Walt at Random

Effective immediately, and for an indefinite period (at least a month, at most until I make the books OP), you can acquire either or both of the liblog books for an insanely low price: $20 for the paperback, $10 for the PDF.

• The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 features 607 blogs by library people, with a wide range of metrics and a final chapter providing brief profiles for each blog in alphabetic order.
• But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009 features 521 blogs–with slightly fewer metrics but expanded profiles, including brief subjective comments on nearly all the blogs.

If you’re wondering, my net revenue is essentially the same for print and PDF versions (about $0.03 different in one case, about $0.40 different in the other).

Note: The CreateSpace version of The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 has not changed price.

A very special (and very long) Cites & Insights is now available: Volume 10, Issue 10, September/October 2010.

It’s at http://citesandinsights.info/civ10i10.pdf, if you’re not seeing the links.

The 60-page issue (which, at 1.5MB, may take a little longer than usual to download) is PDF-only and consists of one essay:

But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009

Except for a few paragraphs (most of page 56), this is taken entirely from the book But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, which is still available. Page 56 summarizes what’s not in the issue–a few graphs, one column of quite a few tables, a substantial portion of one text-only chapter…and all 521 liblog profiles.

Pages 57-60 contain an index to liblog names and people’s names within the issue–since it came directly from the Word document used for the book, it was easy to create a new index (the book index uses W0rd’s internal indexing features), and a group of advisers from that august body, the Library Society of the World, encouraged me to include it.

Since the issue includes dozens of tables and a fair number of graphs, and since it would be vastly longer in printed-HTML form, no HTML version is provided.

Does “September/October” mean there won’t be an issue for another two months?

It means this is three times as long as my target size for issues and twice as long as most actual issues. It means there might not be another issue before the November 2010 issue…depending on a whole bunch of other things.

Meanwhile, enjoy. And to the 17 people and libraries who actually purchased the book to date: Thanks. I hope a few others join you. There’s a bunch of good stuff in the book that isn’t in this issue.

More bits & pieces from But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009–this time, pages 9-10 and part of 11, plus three blogs from page 19.

Blogging Platforms and Programs

How do library people blog? Any blanket statement will be wrong, particularly since the whole universe of liblogs may be unknowable. For the blogs in this study, here’s the breakdown.

Table 1.2: Blogging platforms and programs

WordPress is close to a majority and certainly accounts for a large plurality of the blogs. Oddly enough, as compared to the 2008 study, Blogger has precisely the same percentage (36.6%) albeit of a smaller universe, but WordPress has jumped from roughly 38% to roughly 47% (and increased in real numbers), while TypePad and MovableType decreased in real numbers and increased from 8.8% to 9.2%. (I’ve lumped MovableType and TypePad together since both are similar products from the same company.) “Other” includes a few identified programs and platforms with no more than two blogs each—and a number of blogs that are either handcrafted or shorn of brand identity.

My guess—and it’s only a guess—is that a broader study, including short-lived and less visible blogs, would show a higher percentage of Blogger blogs, most of them on blogspot.com. While it’s trivially easy to set up a hosted blog at Blogspot.com, WordPress.com or Typepad.com, I believe Blogspot is perceived as being the fastest and easiest of the three. (Some Blogger blogs above are not hosted on Blogspot.com—and I’d guess most of the WordPress liblogs use WordPress software on other sites.)

There has been a slow migration of blogs to WordPress. I believe it’s safe to say that WordPress software is the preferred blogging platform for most long-term “serious” bloggers. I see very few people migrating elsewhere (except, for example, forced migrations to MovableType because people move blogs to shared services such as ScienceBlogs). But I have nothing more than anecdotal evidence—that, and the near-majority numbers above.

If you’re a numbers person, you may note that the numbers above don’t add up to 521. In the two weeks between completing the scan of blogs for metrics and doing a second scan for blogging platforms, two blogs had become unavailable, temporarily or permanently.

Currency

How current are liblogs? I used March-May 2009 for metrics—but I recorded those metrics in September 2009. To get a checkpoint, I checked each blog on September 30, 2009, looking for the most recent post but rounding down to week intervals—and beyond that, to spans that seem indicative.

Here are the results, which require some explanation.

