2012 London
Pratt/UCL class journal
by Katie Blake from class notes with images taken throughout the trip
“Jason” by UK artist, Lucy Casson (2012)
–sorry I covered up the other bird with my head
26 June 2012 First day involved am beverages over croissants and an overview of Syllabus. UCL Professors Anthony Watkins and Andy Dawson were both lovely and besides the business of school stuff, they introduced us to a seemingly English habit of charmingly insulting each other without appearing deliberate. An orientation of the University College of London campus followed and despite Andy’s best efforts, I obligingly lost my way everyday thereafter as I am directionally-challenged (my google maps app never worked while I was in the UK, thanks Apple).
What a lovely afternoon we had! As per the program usual, the UCL Folks and our dean Tula Giannini walked us over to the British Library for a short tour. British LibraryThe planning of the underground stacks is fascinating and protective so I won’t discuss what I learned here, besides I’m sure we only got a very small portion of the information. They also showed us a video clip of their mechanized approach to book sorting. I wonder how similar it is to the one I’ve seen at the Seattle Public Library’s main branch. I was interested to learn how the BL puts a placeholder card in the space left behind for a requested book. We contemplated employing that habit at a special collections library I worked at but the initiating costs were too prohibitive to put it into play. Not surprisingly, the BL Treasure Room is a permanent exhibit space containing works any bibliophile would fall in love with. On display for example was Jane Austen’s writing desk and spectacles.
27 June 2012 Prof. Watkins introduced us to e-pubs and the Bloomsbury Conference. Afternoon speaker was Brian Hole (Ubiquity Press). They started a journal but realized when they went into production it would cost 20k (£)and they only had a 1k budget, so they published it themselves. Social contract of Science –publish your work so others can advance upon it. This goes back to the very first journal published in 1665. They want all to participate so they charge a low amount (aprox 100£). Model has online journals appearing first with on-demand available. because they offer a mix n match option for purchase, they add DOIs to each chapter. They are working on data silos (thru grant funding). Mr. Hole said if their model is found to be unsustainable then they will revisit it. To me this means Ubiquity wants to stay light on their feet -to change as needs change to support the long term. Different generations of researchers feel different about sharing their work. This is something I personally have found to be true. I may be still considered early career despite my age but I can’t help but see experts with ‘institutional knowledge’ not wanting to publish because they shy away from mistake making, worried their peer community will think less of them; their reputations would suffer for those flaws. On the other hand early career writers want to push and put everything out, without establishing ties to their peers and without understanding the cumulative effect this early work may have later.
Scarifactor – you turn the crank and BAM! All these blades pop out and pierce your skin for bloodletting
I love this information card. I wonder when it was written.
Petrie Museum,
University College of London campus
28 June 2012 Bloomsbury Conference -6th, Scholarly outreach, Impact and Outcome I took 15 pages of notes during this conference so I am going to try and narrow that down a bit and sort of bullet point things which stood out to me. ·One Finch Report finding is that the move to online means very much open access, but still working out which models are sustainable. ·PDFs are still dominant format, but increasingly semantic publishing (linkages with underlying data) ·Open Access journals are equal to about 10% of ALL articles pub. ·Continuing issues surround repositories (patchy coverage, cost, frequency of deposits, etc) ·Acceptance of crowd sourcing (citizen scientists)for aid in Scholarly research (ex:Galaxy Zoo; sciencecheerleader.com) ·Publishers beginning to be aware of needs to support standardized guidelines, evaluations, templates, metadata etc for work to get them found and to maintain author and publisher source information ·How do scholars and publishers establish facts, and expertise when anybody can publish online? Librarian as ground truth generator ·Crestimathea = study of useful things ·Future of reading. Format vs. Content ·Define research impact as having an effect on, change or benefit to economy,culture,public,policy or services etc beyond academia
29 June 2012 Bloomsbury Conference -6th, Continued
·Study on article writing for science shows that over time the # of works written by single author has dropped and become ave of 5 per. ·Media/public interest. Work to build perceived relevance to larger audience thru- accessibility, pretty pictures=popularize ·Ultimetrics, Bibliometrics, Altmetric, Plum analytics,etc authors should be in charge of tracking works not for ex: google ·Problems: growth of research, fracturing output, increasing diversity of channels, stepping on toes of the canonical article/journal ·true analytics? Why does one article get cited vs another? Is the ease of hyperlinked citation vs writing out for example? ·Sentiment analysis –nature of a sentence that makes it citable ·citation count vs. real world impact ·difficulty in making datasets intelligible across disciplines ·Mindset: publicly funded means data is a public resource? tbd ·Sustainability!! power needs for current data storage will outstrip global electricity supply within the decade ·Can the infrastructure of the internet support datasets? ·Digital curation means things need to get thrown out, can librarians become liaisons for selection per research needs? ·Idea of fluid articles vs. fixed where the original work becomes the parent to child addendums or edits over a period of time. A sort of genealogy of an idea and/or author/researcher ·How can a fully formed semantic web react and help to relate written works with one another?
Tate Britain, seeing Turner exhibit
Obviously this isn’t the way he painted this piece but I loved this work and took a close up of her head, so I could look at the details of the face, the cracked painted and the canvas itself. It’s quite beautiful.
2 July 2012 Ruth Jones (of Ingram) discussed how they work via 5 models currently: Physical content distribution; physical inventory mgmt.; Digital asset mgmt.; and print services. They do this for themselves but largely on behalf of other pub companies who don’t want to hold their holdings. Print on demand (like Springer) allows the consumer to get the most up-to-date version at the time of printing. The shift being from A location where books are supplied to where the reader wants to consume the work.- a market and infrastructure evolution Problematic is idea of not being able to return bad books or buy used. Alison Jones (of Palgrave Macmillian)their books vs. journals Journals- semi-dynamic ppv or subscription Books-static or pdf(moving to e)subscription or loan Trade-static, pdf & epub (have DRM by platform for 3rd parties) Textbooks-pdf and some epub (some rental models but not sustainable) -Suggest librarians stay FLUID, be architects of their own aggregators Moral rights (Europe)- Integrity, paternity of written works afternoon visit with Berg Fashion Library (Bloomsbury) Their model is a for-profit on sliding scale. They have image partnerships and pay for images so they can control the licensing for niche audiences and academic subject specialists, libraries This project seemed very standoffish somehow. I understand the sustainability is more assured with for-profit models but since they are already doing image partnerships (ex:museums) then they are undermining those other institutions’ missions when they control the images. I also wonder when they will finally step on the toes of a designer, makeup artist, etc with this since they are in essence saying the image is the art even tho the collection is about the clothes in them. Opens the doors for lawsuits doesn’t it?
2 July 2012
Went to see the Victoria
& Albert
Museum Ballgown exhibit after class
Trying to visit Bloomsbury Publishers. We went to the wrong address first
Naomi falls- the photo is with Berg
If I had to guess the problem is those stupid shoes
3 July 2012 Oxford First stop was the Oxford University Press. I liked their mission statement which is to further excellence in research, scholarship and education by publishing. Press as ambassador. Listen to customers: Experiment: Keep it simple: Persevere The projects they have undertaken are amazing ones, such as the Oxford Dictionary Online and the Oxford English Dictionary. We were told that more than 70 Lexicographers work on the dictionary! In keeping with their mission they devised a plan where if they could get 90% of all UK libraries to take a core package of their products it would allow them to provide open access to a much larger audience. They are conducting case studies to see how long term projects are effected by the digital age, something I think will have very interesting results over time and might give some insight to digital And/or perhaps popular culture. It would be really fantastic if a similar study could be done on museum images over time as visual culture has already had a major shift when the invention of photography changed the reproducibility of physical art works. After OUP we had lunch at Turf Tavern and then walked toward Oxford. We passed by the Eagle and Child where supposedly so many famous Literati have written; a sort of long-standing hot spot for stories.
