Academic libraries today invest in scholarly communication in a variety of ways, pursuing an array of objectives and taking on a variety of roles. The variety of objectives that academic libraries have for scholarly communications is to some degree a reflection of the different levels of engagement and prioritization that their parent universities have on these issues.
The user experience of working with e-journals and ebooks in an academic setting has failed to keep up with changing practices and preferences for how researchers now expect to access the scholarly literature.I called attention to some of these limitations in a presentation at the STM Association annual conference in October.The video of my talk is now available: I hope you enjoy the presentation
Combining most if not all of a publisher’s scholarly content on a single publisher platform has not always been the norm. Oxford University Press’s transition to a new platform represents not just a one-to-one platform shift but in fact a consolidation from more to fewer platforms. This is a trend worth understanding and watching.
Academics’ expectations for user experience are set not by reference to improvements relative to the past but increasingly in comparison with their experiences on consumer internet services and mobile devices. The best solution for research, teaching, and learning would be a single account for each user, controlled by that individual, and accepted portably across services and platforms.
Publishers and libraries do not completely understand how changing information consumption patterns, especially in the transition to mobile, should affect their product, infrastructure, and acquisitions strategies. Consider enticing or forcing your organization to engage more deeply with the mobile user experience.
The review article follows narrative conventions similar to other journal articles limiting its value in many types of discovery processes. Could the review article’s organization and analysis of the field be used to improve discovery in other types of research workflows?
I have been tracking one kind of discovery – what I will call the quest for comprehensiveness – that is widespread among researchers but seems comparatively quiescent in professional discussion about supporting researcher needs. Would it be possible, I wonder, to develop a discovery tool that is designed not to find you the best items but rather to provide some assurance that you hadn’t missed something?
A look at Facebook’s Instant Article initiative and what it means for discovery and for publishers.
Researchers’ multiple and changing institutional affiliations create tangible challenges, both for the researchers themselves and for scholarly publishers as well.
Several researchers recently “stumbled across” an article indicating the reasonable likelihood that Liberia would be faced with cases of Ebola. Public health officials had not acted on this known likelihood. The question is why.
Content providers operate in the systems ecosystem of the licensing academic library, but they have been challenged to integrate their offerings as seamlessly into this ecosystem as would benefit researchers. To adapt, publishers need to examine not only the usability of their own platforms and how they can continue to be improved, but also how they are in practice used in scholarly research alongside other content platforms and intermediary services. As distance learning continues its inexorable growth and research practices continue to anticipate always-connected devices, it is becoming more urgent for libraries, content providers, and other intermediaries to work together to address these problems.
A researcher’s core interests may be in a specific set of areas, but effective discovery also helps that researcher to stay aware of adjacent areas of interest or even potential areas of unknown interest. Personalized approaches to discovery can improve research efficiency without sacrificing serendipity.
The benefits of personalizing discovery are already playing themselves out in the consumer space, suggesting tremendous opportunities for using data to personalize the research process. Given the scale of data needed for effective personalization, the implications of changing discovery processes will cascade through the scholarly ecosystem.