Labor Statistics Finding and Using the Data
+ Take Me Out to the Ball Game: Getting Inside Baseball with Government Information
+ Refocusing Collections & Services and Working in an Electronic Setting

Various logistical, financial and staffing challenges face libraries that are refocusing their collections and services to provide more electronic coverage. GPO has been providing guidance to libraries undergoing the transition, and at this session will seek insights from Council and the audience regarding the diverse situations libraries are operating in. A variety of authentic scenarios will be presented for everyone’s input.

Source: FDLP Desktop

Service Equality in Virtual Reference

Research is divided about the potential of e-service to bridge communication gaps, particularly to diverse user groups. According to the existing body of literature, e-service may either increase or decrease the quality of service received. This study analyzes the level of service received by different genders and ethnic groups when academic and public librarians answer 676 online reference queries. Quality of e-service was evaluated along three dimensions: timely response, reliability, and courtesy. This study found no significant differences among different user groups along any of these dimensions, supporting the argument that the virtual environment facilitates equitable service and may overcome some challenges of diverse user groups.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 341 KB)

Source: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (via E-LIS)

See also: Virtual reference service evaluation: Adherence to RUSA behavioral guidelines and IFLA digital reference guidelines

The library without walls: images, medical dictionaries, atlases, medical encyclopedias free on web

The aim of this article was to present the ”reference room” of the Internet, a real library without walls. The reader will find medical encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, e-books, images, and will also learn something useful about the use and reuse of images in a text and in a web site, according to the copyright law.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 79 KB)

Source: European journal of physical and rehabilitation medicine (via E-LIS)

Embracing the future: Embedding digital repositories in the University of London

Digital repositories can help Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to develop coherent and coordinated approaches to capture, identify, store and retrieve intellectual assets such as datasets, course material and research papers. With the advances of technology, an increasing number of Higher Education Institutions are implementing digital repositories. The leadership of these institutions, however, has been concerned about the awareness of and commitment to repositories, and their sustainability in the future.

This study informs a consortium of thirteen London institutions with an assessment of current awareness and attitudes of stakeholders regarding digital repositories in three case study institutions. The report identifies drivers for, and barriers to, the embedding of digital repositories in institutional strategy. The findings therefore should be of use to decision-makers involved in the development of digital repositories. Our approach was entirely based on consultations with specific groups of stakeholders in three institutions through interviews with specific individuals.

+ Summary (PDF; 135 KB)
+ Full Document (PDF; 590 KB)

Source: RAND Corporation

Where Have All the Legal Downloading Services Gone?

In its new report, “The Campus Costs of P2P Compliance,” the Campus Computing Project makes clear that many colleges are spending a lot of money — more than they’d like — to keep students from downloading pirated music and movies. But one of the report’s most interesting findings concerns what colleges aren’t paying for: legal alternatives to peer-to-peer piracy.

Just three of the 321 institutions surveyed for the study reported spending money on a legal music or movie library, says Kenneth C. Green, the Campus Computing Project’s founding director. That number would almost certainly have been higher in 2005, when dozens of colleges had purchased licenses to use commercial services like Napster, Cdigix, and Ruckus. According to an Educause survey from that year, nearly one in five institutions were considering signing a contract with a legal downloading service.

So what happened in the past few years? Napster has all but abandoned the collegiate market, and Cdigix discontinued its music and movie libraries. In the meantime, Ruckus shifted its business model: It now pulls in revenue from advertisers and lets college students sign up for free.

Source: Wired Campus (Chronicle of Higher Education)

All Counterterrorism Programs That Collect and Mine Data Should Be Evaluated for Effectiveness, Privacy Impacts; Congress Should Consider New Privacy Safeguards

All U.S. agencies with counterterrorism programs that collect or “mine” personal data — such as phone, medical, and travel records or Web sites visited — should be required to systematically evaluate the programs’ effectiveness, lawfulness, and impacts on privacy, says a new report from the National Research Council. Both classified and unclassified programs should be evaluated before they are set in motion and regularly thereafter for as long as they are in use, says the report. It offers a framework agencies can use to assess programs, including existing ones.

The report also says that Congress should re-examine existing law to assess how privacy can be protected in such programs, and should consider restricting how personal data are used. And it recommends that any individuals harmed by violations of privacy be given a meaningful form of redress.

Read for free online.

Source: National Research Council/National Academies Press

Free Our Libraries! Why We Need A New Approach to Putting Library Collections Online (PDF; 128 KB)

Long ago, mankind figured out that special kinds of public institutions are needed to preserve cultural heritage—libraries and museums. They’ve been a grand success, enabling successive generations to learn from and build on the record of man’s achievements and failures.

But a momentous, ill-considered shift is now afoot that threatens to limit the public rights in the collections assembled and maintained, often at public expense, in libraries around the globe.

Today Google and other businesses are scanning millions of books from the world’s great libraries and offering access to them on the Web. This conjures up the vision of a vast, free, Internet public library of accumulated knowledge. It seems like a marriage made in heaven—the union of corporate capital and enormous library collections, carrying knowledge into virtually every home and workplace.

Unfortunately, it’s not.