Table 1.3: Currency of most recent post as of September 30, 2009

I marked a blog as Ceased if there was an explicit declaration that there would be no new posts—no matter how recent that declaration was. (Here again, the universe is 519, missing two blogs that seem to have vanished.) Other than that:

• More than 40% of the blogs are robust—they had a post within the most recent week.
• Just over half the blogs are active—with a post somewhere within the most recent fortnight.
• Stepping back at larger intervals, it’s interesting that the number with posts sometime during the month (but not in the most recent fortnight) and those with posts sometime in August are fairly close to the “week before last” group.
• “13” indicates sometime within the last quarter (13 weeks). More than three-quarters of the blogs had a post within the summer quarter (July-September).
• I include “17” (actually four months) because Technorati uses that cutoff for blogs that could be considered alive. Roughly 80% of liblogs had a post between June 1 and September 30, 2009.
• The next two levels are half-year and year marks—in both cases representing blogs that are neither active nor clearly dead.
• “99” really means “more than 52”—that is, blogs that haven’t explicitly ceased but haven’t had a post in more than a year.

Profiles

Lady Crumpet’s Armoire

Began July 2002.

No announcement of hiatus or dropping the blog, but the most recent post was on August 20, 2008.

beSpacific

“Accurate, focused law and technology news.” By Sabrina Pacifici. Began August 2002.

Purely professional with no distinctive authorial voice. Does this belong in a liblog study? It’s a prolific set of very brief descriptions of, and links to, news items done by a special librarian. But it’s in blog form, Pacifici calls it a blog, and she is a librarian, so. Note the remarkable consistency over the years.

etc.

“the last, since 2002” By Amanda Etches-Johnson. Began August 2002.

When Etches-Johnson posts, she usually has something interesting to say. Lately, she hasn’t posted much (the single post for this quarter is about the lack of posts and an experiment in “lifestreaming”).

Go buy it!

Lots more in the book–PDF or paperback. And free shipping during the summer.

Here’s what you’ll find at the bottom of page 15 and all of page 16 in But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009: (with one subheading eliminated)

The Rabid Librarian’s Ravings in the Wind

“Born, like other comic book characters, out of an otherwise trivial but life-changing animal bite, the Rabid Librarian seeks out strange, useless facts, raves about real and perceived injustices, and seeks to meet her greatest challenge of all–her own life.” By Eilir Rowan. Began October 2001.

Impressively active, varied, personal blog on all aspects of life and libraries. (There were comments in 2009, but slightly fewer than 0.05 per post.) These aren’t high quarters, by the way: Annual posting totals were 663 for 2008, 653 for 2007, 808 for 2006…and more than 1,000 in 2004.

wiredfu

“another wretched hive of scum and villainy” Began December 2001.

The most recent post is dated February 1, 2008. A sidebar item is a little clearer—wishing people Happy 2008 and saying: “I’ve made a New Years resolution to post more. But then again, I made that same resolution in 2007 and 2006. So, at this rate, I hope you enjoy 2009 as well.”

rawbrick.net

“A personal weblog.” Began January 2002.

Mostly, but not entirely, movie (on DVD) reviews, including placeholders.

The Shifted Librarian

“Shifting libraries at the speed of byte!” By Jenny Levine. Began January 2002.

This blog has shifted over the years—from a primary focus on “shifted” librarianship, to a primary focus on gaming in libraries, to a mixture of topics.

Who cares? Won’t there be a replacement?

As to whether you should care or not, that’s your call. I’m doing some additional promotion and excerpting from the book to remind people that’s still around. I believe it’s the best look at liblogs (or the biblioblogosphere, if you prefer)–and the only one with brief comments on most, but not all, blog profiles.

To some extent, this book does replace The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008–but only to some extent:

• The 2009 book does not include measurements on use of illustrations in liblogs.
• The 2009 book has somewhat more stringent requirements for blog inclusion.
• If you’re looking for a particular blog profile, you may find the 2008 book–with its 145-page final chapter consisting of all the profiles in straight alphabetic order–easier to use. Profiles are scattered throughout the 2009 book, for logical and stated reasons; you can find them through the index, but that’s a little slower.

