Written by Joe Kraus, Science Librarian, University of Denver

I first became away of the term Digital Rights Management (DRM) about five years ago (http://stlq.info/sae/) when several engineering librarian discussion lists discussed the DRM restrictions that were being imposed by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). At the time, I knew how DRM was applied to music files and DVDs, but I hadn’t considered how DRM could be applied to PDFs, ePUB files and other text-based documents.

About 9 years ago, Karen Coyle gave a talk at the Library of Congress concerning DRM, and the talk was archived as a PDF. (http://www.kcoyle.net/drm_basics.pdf) This provides a good overview of the basics of DRM technology as of 2003. But, today, things are a little different. Now that more and more people are using ebooks to read digital texts (online and using ereaders), publishers are trying out a variety of ways to control use of their copyrighted content. These restrictions have greatly affected the way libraries and information centers provide access of licensed content to their patron base.

There are many who write about the negative impact of DRM technologies on the free exchange of ideas, but I find the work of Lawrence Lessig to be the most eloquent of the bunch. His book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2750/free-culture) is great overview of the issues at stake. While this book came out about 6 years ago, Mr. Lessig continues to speak out on the rights of the common person to have greater access to scholarship and other content. (See http://fora.tv/2012/04/20/Ingredients_for_Innovation and http://www.casttv.com/video/ri74834/lawrence-lessig-the-architecture-for-access-to-scientific-knowledge-video for two examples.)

Publishers do have a right to make money from the books, journals and reports that they publish, but noted author Cory Doctorow wrote that “The death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/03/death-of-drm-good-news) The discussions concerning Digital Rights Management software between readers, authors, publishers and information centers will certainly continue. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out in the next 5-10 years. Then again, maybe nothing will “shake out” in that time. No matter what happens, you can count on librarians and information specialists to advocate on behalf of the readers and users of published content.

Join RMSLA at noon on Thursday, May 17 for Joe Murphy’s presentation on the “Information Impacts of Current Tech Trends.”

Learn about the biggest technology trends affecting information centers, from 3D printing to econtent directions and mobile strategies. This session by Joe Murphy explores the most current trends in technology, including the social media landscape, how shifting smartphone usage is shaping information engagement, and how the roles of special librarians are continuing to evolve.

Joe Murphy is a Librarian and Technology Trend Spotter consultant helping libraries and more prepare for upcoming technology shifts. Joe is an author and editor, an international keynote speaker, and a conference organizer. For more details about Joe, who formerly worked in the Yale University Libraries, see his website, http://joemurphylibraryfuture.com.

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Register now to reserve your seat at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/115152769

This program is free to all SLA members. Non-members are welcome to attend for a $20 registration fee. Please allow 48 hours for our volunteers to confirm your registration and payment.

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Written by Joe Kraus, Science Librarian, University of Denver

I have heard the phrase “Build it, and they will come” used a little bit to describe technology projects that libraries have either built or implemented.  There is some great technology that is heavily used by the patrons and the librarians, and some that are not used as much. Some technology could be used even more, but it may be underutilized for whatever reasons.  The technology that I am going to discuss a little bit this month is the main library website.  (Note that I am an academic librarian, so I may have a focus on college based resources.) While you can never please all of the people all of the time, the design of the website should not “get in the way” of most users.  In general, the library website should be easy to navigate with plenty of
white space without a lot of text.  If your patrons find the website difficult to use, they may find other resources to use instead.  They might even go to a different library or use a different service.

Some libraries think of the website as if it is a digital branch of the main library.  The library should have key staff who take care of the feeding and the maintenance of the site. If you are a solo librarian or if you are in a small organization, then that responsibility might fall completely on you.  If that is the case, then you may need to carve out some time each day or each week to update some sections of your website.

I recently found a blogger (Matthew Reidsma, currently at GVSU) who writes a bit about library website design.  One of his posts is: “Bad Library Websites are just a Symptom.” (http://matthew.reidsrow.com/articles/15)  Here, he noted: ”Understanding your users isn’t one step in a long process to make a great web experience. It’s the foundation of that experience. This is about building a relationship with your users. How many successful relationships have you seen that do a quick check-in once every 3-5 years? You should always be doing it. ALWAYS.”

