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The Paradox of Privacy: Revisiting a Core Library Value in an Age of Big Data and Linked Data

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Protecting user privacy and confidentiality is fundamental to the ethics and practice of librarianship, and such protection constitutes one of eleven values in the American Library Association’s “Core Values of Librarianship” (2004).

This paper addresses the concerns of protecting privacy in the library as they relate to library users who are defining, exploring, and negotiating their sexual identities with the help of the library’s information, programming, and physical facilities.

In so doing, we enlist the aid of Garret Keizer, who, in Privacy (2012), articulates a fresh theory of the concept in light of American social life in the twenty-first century. Using Keizer’s theory, we examine these concerns within the context of the rise of big data systems and social media on the one hand, and linked data and new cataloging standards on the other.

In so doing, we suggest that linked data technologies, with their ability to lead searchers through self-directed, open inquiry, are superior to big data technologies in the navigation of the paradox between openness and secrecy.

In this way they offer a greater potential to support the needs of queer library users: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or questioning (LGBTQ).

URL : http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/library_trends/v064/64.3.campbell.html

Advocating for Librarianship: The Discourses of Advocacy and Service in the Professional Identities of Librarians

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A dedication to service is often cited as a hallmark of a profession. Service is included as one of eleven Core Values in the American Library Association’s “Core Values of Librarianship” (2004). For librarians, service includes helping people find information resources to meet their educational, recreational, and work needs.

Reporting findings from a larger study into the professional identity of librarians, this paper explores the centrality of service, with specific attention to how librarians advocate for their services and, ultimately, for librarianship.

Using a discourse analysis approach, this study examines the roles that Service as a Core Value and advocacy play in the construction of professional identity. Three different data sources were used: professional journals, e-mail discussion lists, and research interviews.

The data were analyzed for the discourses librarians use when describing librarians, librarianship, and professionalism and their connection to advocacy. When librarians advocate for the services they offer, they are in fact advocating for the value of the profession.

Discursively, speaking or writing about advocacy positioned librarians as active participants in their own identity formation. By making advocacy a central activity of the profession, librarians not only challenged others’ perception of librarianship, they challenged their own understanding as well.

URL : http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/library_trends/v064/64.3.hicks.html

Democratic Potential of New Models of Scholarship and the Crisis of Control

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This paper frames the serials crisis as a loss of control over libraries’ collections and development budgets. While libraries have always had to contend with budget constraints, for many the rising cost of serials has become prohibitive, impeding on scholarship itself as librarians are forced to cut journal subscriptions.

Open Access (OA) journals hold the potential to partially alleviate the crisis, but a lasting solution might lie in altering expectations of scholars. Our critique of the dissemination of scholarly research looks to both Marxian economic theory and later critical theory, but finds both inadequate for a pragmatic solution to the crisis; instead, we adopt Deweyan democratic theory to argue in favour of public scholarship aided by librarians and vetted by scholarly societies.

URL : Democratic Potential of New Models of Scholarship and the Crisis of Control

Alternative location : http://www.mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/article/view/26418

Big Publishers, Bigger Profits: How the Scholarly Community Lost the Control of its Journals

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Despite holding the potential to liberate scholarly information, the digital era has, to the contrary, increased the control of a few for-profit publishers. While most journals in the print era were owned by academic institutions and scientific societies, the majority of scientific papers are currently published by five for-profit publishers, which often exhibit profit margins between 30%-40%.

This paper documents the evolution of this consolidation over the last 40 years, discusses the peculiar economics of scholarly publishing, and reflects upon the role of publishers in today’s academe.

URL : Big Publishers, Bigger Profits: How the Scholarly Community Lost the Control of its Journals

Alternative location : http://www.mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/article/view/26422

Back to the past: on the shoulders of an academic search engine giant

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A study released by the Google Scholar team found an apparently increasing fraction of citations to old articles from studies published in the last 24 years (1990-2013). To demonstrate this finding we conducted a complementary study using a different data source (Journal Citation Reports), metric (aggregate cited half-life), time spam (2003-2013), and set of categories (53 Social Science subject categories and 167 Science subject categories).

Although the results obtained confirm and reinforce the previous findings, the possible causes of this phenomenon keep unclear. We finally hypothesize that first page results syndrome in conjunction with the fact that Google Scholar favours the most cited documents are suggesting the growing trend of citing old documents is partly caused by Google Scholar.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.09111

Measuring Book Impact Based on the Multi-granularity Online Review Mining

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As with articles and journals, the customary methods for measuring books’ academic impact mainly involve citations, which is easy but limited to interrogating traditional citation databases and scholarly book reviews, Researchers have attempted to use other metrics, such as Google Books, libcitation, and publisher prestige.

However, these approaches lack content-level information and cannot determine the citation intentions of users. Meanwhile, the abundant online review resources concerning academic books can be used to mine deeper information and content utilizing altmetric perspectives.

In this study, we measure the impacts of academic books by multi-granularity mining online reviews, and we identify factors that affect a book’s impact. First, online reviews of a sample of academic books on Amazon.cn are crawled and processed.

Then, multi-granularity review mining is conducted to identify review sentiment polarities and aspects’ sentiment values. Lastly, the numbers of positive reviews and negative reviews, aspect sentiment values, star values, and information regarding helpfulness are integrated via the entropy method, and lead to the calculation of the final book impact scores.

The results of a correlation analysis of book impact scores obtained via our method versus traditional book citations show that, although there are substantial differences between subject areas, online book reviews tend to reflect the academic impact.

Thus, we infer that online reviews represent a promising source for mining book impact within the altmetric perspective and at the multi-granularity content level. Moreover, our proposed method might also be a means by which to measure other books besides academic publications.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.08091

Perish or Publish in China: Pressures on Young Chinese Scholars to Publish in Internationally Indexed Journals

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To boost their research productivities, Chinese universities are putting great pressure on their research-active staff to publish in internationally indexed journals. However, the emerging publish-or-perish culture in China has seen little empirical investigation thus far.

In the research reported in this article, semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven young researchers in science and engineering disciplines at a research-centered university in central China.

The study showed that these young scholars faced great pressure to publish papers in internationally indexed journals. Consequently, the participants were reluctant to spend time on other academic activities, including teaching training.

They also reported considerable work time devoted to writing, which resulted in fatigue and negatively affected family relations. The participants admitted that they had to rush to publish, and therefore were less likely to produce papers of better quality or those with novel discoveries.

The research contributes to our reflection upon Chinese universities’ increasing use of the number of international publications as a major assessment and incentive measurement of their faculties’ academic performance.

URL : Perish or Publish in China: Pressures on Young Chinese Scholars to Publish in Internationally Indexed Journals

Alternative location : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/4/2/9