As to there being a replacement: Maybe and no.

• Maybe: I’m thinking about (OK, working on) a new liblog survey that is in some ways more ambitious than the 2009 project, but in other ways much less ambitious. Phase 1 is nearly complete. Phase 2 might take a few weeks or several months (depending on other projects). This survey might yield a (considerably smaller) book. It might not.
• No: One of the ways in which the new project is much less ambitious is that there will not be profiles of individual blogs, and the index will not include the names of bloggers (I’m not even recording those). The only way there could be a new set of profiles, covering up to four years of blogging activity, is with direct advance sponsorship for the work required; the probability of that happening is somewhere close to the probability of, say, the Dow reaching 20,000 by the end of Summer 2010.

When the 2008 book emerged, a couple of people said they’d find it a lot more interesting if they had my comments on individual blogs. The 2009 book has those comments–brief ones, and omitting any absolutely damning comments, but still. And, of course, I did not include the 2008 profiles in the Cites & Insights version of the 2008 book.

When did liblogs begin?

Table 1.1: Blogs by year of origin

Comparing this table to the same table for last year’s larger set of blogs, I note that two of three blogs from 1998 are gone, as are one of two from 1999 and the only one from 2000. Other than that, the pattern is similar—with, again, the peak for new liblogs being in 2005, declining slightly in 2006 and somewhat more in 2007. There’s a huge decline in 2008, down almost 90%. That may mean that few new blogs gain readership, that bloggers aren’t bothering to add their blogs to LISWiki—or that there are simply a lot fewer new liblogs.

Figure 1.1: Liblogs by year of origin

…and here are two more liblog profiles, this time from pages 13-14

ResearchBuzz

“News about search engines, databases, and other information collections.” By Tara Calishain. Began August 1998.

What it says in the tagline—and, if you can get past the daily tweet summaries in recent days, the blog includes some fascinating essays.

librarian.net

“putting the rarin back in librarian since 1999” By Jessamyn West. Began April 1999.

If not the oldest liblog, this is certainly close—and West (OK, Jessamyn) continues to write a wide range of interesting commentaries on the field.

For more…

Buy the book!

I haven’t tried to promote But Still They Blog after the initial run of posts summarizing each chapter–and that may be a mistake. (So far, it’s sold 17 copies. Pathetic.)

I’m not ready to give up and just run the chapter contents (but not the profiles) in C&I, and don’t plan to do so, although I might offer a few excerpts here or there. This really is a good book, in my not-at-all-humble opinion, well worth the $35 (cheaper as a download), and I think you should buy a copy. (I’m thinking about doing something different but not entirely unrelated this Fall…but it won’t replace BSTB.)

For the moment, here are a couple of blog profiles from the book, indicative of what you’ll find.

The Distant Librarian

By Paul Pival. Began October 2004.

While many of the posts relate somehow to distance librarianship, Pival views that as broadly as most bloggers view librarianship in general and brings a clear, thoughtful voice to his posts.

School Librarian in Action

By Zarah Grace C. Gagatiga. Began April 2005.

An impressive blog from a Filipino school librarian. Unfortunately, the new WordPress template blocks attempts to measure length (and the pages are too crowded to use my alternative trick). This is also another blog with a “Reactions” line that only allows for highly positive reactions—but it’s an interesting and, I think, important blog for all that.

Where and Why

Those two profiles appear on page 57 of the book. Why there? Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out…

In some ways, this is another promotional post for the forthcoming July 2010 Cites & Insights (which, as of right now, seems likely to emerge on June 9 or June 10 and to be 40 pages long). The first such post appeared yesterday, and raised some troubling issues regarding the future of C&I (and of my involvement in the field).

To the extent that the second section of that post was a touch downbeat, I apologize–sort of. And I do apologize to the colleague with whom I had an email conversation (not sparked by the post), a conversation that revealed to me that I’ve been more demoralized by some events of this year than I’d realized. (Don’t worry: I won’t be wandering around DC being gloomy–I don’t do that at conferences. In fact, overall, I’m not gloomy…)

What Is Happening

The forthcoming issue has, I believe, some interesting stuff. The first piece starts a new project that might or might not continue; I think it’s interesting and maybe relevant to some libraries. The second piece–the big essay–is relevant to almost every librarian (in my opinion) and continues what I regard as strong Zeitgeist pieces (most of which could equally well be Making it Work pieces, this one less so).