3 July 2012 Oxford
Clive Hurst discussed his exhibit: Dickens and His World which was currently showing in this building at the Bodleian
3 July 2012 Oxford-continued
After lunch it was onto the Bodleian Library. We had a very brief tour of the inside, shortened due to renovations. But the oft photographed Divinity College hall is incredibly beautiful. The hall was a long time place for the students’ oral exams which were like debates. The library started with 300 works donated by Henry V’s brother. In 1488 the library opened for the first time, then a second time in 1602. The Radcliffe Camera is a round reading room added in 1860. The original part of the Bodleian, the reading room we toured is open for certain levels of scholarship and housed those first 300 works. Several shelves of those early books still sit in their original positions, though they are not and were not faced, spines out, but have their original numbers handwritten on the fore-edges.
The Bodleian curator of rare books, Clive Hurst hosted us for a short while to introduce his exhibit, Dickens & His World. He being a Dickens scholar was quite excited about the project and its timing to celebrate his 200th birthday. After our class dispersed, Anthony took a few of us to New College for a bit of a tour where we delighted in the 14thc buildings plus a dining hall straight out of the movies. Then we walked through their gardens and to the Oxford City Wall. I also went into the covered market, the Ashmolean and lastly to Blackwell’s bookstore before heading home.
Eagle and Child
Turf Tavern
Divinity College Chapel
Radcliffe Camera
This is part of what is now called the Oxford City Wall dated to sometime in the 13th century even though it wasn’t a ‘city’ until about 1542.
3 July 2012, Oxford
Ashmolean Museum
New College Gate
Oxford Covered Market
4 July 2012 Graham Bell talked about trade books and brought up web-scale discovery systems like Primo, Ebsco, and OCLC. Open access journals originally got their bad reputations because they weren’t peer reviewed. In the last couple of years open access (and therefore grey literature) has become more acceptable; however, these open access journals are being pressured to be more rigorously referred. This made me think perhaps there will be a sort of aggregate place where one could register their blog, IF they met the criteria, to be considered grey literature of their own making. Interoperability for ebooks is currently a standards joke as there are ‘standards’ for nooks and kindles, it’s just that they don’t work on each other’s operating systems. The sort of ‘food pyramid’ of publishing a document, apex to base is: Content, Structure (paragraphs, highlighting, etc), Appearance, and metadata. With the base/metadata being what sells it. When you copy ‘n paste a pdf you are only retaining content, not structure & appearance; which is fine for ‘now’ research but bad for Archiving and/or preservation of that same document. Sage Publishing hosted us in the afternoon. They said they were interested in learning about and creating tools an individual can use to Add metadata to –attach to products of their own making. This would drive Those documents up in searches, but what about badly done metadata? What About what will become historic internet documents? Will they in essence Become obsolete because they have less fully formed metadata? I wonder too how searching can and will change so that one can conduct visual-only searching online; that is to say beyond Google’s image Option. Imagine a cross between that, Photosynth and facial recognition To create a semiotic image search!! Please somebody make this soon.
HAPPY 4th OF JULY
A sample entry page for a Sage journal
Anthony has this habit of fussing his buttons when he’s contemplating what he’s going to say.
Millennium Bridge looking towards
St. Paul’s Cathedral
After class I went to the Tate Modern. There was a Damien Hirst exhibit up which this body is part of
5 July 2012 Cambridge On this traveling day we first stopped at ProQuest. Matt Kibel said their mission is to provide indispensable research solutions that connect people and information. One of their major projects continues to be Early English Books but they are expanding that with books from other European countries. They will be able to cover the costs to digitize with both public and private partners. They are conscious of their online tools and work at training librarians in their use as well as working at interfaces to ‘-help users feel comfortable clicking onto an unknown database-.’They try to resolve the challenge of sifting thru information and look at how research behavior changes (ex: probing, moving from niche topic to nonrelated to answering questions). The folks at ProQuest gave us a bit of a tour inside before the presentations. They also gave us goodie bags which I thought was very kind. We had lunch at the Granta which is a riverside pub and quite stunning as a backdrop with the colorful flowers and punting boats. After lunch we walked under Anthony’s guidance thru the area. He lives nearby and I think Pembroke was his Alma mater. Again just as if it were meticulously crafted, everything was gorgeous; complete with cows grazing -King’s College in the background.