Source: Universal Access Digital Library Summit (Boston Library Consortium)

How Do We Measure Use of Scientific Journals? A Note on Research Methodologies

Scientific journals represent a significant and growing part of the libraries and many researchers have attempted to measure their use by various methodological approaches till date. In this paper, the author reviews the methodologies employed by researchers working on scientific journals usage. It aims to present an overall picture of the research methods used in the area, in a way that will be of value to anyone seeking to study scientific journals. The author reviews four main research methodologies which are being used for profiling scientific journals usage including questionnaire, interview, citation analysis and transaction log analysis.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 78 KB)

Source: Scientometrics (via E-LIS)

The Time Value of Reading Privacy Policies (PDF; 377 KB)

Companies collect personally identifiable information that website visitors are not always comfortable sharing. One proposed remedy is using economics rather than legislation to address privacy risks by creating a market place for privacy where website visitors would choose to accept or reject offers for small payments in exchange for loss of privacy. The notion of micropayments for privacy has not been realized in practice, perhaps because as Simson Garfinkel points out, advertisers might be willing to pay a penny per name and address yet few people would sell their contact information for only a penny (Garfinkel, 2001). In this paper we contend that the time to read privacy policies is, in and of itself, a form of payment. However, instead of receiving payments to reveal information, website visitors must pay with their time to research policies in order to retain their privacy. We pose the question: if website users were to read the privacy policy for each site they visit just once a year, what would the loss of their time be worth?

Studies show privacy policies are hard to read, read infrequently, and do not support rational decision making. We calculated the average time to read privacy policies in two ways. First, we used a list of the 75 most popular websites and assumed an average reading rate of 250 words per minute to find an average reading time of 10 minutes per policy. Second, we conducted an online study of 93 participants to measure time to skim online privacy policies and respond to simple comprehension questions with an average time of 6 minutes per policy. We then used data from Nielsen/Net Ratings to estimate the number of unique websites the average Internet user visits annually with a lower bound of 119 sites. We estimated the total number of Americans online based on Pew Internet & American Life data and Census data. Finally, we estimated the value of time as 25% of average hourly salary for leisure and twice wages for time at work. We present a range of values, and found the nationwide cost for just the time to read policies is on the order of $136 billion. Additional time for comparing policies between multiple sites in order to make informed decisions about privacy brings the social cost well above the market for online advertising. Given that web users also have some value for their privacy on top of the time it takes to read policies, this suggests that under the current self-regulation framework, targeted online advertising may have negative social utility.

See: Lost in the Fine Print: It Would Take a Week to Read All Your Privacy Policies (Washington Post)

Insights regarding undergraduate preference for lecture capture (PDF; 412 KB)

This research study set out to understand student attitudes toward the value of adding lecture capture to existing courses and to assess preferences for classes with a streaming option. A survey was sent to 29,078 undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in April 2008. Average response rate exceeded 25%. Of the survey participants, a significant number of undergraduates (47%) have taken a class in which lectures were recorded and made available online.
Respondents answered 10 multiple-choice questions related to their perspective regarding streaming lectures and preference for streaming content.

Source: UW E-Business Institute

See: I’ll Take My Lecture to Go, Please (Inside Higher Ed)

Speech transcripts from the Council on Foreign Relations:

+ Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joseph Biden’s speech on National Security (Cincinnati, Ohio on September 24, 2008)

+ President George Bush’s Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 23, 2008)

+ Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve System Ben Bernanke’s Testimony on U.S. Financial Markets (Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs; September 23, 2008)

+ U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson’s Testimony on Turmoil in US Credit Markets ( Senate Banking Committee, September 23, 2008)

Harvard, NIH, and the Balance of Power in the Open Access Debate

This article reviews the recent decision by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences to submit scholarly articles to the University’s institutional repository prior to (or in lieu of) publication in a journal. The remarkable decision, the first of its kind in the United States, reverberated quickly across the open access landscape, making many wonder which universities will follow Harvard’s lead. This article also looks at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy, which as of 8 April 2008, requires NIH-sponsored investigators to place into PubMed a copy of their peer-reviewed journal articles. The impact of this legislation will be enormous, as some 80,000 articles per year result from NIH-sponsored research.

+ Full Paper (PDF 151 KB)

Source: OCLC Systems & Services (via E-LIS)

Experience versus talent shapes the structure of the Web

We use sequential large-scale crawl data to empirically investigate and validate the dynamics that underlie the evolution of the structure of the web. We find that the overall structure of the web is defined by an intricate interplay between experience or entitlement of the pages (as measured by the number of inbound hyperlinks a page already has), inherent talent or fitness of the pages (as measured by the likelihood that someone visiting the page would give a hyperlink to it), and the continual high rates of birth and death of pages on the web. We find that the web is conservative in judging talent and the overall fitness distribution is exponential, showing low variability. The small variance in talent, however, is enough to lead to experience distributions with high variance: The preferential attachment mechanism amplifies these small biases and leads to heavy-tailed power-law (PL) inbound degree distributions over all pages, as well as over pages that are of the same age. The balancing act between experience and talent on the web allows newly introduced pages with novel and interesting content to grow quickly and surpass older pages. In this regard, it is much like what we observe in high-mobility and meritocratic societies: People with entitlement continue to have access to the best resources, but there is just enough screening for fitness that allows for talented winners to emerge and join the ranks of the leaders. Finally, we show that the fitness estimates have potential practical applications in ranking query results.

+ Supporting Information (PDF; 302 KB)

Full article available to subscribers or for purchase.

Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences