Monday, January 23, 2006

Top Five Information 'Trends' to Watch in 2006

The following information "trends" are those I consider to be of particular relevance to academe and worth keeping tabs on during the coming year. In no particular order of importance they are: 1) Wikipedia, 2) Google Book Search, 3) Open Content Alliance, 4) Google Scholar, and 5) SPARC: Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. Please read below for details.

Happy New Year and thanks for reading my BLOG.

--Kris--
1. Wikipedia: A free, online collaborative encyclopedia. Entries are written by volunteers (anyone really) and can be changed by anyone at any time.

  • Benefits: Free, fast, easy to access. Lot's of neat stuff.
  • Weaknesses: No authority control: Entries are written by anyone. Stability: What's there one day may not be there the next, a problem for students when citing information in papers.
So, what will Wikipedia do in 2006 to address its critics? Links to some interesting information:

2. Google Book Search: Formerly called Google Print. In their own words, Google's goal is "to work with publishers and libraries to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and publishers discover new readers." Basically they want to provide a single access point to all the world's books, a noble goal.

  • Benefits: Free, fast, easy to access. Lot's of neat stuff!
  • Weaknesses: Many unknowns. You can never be sure what you're getting, what's included and what's either been specifically excluded or has not been entered yet, what you'll get to read in full-text and what you'll be given a link to purchase.
This is still in beta (as are most of Google's products) so it will be interesting to see what happens in 2006. Links to some interesting information:

3. Open Content Alliance (OCA): A group that organized in response to Google Book Search, the OCA is a consortium of non-profit and for-profit groups dedicated to building a free archive of digital text and multimedia. "Created in 2005 by Yahoo and the Internet Archive in response to the apparent 'closed nature' of Google Book Search. Their goal it to keep public domain works in the public domain on-line."

  • Benefits: Free books? People that are nice to publishers? Too early to tell. Has buy-in by Google's competitors Microsoft and Yahoo.
  • Weaknesses: Too early to tell. Has buy-in by Google's competitors Microsoft and Yahoo.

Links to some interesting information:

3. GoogleScholar: In their own words: "Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research."

  • Benefits: Free, fast, easy to access. Lot's of good quality academic stuff!
  • Weaknesses: Many unknowns. You never know what universe of information you're searching, what's included and what's not. If you're of the Google mindset that expects full-text, think again. Lot's of links to "buy the books." Perpetually in Beta mode.

Links to some interesting information:

4. SPARC: Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources. "An alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations... started in 1997 to be a constructive response to market dysfunctions in the scholarly communication system. These dysfunctions have reduced dissemination of scholarship and crippled libraries.

I'm not an expert about SPARC, but here are some links to learn more about it:

posted by Kris Johnson, Citizen @ 5:32 PM   0 comments

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