The third piece is a traditional collection with a difference–it’s about products, but in most cases with brief (or not so brief) essays rather than pure descriptions. Then there’s a set of brief takes on old movies, always fun…or not. (This group includes three classics and three more that I thought were near-classics…indeed, this time I thought three-quarters of the flicks were worthwhile.)

And I close with an overdue PDF-only section of snark, only about half of it related to the wonderful world of high-end audio

But I thought I’d also talk about…

What’s Not Happening

There’s no Making it Work essay in this issue. I’m pretty sure there will be one in the August issue–there’s certainly plenty of source material, and I’ve started splitting into semi-manageable chunks. (How semi-manageable? 44 items in one big chunk, 25 in another, 26 in a third, and a bunch of smaller groups.)

There’s no Perspective as such–and in that case, I have a working “On” title that will almost certainly get written very soon (I would have written it for the July issue, but this issue was already overlength, and the particular topic can only benefit from a little more thinktime). For that matter, I could treat an MiW chunk as a Perspective…and quite easily come up with an all-Perspective issue.

By far the largest group of Delicious items relates to Google Book Search and the proposed settlement…but there’s no indication of when or whether a settlement will actually be approved, and I have no idea whether it will even make sense to dive back into that particular pool.

Blogging, copyright, writing, reading, social networks, ereaders, ebooks…lots of future topics with lots of worthwhile source material.

It’s clear to me that, if it makes sense to keep C&I going, having enough varied material and ideas won’t be a problem for years to come. Does it make sense to keep C&I going? That’s a tougher question…

What’s Also Not Happening

Beyond C&I–and at least one promising individual project that I won’t discuss until it’s final–there’s some potential research that isn’t happening. At least not yet.

• I’m now fairly well convinced that it’s futile for me to spend time on library blogs, even though it would be fascinating to do a qualitative/quantitative study focusing on those library blogs that appear to be succeeding (based on comments or Google Page Rank). The field seems to have told me in no uncertain terms that my work in this area is simply not valued, so there’s little point in even considering additional bruises on my forehead.
• Liblogs–blogs by library people–are another question. Not that But Still They Blog is setting any sales records (I do appreciate the purchase of PDF versions of both liblog books last Friday–thanks, whoever you are!)–it’s now up to 16 copies–but, well, this one still interests me. Maybe. I can think of two approaches for a future study, but in my saner moments I think that neither one may be worth pursuing. (One approach: An attempt to capture the entire field, but only at a gross level–that is, without individual commentaries or difficult metrics. The other, which may be complementary: A detailed analysis of a smaller group of blogs, focusing on those that can be said to be currently active.)
• Anything else where my skills and tenacity might be worthwhile. It just doesn’t make sense to do this kind of stuff on speculation, based on results to date.

That’s it for now. Once again, I’d love to discuss possibilities with people or groups, before I admit that “semi-” in “semi-retired” has become a lie.

If you’ve been thinking about buying one of my books (OK, don’t laugh…), this is a great time to do it. Lulu’s having a summertime shipping deal–regular USPS shipping (USMail only, US only, I think) is free. (When you’re ready to check out, you’re prompted for the coupon code. It’s not the $3.99 discount they had for a while earlier; it actually discounts by the total amount of USPS shipping, which can be higher.)

You can find all C&I books at my bookstore–along with two family history books my wife’s published (they show up as four books, because she’s done hardcover versions as well as download–and, if you know anybody in the Driver, Cockerton, Sweet, Wilkinson, Wiltfong, Higgins, Edmunds, Joyce, Saxe, Symmons, Gerow, Vivian, Symons, Eva, Rodda, McQuaid or Spafford families, these are excellent books, priced just barely over production cost, for now).