I also like some advice from Aaron Schmidt.  For example, he recently wrote in the post “The OPAC: Yesterday’s Problem” that “we’re expecting people to learn two interfaces — and often two suboptimal interfaces — when we should be providing a single great one.” http://www.walkingpaper.org/5300

I have been through a number of library website redesigns, and it is often done by a committee with many different stakeholders.  But, websites designed by committee can often provide a mishmash of results. If the main designer or coder relies on gut feeling instead of knowing the needs of the patron, then the redesign can also result in a suboptimal experience for some patrons.  Hopefully, several people on the committee will be good advocates for the needs of the patrons.

In short, it is recommended to have a library website where there is iteration in the process of updating pages, and staff have an ability to quickly change pages and sections if needed.  Some of the larger organizations might manage a website using Drupal (http://groups.drupal.org/libraries), Joomla
(http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/4226) or some other content management system, but smaller organizations might find software like WordPress to be capable. For example, the Cal-Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies Library (http://library.its.berkeley.edu/) has a nicely designed website using WordPress.

By Jeanie Straub, Douglas County Libraries

If you are interested – or think you should be interested – in Big Data, there are a couple of annual conferences that you may want to swish your feet in via internet offerings. They piqued my interest when I stumbled upon one presentation on Quora and will probably pique yours as well if you are not already familiar with these conferences: Very Large Databases (VLDB) and Extremely Large Databases (XLDB).

These conferences deal with terascale and petascale databases, respectively. (To get a sense of this size and the market, know that the data that makes up Wikipedia used 5.87 terabytes in January 2010 and that Teradata Corp. (NYSE: TDC) reported revenue of $602 million for the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2011, an increase of 23 percent.

XLDB

The first one I’ll mention, XLDB 2011: 5th Extremely Large Databases Conference, was held Oct. 18-19 in Menlo Park, Calif.

According to the website, http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/xldb2011/, the conference is “in response to the exploding need for systems and tools capable of managing and analysing extremely large data sets.”

The main goals of the conference are:

• Encourage and accelerate the exchange of ideas between users trying to build extremely large databases worldwide and database solution providers

• Share lessons, trends, innovations, and challenges related to building extremely large databases

• Facilitate the development and growth of practical technologies for extremely large databases

• Strengthen, expand, and engage the XLDB community

In 2011, the XLDB conference focused on “practical solutions.”

People from academia represent about 14 percent of the participants in XLDB, while scientists are about 21, industries represent about 47 percent and the balance belongs to vendors. Since the first conference in 2007, the number of science people has gone down while industry numbers have climbed.

Topics range from “Industrial Perspective on Tools for Big Data” to “Data Infrastructure at LinkedIn” to “What’s New at Google?” to “Advanced Concepts and Techniques for Visualizing Large Data.”

You can see PPT slides from the conference at http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/xldb2011/Program.asp.

Here are quotes from typical abstracts – note that a lot were over my head but my intent was to swish my feet in them:

Low-rank matrix factorizations are effective tools for discovering and quantifying relationships between classes of entities such as documents and terms (as in keyword search), users and stories (news personalization), and users and items (recommendation systems). – “Techniques for Discovering Relationships in Massive-Scale Data,” Peter J Haas, IBM

The 1000 Genomes Project data represents a very large dataset, which is of significant interest to not only computer scientists and bioinformaticians but also bench biologists and clinicians. The Data Coordination Centre for the 1000 Genomes Project has worked on several measures to improve accessibility both for high end and naive users. Here I present some of these tools including our Data Slicer which allows individuals to download slices of data relevant to their gene or genomic region of interest and our Variation Pattern Finder which presents a view on variation data, showing how the genotypes for different variants are shared between different individuals. By providing these tools the 1000 Genomes project hopes to make the data we present as widely useful as possible. “The 1000 Genomes Project, User Accessibility,” Laura Clarke, EBI

Although much of this stuff, as I mentioned, was clearly over my head after the first couple sentences, enough is understandable and of interest to pick through the slides and read the abstracts; one thing you will at least get is a view of issues surrounding extremely large data – as well as what’s coming down the road – and this is something that as a professional I both want to understand and feel like I should understand; at minimum you will pick up the language and themes of Big Data.

