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.
My nominee for a summer reading book, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. This is a humorous book set in San Francisco. It playfully describes the clash between the new technology and the old world of printed books.
An entertaining lecture on the tricks of typography.
Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer, librarians at Utrecht University, talk with podcast host Stewart Wills about their 101 Innovations project.
The Internet operates on a scale unlike anything we have seen before. How must publishing adapt to this scale? This requires more than thinking of the Internet as another format. The scale of the Internet requires us to invite machines into our research and publishing activity.
As the scholarly communication world becomes more complex and the issues we deal with become more politically and emotionally fraught, it becomes increasingly essential that we be able to tell the difference between anlaysis and advocacy. What markers can we look for to help us discriminate between them?
The pathways into academic material are diverse and the researcher experiences (RX) are quite variable. How can a publisher best open up its content for discovery?
Michael Clarke looks at some of the growth avenues in scholarly communications.
Offering researchers credit for performing peer review seems, on the surface, like a good idea. But implementing such a scheme raises some problematic questions.
Submitting articles for publication is a nightmare–there’s a plethora of platforms and interfaces, and they all seem to be awful. Can anything be done?
Digital media enables us to collect a huge amount of end-user data, far more than we could gather for print publishing. This presentation summarizes the way that data can be used to foster growth and concludes that end-user data is likely to require the creation of a new class of products.
What is text mining? The CCC’s Roy Kaufman offers a primer for publishers.
INASP’s Anne Powell discusses the complexity of discovery, and the work INASP is doing to bring together tools, technologies, infrastructure and perhaps most importantly, relationships built on an understanding of the needs of users.
How valuable is the brand? It depends on the ecosystem or publishing epoch. Brands were the hallmark of the print era, but with the advent of new publishing paradigms, brands now compete with other useful means to identify materials.
A look at Facebook’s Instant Article initiative and what it means for discovery and for publishers.