Books currently available:

• Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change – still well worth reading! $25
• Open Access and Libraries: Essays from Cites & Insights 2001-2009. The complete, unaltered, uncorrected text of 30+ essays related to open access and library access to scholarship. Brief introduction. No index. $17.50 (barely over production cost–it’s a thick book).
• But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009 – Landmark study of 521 English-language blogs; a must-read for anyone who cares about blogging. $35.
• The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 – Earlier, even broader landmark study, covering more than 600 blogs. $25.
• Cites & Insights Annual Volumes – each one with a complete year of C&I, including index, each with cover photos exclusive to the bound volumes (all wraparound except 2007. Each $35. Volume 6 (2006) includes an exclusive prefix on what happened to liblogs in “Looking at Liblogs: The Great Middle.” Volume 7 (2007) includes the phantom edition, Cites on a Plane, available nowhere else. Volume 8 (2008) and Volume 9 (2009) are great bound annuals–and Volume 9 includes an overall table of contents.

I don’t know how long the free shipping offer lasts. I don’t know how long these books will remain available, either, although I have no current plans to pull any of them. They’re all available as downloadable PDFs at slightly lower prices ($0 in the case of Open Access and Libraries)–but of course shipping isn’t much of an issue in that case.

Oh, by the way, if you’re putting off buying But Still They Blog because you assume I’ll publish most of it in future issues of C&I…I really have no plans to do that, although plans could change. I suppose I could relabel it as a Limited Edition and unpublish it after 50 or 100 copies…

When I announced the trade paperback version of Open Access and Libraries, and the free final PDF version available from Lulu, I didn’t provide any information on how often the various preview versions had been viewed or downloaded…because of a temporary reporting problem.

That problem’s been solved, and here are the numbers, for what they’re worth:

• The “html epub” version was viewed/downloaded 304 times.
• The “rtf epub” version was viewed/downloaded 78 times.
• The draft PDF version was downloaded 155 times
• So far, the final epub version has been viewed/downloaded 60 times
• Two copies of the trade paperback have been purchased so far, but one of those was mine.
• I have no way of knowing how many people have downloaded the final PDF version, apparently: either Lulu doesn’t report free downloads as sales, or there haven’t been any.

No attempt to draw conclusions. Should there be?

Three items not really worth full posts–two book-related, one DVD-related:

La misma luna

Last Saturday, our weekly movie night, we watched La misma luna or “Under the Same Moon.” Unless you’re familiar with Mexican cinema, the only actor you’re likely to recognize is America Ferrera, and she’s only in it for about five minutes.

The plot, basically: A young mother is working in LA to send money to her son…in Mexico, staying with his grandmother…to make his life better. She’s undocumented. They talk once a week, when she calls him, always from the same pay phone to the same pay phone (she describes the corner at which the pay phone stands)–and they’re both “under the same moon” even though they’re in different countries.

Grandmother dies, son can’t stand being apart from mother, takes action to fix it. He’s nine years old.

I won’t say more than that. It’s excellent–well made, well acted. It’s also subtitled (not unreasonably), including the “making of” featurette (except when Ferrera is speaking). The only language option is Spanish. That’s only reasonable. We enjoyed it very much. No, I didn’t regard it as political propaganda, but then I don’t view the world as being entirely political statements.

Reservation Blues

On my long-term semi-random walk through the fiction available at Livermore Public Library (each time I go, I get three books: One nonfiction but with a narrative arc; one genre fiction, alternating between mystery and science fiction, and one fiction that’s not in a genre section and looks interesting), I picked up Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie–who I’d heard of but never read.

I can’t say I read it in a single sitting. I can say that, if the rest of life had allowed, I might have done so–and I did read it in two days, which is highly unusual.

Don’t know whether I’d recommend it to others, but I was pleasantly surprised. (OK, so the rest of you, being more up on important literature than I am, have already read this–after all, it’s been out for fifteen years, it won an American Book Award, etc., etc.. What can I say? I’m a couple of decades behind on most book reading.)

Anyway, on the off chance that you haven’t read it…you might enjoy it.

Open Access and Libraries

Going from the sublime to the…well, anyway, I just received my own copy of Open Access and Libraries: Essays from Cites & Insights, 2001-2009. (USPS for the win, as usual: Three days for MediaMail from North Carolina to Livermore.)

I gotta say, the cover is even brighter in real life than on the screen (go down a few posts to see the screen version, or click on the link above for that matter). It is, of course, my tribute to the two primary flavors of open access and some of the many shades of those flavors.

