To begin this week, I read through the Against the Grain special report on pay-per-view. The articles reminded me of a particular event I witnessed while an undergraduate. My school had a large number of journal subscriptions and once someone I knew (let's call her Wanda) downloaded and emailed some articles to her friend (let's call him Joe) who did not attend our school. Joe needed these articles because he was attending a community college that did not provide access to the articles he needed to write his research paper. Rather than obtaining the articles legally through an interlibrary loan or other means, he asked Wanda to violate the terms of use for her university's subscription since this would allow him to obtain the articles more quickly. The Against the Grain articles reminded me of this because pay-per-view could be a viable option for the community college. According to "Pay-Per-Use Article Delivery at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point" by King and Nichols, articles obtained through this method are delivered within 24 hours. Furthermore, 63.4% of survey respondents rated the speed of document delivery as "very fast." Length of time until access seemed to be the determining factor for Joe so even if the community college could not afford a particular journal's subscription price, they could still satisfy users like him by offering a pay-per-use program.
Additionally, I found a section in one of the Against the Grain articles that relates to this week's readings. Specifically, in the article "Pay-Per-View at the American Institute of Physics: One Scholarly Publisher's Experience with 'The Article Economy'" by Douglas LaFrenier, the need for discoverability is discussed. He states that when publishers were first selling articles online, around 1998, the AIP was more focused on availability than discoverability. They were unsure of whether to even allow Google to index their website and thought that, instead, users should "come directly to us for our content." Now, of course, this sounds completely ridiculous. Publishers can only hurt their sales by preventing search engines from including their website's contents. In fact, the first recommendation of the "New Resource Discovery Mechanisms" article from this week's reading is that libraries should "ensure that library resources are well integrated into Google and, indeed, other search engines." This article was written in 2006 so it is clear how important search engines have become in just eight years.
I thought CrossRef was the most interesting subject from the readings this week. I had learned about DOIs in LIS 644 but I understand their purpose a lot better now that I've learned about a specific use for them. With so many different systems needing to reference one piece of material, it makes a lot of sense to have a single identifier for this material which is then connected with a URL in a database. This allows the URL to be updated in a single location rather than numerous times in each of the systems. Additionally, I found CrossRef encouraging socially because publishers, who are normally competitors, were able to join together to create and fund CrossRef. Although CrossRef was discussed in all five readings, I particularly appreciated the diagrams in Brand's "CrossRef" article. While the other articles outlined in text how CrossRef works, the "Workflow for Reference Linking" and "DOI Resolution" diagrams showed the steps involved much more clearly.
The LibX Firefox extension developed by Virginia Tech intrigued me. This was mentioned in the "Beyond Open URL: Technologies for Linking Library Resources" article. The article also included a link to a website showing example toolbars used at various libraries. Despite the separate listing for each library, the sampling of toolbars I examined seem to all have the same features. These include a text box to search your library's OPAC directly from the toolbar, a special "cue" on a webpage if the item displayed (ie while browsing Amazon) is available at your library, and the ability to select text on a webpage and search for it as a title, author, or subject in your library's OPAC. The toolbar has also been extended since the time when "Beyond Open URL: Technologies for Linking Library Resources" was written because, despite the article's claim that LibX is only available for Firefox, the website includes a version for Internet Explorer. Overall this Firefox add-on looks extremely useful for research and, even though I try to avoid toolbars as a general rule, I'm strongly considering downloading the UW version.
P.S. Metadata database is my new favorite tongue twister
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