A Name Identifier Summit was held among various STM publishing concerns (Nature, Sage, American Institute of Physics, etc.) recently to discuss ways of disambiguating names:

Accurate identification of researchers and their work is seen as key for the transition from science to e-science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the growing volume of scholarly literature. A disambiguated set of authors will allow new services and benefits to be built for the research community by all stakeholders in scholarly communication: from commercial actors to non-profit organisations, from governments to universities. — KnowledgeSpeak blog.

The old, familiar problem that doesn’t want to go away.

How about this for engaging the reader?  New Zealand Book Council’s idea of “bringing books to life”.

Found via the Daily Beast.

Back a few months, Elsevier and Cell prototyped two different scenarios for a project called the article of the future.

It was was recently announced that the November 12th issue of Cell would be viewed using Reflect, an interface which was developed by a research team in Germany and which won Elsevier’s Grand Challenge 2009.  This is an effort to solicit feedback from the scientific community about what works when viewing articles online, and depending on the success of the project, may result in a different interface for Elsevier’s life sciences journals down the road.

An interesting dimension is that I wonder when it is that the reader (but reader is too passive a term for this experience — perhaps we merely say scientist or researcher) determines when the article has been read, i.e., when does one stop clicking? At what point is one satisfied that the ‘article’ has been read?  A similar phenomenon can be experienced today when one reads (in the more traditional sense) an article studded with links, but these protoypes push far beyond that. It will be interesting to watch things develop here.

Well, I just about fell over myself trying to load the LISTA package in ERM today.  This package goes by the default title in Serials Solutions of Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts (LISTA) with Full Text.

LISTA’s default title is longer than 64 characters.  ERM is allergic to any incoming title longer than that, so it truncates the title, which in turn prevents the generation of matching checkins. Too bad you only catch these AFTER they fail.  And as long as your eyes are sharp.

I blithely thought I would just use the Coverage Conversion rules to shorten that 74-character puppy.   But multiple attempts (fiddling with trailing spaces, remaking spreadsheets, etc.) to convert the title using coverage conversion rules were failing to work.  

I’m not a stranger to ERM’s Coverage Conversion rules, having set up lots of things in there.  More hair-tearing occured.  Could it be…? Nah…but wait…lemme see if that comma in the incoming title could be affecting the conversion?

Bingo. 

So now we know!  More undocumented ERM features: No titles over 64 characters AND no commas in any incoming title in the conversion rules! 

That just about means that for LISTA, we may end up having to use the dreaded customized name field in SerSol (and we all know how I feel about THAT.)

This package is now fully deserving of an ERM Snake-in-the-grass award.  (Remember the award for Worst Serial title change from your Serial Librarian days of yore? The category assigned for afflicted library publications was given a Snake in the Grass award, or “Et tu, Brute?”)

Just installed the wordpress iPhone app which lets me post from my iPhone. This could be interesting for sure (the autocorrect feature is coming in pretty handy I have to admit…)

This is a well thought-out application – not over-engineered. Well done.