Transcript Finding listservs/electronic discussion groups

Need to Know Now:
Scholarly Communication
Today
Prof. Monica Berger, Library
PDAC, NYC College of Technology
Nov. 17, 2005
Program overview
 Scholarly communication in general
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What is scholarly communication?
How has it changed? Interdisciplinary,
electronic
 Four major tools for scholarly
communication in historical order
Program overview
1. Listservs (informal) = email-based
communication
2. Ejournals & Open Access journals
(formal: often peer-reviewed)
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different modes of access, complexity of
definition of Open Access
Licensed vs. “free” ejournals
Preprints/Postprints
Hybrid open access journals: not all content
available
Program overview
3. Digital libraries (hybrid content, not
always peer-reviewed)
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Collections of content, often by subject, can be
mixed media
4. Blogs (informal)
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Increasingly utilized by scholars, still new
What is Scholarly Communication?
Definition: generally understood to mean
publication of research articles in scholarly
journals (and possibly monographs) but
there are many other forums for scholarly
communication
Speed of Scholarly Communication
Then:
1. Books and journals, conference papers, newsletters
Internet age (late 1980s -)
1. All of the above plus
2. Listservs for immediate electronic discussion
“Email is the killer ap”(1990s - )
1. All of the above plus
2. Email becomes ubiquitous
3. Push technology hot in mid-1990s but didn’t come to
fruition
4. WWW used for content but not for fast communication
The Hybrid age (2000 - )
1. All of the above plus
2. Blogs, wikis and other emerging technologies
Finding the content
Predigital age (before mid-1980s):
print indexes, card catalog
Early digital age (early 1990s, pre-WWW)
All of the above plus electronic indexes, online catalog
Middle digital age (mid-late 1990s, pre-Google)
All of the above (excluding card catalog) plus Internet
search engines (would retrieve only free WWW
content)
Hybrid environment (2004- )
All of the above (excluding card catalog) plus hybrid
gateways to content both free and licensed
including GooglePrint, GoogleScholar, Digital
Libraries)
Cyclical nature of scholarship
The next two charts shows the scientific publication cycle and give
some time lines ...
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Conception of research idea, secondary research
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Email and other more informal development of idea, grant
proposal
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Conference presentation, preprint of article
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Possible “Gray literature” report publication
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Peer-reviewed article is published
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Research is included in monographs
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May disseminate to popular media/textbooks
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Influence other scholars, new research
http://www.lib.washington.edu/subject/environment/imt220/pubcycle.jpg
http://www.lib.cuhk.edu.hk/information/bi/infolit/sciinfo.gif
Listservs/electronic discussion groups
 Listservs and listproc are electronic
discussion groups
 Features:
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Web interface for some
archives for most (some web)
can suspend messages when on vacation
daily digest
some moderated
not always open to all
Listservs/electronic discussion groups
 List = the subscribers
 Server = the computer managing the email
and the commands
Listservs/electronic discussion groups
 Command to SERVER (subscribe)
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Send message to
[email protected]
Text = SUBSCRIBE SERIALIST MONICA
BERGER
 Message to LIST (people):
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Send message to
[email protected]
Search on “biology”
Licensed Ejournals ($)
 Our library has 28,000 online periodicals
 Aggregate databases, e.g. Ebsco = subject to flux in
terms of titles
 Ejournal collections tend to be stable, have deep
archival back files
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Project Muse
JSTOR
American Chemical Society Ejournals
Duke University Press
Browse or search
New Issue/Table of Contents alerting for specific
journals
Full access/always free
History dissertations published as ebooks; not free
Finding, managing, creating blogs
Finding blogs
 Google Blogsearch recommended to identify blogs
Managing blogs
 Blogarithm generates “blogmail” when blogs are updated (not
very efficient)
 Bloglines: one-stop reading + searching, subscribing to blogs,
can get content by keyword (maybe a better solution)
 RSS (Really Simple Syndication): format for syndicating news
and personal weblogs: content pushed to a RSS reader. Can
get content by keywords. Many RSS readers. I have used Pluck,
software I downloaded from CNET
Creating a blog
 Blogger most popular
Bibliography
Available separately on the library’s website
http://library.citytech.cuny.edu/scholarly/Bibliography.pdf