5 July 2012 King’s College, Cambridge
5 July 2012 Cambridge -continued Our walk brought us to the King’s College Chapel. We had no tour specifically of this Gothic building. Alongside on the interior of the Chapel there is a bit of an exhibit and I think I read that it was built in the early 16thc. The ceiling is described as the world’s largest fan vault and makes you dizzy it’s so high up. With those fans and ceiling height I would be curious to hear their famous choir give a performance. At Pembroke College we went into a Victorian building which serves As their undergraduate collection library. We went on a tour of it with their head librarian, Pat Aske a particularly kind lady with a giggle that was infectious and completely sweet. She described the collection as being appropriate for the first year or so. As a student would continue to becoming a specialist in another subject there were other specialty libraries on campus whose collections would better suit their research needs. We went up to the Yamada Reading room. Anthony said it used to be a place called The Reader where the Footlights used to meet. I had to look that up as I’d never heard of them. It was an amateur theatrical club founded in 1883 by Cambridge students. Down in their Special collections Pat showed us a printed book which featured green-tinted pages. The card next to it attributed it to William Caxton which was cool as he was an important printer in the history of the book. He also I believe is credited with achieving a standardization of the English language, that is the spelling, probably to help with dialects amongst other things. Given a choice I would, in a heartbeat, go to school in Cambridge
Pat Aske, Head Librarian
Green tinted pages from a William Caxton binding Pembroke College, view from undergraduate library
6 July 2012
Last day of class
Bittersweet last day of class. We discussed our trip to Cambridge as well as the class and the subject of e-publishing in general. We are cautioned as we move forward to look at e-publishing not just from a librarian’s perspective but also from a researcher’s, and even better if we could also see it from the publisher’s point of view. Joyce Ray discussed her field of digital curation. The idea of how to consider the management of digital assets over their lifetime. We have to connect with users online, we have to be persistent, give reliable information for data reuse and to advance research, maximize our and the users’ investment, not to mention that of the researchers’. What is the workflow? Data use and reuse? Archives and Publishers? Content-Context-Access –pieces of a trustworthy repository’s archival principles. Disciplinary differences affect curation practices. She talked about search engine optimization with keywords & phrases And to be aware always of metadata which would serve a semantic web. Class ended early so I went walkabout and did a bit of shopping. We all met up at the Spaghetti House for a sendoff dinner. Andy sang us “The Bold Librarian” and besides the delicious food I played musical chairs and found most of us to be in love with Cambridge and very hopeful that Dean Giannini will be able to get her Pratt Phd program off the ground for Library Science. Afterwards most of us went to sing Karaoke –good times!
7 July 2012 My last day in London I slept in. It was fantastic. Goals for the day: 1. Get to Book Art bookshop 2. Go to artist Vincent Hawkins’ studio The Book Art bookshop is the sole place in London to get artists books so I was really looking forward to this store. According to their Hours they would be open till midafternoon so I would have plenty Of time to look. As I walked up they said oh we’re closing, we’re going to an exhibit. …so no artists books for me, a true bummer. I caught a bus to Vincent’s studio. He’s an abstract painter whom I had just met in NYC earlier this summer at Bushwick Open Studios. Thankfully this turned out to more than make up for the failed bookstore visit. Vincent has had this particular studio for more than a decade he said. Between the visitors checking out all of the open studios he and I talked Art all afternoon. Vincent had pulled out a series of heart shaped collages that were “old” according to him, just for me since he knows how much I adore them. Vincent gifted me one which I promptly hung on my wall. So I guess instead of leaving my heart in London, I took one home with me.
8 July 2012 I sat in Trafalgar Square for a couple of hours and then headed to Heathrow for the ride back to the States. A fantastic trip and class!
7 July 2012
Vincent Hawkins’ studio
Heart collage
8 July 2012 leaving the UK