Reference rot September 1, 2017
Posted by Mia in Frontiers, Uncategorized.comments closed
It’s disconcerting that the problem of disappearing content in our repositories is not of much greater concern among academic librarians. Perhaps we’ve just become too inured to linkrot — but what about content drift phenomena? When those two are combined, you have reference rot. Its everywhere once you start looking for it.
Intrigued by a study published in PLoS, a colleague and I teamed up to investigate the URLs in doctoral dissertations deposited in our institutional repository.
Massicotte, Mia and Botter, Kathleen (2017) Reference rot in the repository: A case study of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in an academic library. Information Technology and Libraries (ITAL), 36 (1). pp. 11-28. ISSN 0730-9295
http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/982310/
In our shared, brave new digital information world, we really do need to gain a better understanding of what digital preservation means, especially if we expect it to achieve traction as a primary focus of library transformation.
Author IDs April 25, 2015
Posted by Mia in Frontiers.comments closed
I’ve been sidetracking on ORCID these days. I need to walk through — make that click through — any process I’m reading about. I’m impatient and pretty quickly I have to just stop and go off and use whatever the heck is being described. How else to learn? Even if I don’t subsequently have to be able to demonstrate something to others, I do it for my own edification.
So in my ORCID explorations, a less than satisfactory experience (on the Scopus side of things) was linking up a SCOPUS Author Profile with the ORCID ID. I just prefer a UX that has much sharper definition. I like things to be overly obvious. Is that such a bad thing? Please use more textures! There’s almost no such thing as being too obvious. Every interface comes with a plethora of assumptions that it is built upon, so I prefer it when at least some of those assumptions are unpacked and flattened out in front of my eyes. thank you.
The custom QR generator is a neat little gadget and I generated one for my ID, and I do like the idea of customizing a nifty design and ordering a sheet of labels to accompany a presentation/handout.
That’s at least one use case for a QR code.
Alternative stimulus response June 7, 2013
Posted by Mia in Frontiers.comments closed
Something’s been bugging me. There is a huge swell of interest in alternative metrics as an indicator of scholarly and social impact. These alternatives are distinguished from traditional bibliometrics which focus primarily on ISI’s journal impact factor (jif).
The scholarly journal framework has dematerialized into a loose, unbounded container — although “journal” is still a useful model and I don’t think it has outlived its purpose quite yet. It still meaningfully represents a collection of thematically related, stand-alone information units – otherwise known as “articles” — and regardless of whether the collection is completely virtual.
The direct dissemination of information will continue to inspire the creation of new and emerging models which will help us understand how scholarly information is propagated, absorbed, and digested into the broader community. Perhaps it is more of an organic process than we realize.
Some are calling for the inclusion of altmetrics into tenure packages, but I would be wary of endorsing such general recommendations, particularly since it is academia which misappropriated the use of the JIF for determining research ‘value’ in the first place.
There are tremendous differences in the way in which various disciplines conduct, generate and communicate research/results.
The click of a link may be an interesting pattern generator, but so much further analysis has to be conducted on those patterns in order to gain understanding of what they might meaningfully represent.
Internet/infotainment phenomena have very short life spans. Reputation management is on the rise. Using Capitalizing on SEO tactics to drive more traffic in a particular direction may boost altmetric “scores”, but like a downpour on parched earth, there’s a lot of runoff with no absorption. The lack of the term ‘altmetrics’ in this blogpost title is intentional.
Reflection and digestion take time. Unless, of course, you’re just clicking links and aren’t actually reading, reflecting or digesting.
ISI’s Journal Impact Factor’s characteristics and methodology are well-documented. The journal impact factor has been well-studied and well-critiqued over the years. It is so well-understood by the scientific research community that its rejection as a measurement (see here, and the recent DORA) has been greeted with widespread enthusiasm.
Now altmetrics need to be scrutinized with a similar kind of rigor along with a healthy dose of skepticism. Or they run the very real risk of becoming altmetricks instead.
Discoverability December 18, 2012
Posted by Mia in Frontiers, Uncategorized.comments closed
We’re embarking on a discovery layer project and looking at the few contenders out there in the marketplace.
I am not yet sold on building a pre-harvested index composed of all different types of indexing terminology and depth of granularity thrown in together. How reasonable it is to have something like, oh, I don’t know, say ninety or so different content types, so that you can filter your results?
The goalpost just moved. Its easier to start your search and get some meaningful results, and that is very good.
But to refine a search might mean you are now faced with an abundance of choice as to which content types to tick off as you are scrolling through the list of terms that you can check off.
We’re back to listing terms in an alphabetical sequence and asking users to (once again) browse through the terms to find ones that strike their fancy!
It’s no wonder relevancy ranking algorithms are closely guarded secrets. Special sauce, indeed.
Oh, look, it’s snowing! Thank you, WordPress. It’s that time of year.
Typography counts November 26, 2012
Posted by Mia in Frontiers, Uncategorized.comments closed
A recent study by Larson and Picard on the Aesthetics of Reading has been circulating on the internets (thanks to Fadayev’s UsabilityPost). One thing the authors tested for is whether good typography can be measured to have a positive effect on mood. The interesting thing is that reading comprehension and speed were not measured, but rather the reader’s subjective impression of how long it took to read the piece (the duration). The authors of the study that reading is an engaging task, but reading when high quality typography is present is “more engaging” — as measured by users consistently (and by a wide margin) underestimating the amount of time it took them to complete the reading.
…high quality typography appears to induce a positive mood, similar to earlier mood inducers such as a small gift or watching a humorous video. This is an exciting finding because there are important differences between good and poor typography that appear to have little effect on common performance measures such as reading speed and comprehension.
It’s great to see the importance of typography getting attention. Recently the UK GDS team (responsible for launching the new website gov.uk) was deciding on legibility, so they looked to a font widely adopted for highway signage:
Accessibility is key at GDS and ideally we’d like a typeface that’s good enough for us not to need an ‘easier to read’ font option for the dyslexic and those with other visual or cognitive issues. We tried lots of different ones and the best was Transport. This shouldn’t come as a surprise – it’s the typeface designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert in the late fifties/early sixties for Britain’s national motorway and road sign system. They spent years testing for legibility in all sorts of extreme conditions; in the rain, at night, at speed.
A font that withstood years of testing under extreme driving conditions should score well on lowering the stress quotient for sure.
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