To read a presentation that is easier to understand, try Edmond Lau’s (Quora) presentation “Scaling Up Quickly on the Cloud,” the full-text of which is available as one of his postings on Quora at http://www.quora.com/Edmond-Lau/Scaling-Up-Quickly-on-the-Cloud.

You can follow XLDB on Twitter at @XLDBConf; also search #xldb for links to presentations and the like. Video of presentations is available on iTunes U, a distribution system for lectures and other educational content.

VLDB

The other conference I found while searching for XLDB was VLDB, an annual conference held by the U.S. non-profit Very Large Data Base Endowment Inc.; the mission of VLDB is “to promote and exchange scholarly work in databases and related fields throughout the world.”

The VLDB conference began in 1975, and a complete archive is available at http://www.vldb.org/archives/website.html.

According to the website http://www.vldb.org/2011/?q=node/2

VLDB is a premier annual international forum for data management and database researchers, vendors, practitioners, application developers, and users. The conference … cover[s] current issues in data management, database and information systems research. Data management and databases remain among the main technological cornerstones of emerging applications of the twenty-first century.

VLDB 2011 was in Seattle, Aug. 29-Sept. 3. Various talks are available by searching “vldb conference 2011 site:youtube.com”. For example the presentation “Databases will visualize queries, too” is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVFnQRGAQls – you’ll see on the youtube page that the PPT slides, paper and online demo for that same talk are available at http://queryviz.com/.

By searching Twitter for #VLDB you can find links to more from current and previous years such one from a previous year, “Data Markets in the Cloud: An Opportunity for the Database Community,” by Magdalena Balazinska, Bill Howe, and Dan Suciu, University of Washington: http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol4/p1482-balazinska.pdf:

Cloud-computing is transforming many aspects of data management. Most recently, the cloud is seeing the emergence of digital markets for data and associated services. We observe that our community has a lot to offer in building successful cloud-based data markets. We outline some of the key challenges that such markets face and discuss the associated research problems that our community can help solve.

Again, most of VLDB is written by and for computer / data scientists, but you can go into it thinking you will get what you can from it and leave it at that. So have fun with it and let me know what you think: jstraub@dclibraries.org.

>> View the recorded program.

>> Download the slide deck (PDF format).

Note: This RMSLA Virtual Lunch program was moved ahead one day to Wednesday, Oct 19, 2011. Other Virtual Lunches take place on the third Thursday of each month.

About the Program

Communications affects every market, and many information professionals may find themselves at one time or another in need of communications industry resources. The IT department of a law firm may need to understand the implications of transitioning over to cloud computing, or perhaps the executive team for manufacturing needs to understand which mobile devices and apps are most effective when traveling. Since the last years have been particularly tough on budgets, the info pro often is asked to find more with less, and add value to boot! This webinar concentrates on communications industry resources available online or over the Web that are free or, if not free, cost-effective.

The communications industry is quite broad and overlaps with other industries. This presentation will focus on:

• Technology: PCs, handhelds, mobile devices and applications, etc.

• Telecommunications: Network-enabled services, broadband, high-speed data, cellular

• Digital media: E-commerce, video, mobile

Heidi covers sources from government, market research, associations, the news media, and blogs.

About the Presenter

Heidi Longaberger has been connecting people to information for 18 years. The beginning of her career coincided with the release of the first graphical web browsers, and she has been helping clients harness Internet tumult into actionable intelligence ever since. Heidi has been a part of due diligence, marketing, strategy, and competitive intelligence teams in the technology, communications, media, and venture capital industries. She established Longaberger InformationWorks to continue the discovery of research and information to help her clients reach their business goals, as well as to write about the ever evolving information industry. Heidi can be reached at Heidi@Longabergerinfo.com and on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/heidilongaberger.