It’s also a thick book (191,000 words in 519 pages): the thickest I’ve done via Lulu, although not actually either the thickest book I’ve published or the one with the most pages. (Desktop Publishing for Librarians, published in 1990 by G.K. Hall, is about 0.05″ thicker as a page block–that is, exclusive of hardcover–even though it’s only 420 pages; The Online Catalog Book: Essays and Examples, published in 1992 by G.K. Hall, is 560 pages and 8.5×11 rather than 6×9, but it’s a little thinner, printed on lighter-weight paper. Hmm. As with this book, I did the typography for both of those.)

Is it a “good” book or a “worthwhile” book? I can’t say. I know the price is right if you want PDF: $0.

Cites & Insights 10:7 (June 2010) is now available.

The 34-page issue is, as usual, PDF; each essay is also available as an HTML separate

(just click on the links, or use the highly sophisticated notational scheme, http://citesandinsights.info/vNiMx.htm, where N is the volume (10), M is the issue (7), and x is a lower-case letter indicating the article, starting with a, then b, then c…)

What’s Here

Bibs & Blather…pp. 1-3

Announcing the new book Open Access and Libraries: Essays from Cites & Insights, 2001-2009, a 519-page 6×9 book combining all OA-related essays from C&I–free as a PDF, minimally priced ($17.50) as a trade paperback. Also a note on ALA and my rehearsals for [semi-?]retirement.

The Zeitgeist: There is No Future…pp. 3-19

You could think of this as a Making it Work Perspective on library futures, if you prefer–focusing on exclusionary vs. inclusionary thinking (OR vs. AND), The Future vs. many futures…and more.

Feedback and Following Up…pp. 19-20

Finally (and probably having missed some feedback), a little feedback–three items in all.

Copyright Currents: Catching Up with the RIAA…pp. 20-27

Yes, the RIAA says they’ve wound down their vastly offensive campaign of suing 30,000+ file-sharers for a few thousand bucks each–and, during that process, exactly two cases have gone to jury trial. Guess what? So far, the RIAA’s batting 1000 in those cases. This piece brings us up to date on the longest-running case (Jammie Thomas, now Jammie Thomas-Rassset)–and ads notes on the other one, Joel Tenenbaum, where a defense lawyer’s novel interpretation of fair use was so convincing that the judge ordered a directed verdict…in favor of the plaintiff.

Offtopic Perspective: Spaghetti Westerns…pp. 27-34

That’s the name of the five-disc set containing 20 movies covered in this set of offhand impressions (although in 2.5 cases I refer back to an earlier impression). For a few of you on FriendFeed, inclusion of this piece also means I don’t plan to do a special “summer silliness” issue–and will integrate my odd digital media archaeology project, if and when, into regular issues of C&I.

Sponsorship and Support

This is the penultimate issue sponsored by the Library Society of the World. Chances are, the final such issue (July 2010) will appear before the 2010 ALA Annual Conference (although that’s not guaranteed).

After that, I’m in need of sponsorship or, failing that, direct support. If you regard C&I as worthwhile, one way to show that is to provide some support: The PayPal link is right on the C&I home page.

I’m pleased to announce that Open Access and Libraries: Essays from Cites & Insights, 2001-2009 is now available via Lulu.

The 519-page book is available as a free PDF download or as a 6×9 trade paperback for $17.50. (If you’re wondering, I get $2.10 of that $17.50. For every three print copies published, I can buy lunch…)

I’d like to think that the cover treatment is obvious for anyone who knows much about OA. I could be wrong.

Why this book?

In short:

• I’ve stopped writing about open access within Cites & Insights for a number of reasons.
• When I asked a couple of knowledgeable people–specifically Peter Suber–whether a collection of those essays might have some minimal value, the answer was Yes.

From the time I made the draft PDF and some different trial ePub versions available (through April 26, for reasons that aren’t relevant here), the PDF has been downloaded 123 times and the epub versions have been viewed/downloaded anywhere from 71 to 290 times each. So, even with lots of ebook-oriented folks looking at those versions just for fun, I conclude that a few dozen people find enough value in this to download it.

In long–here’s the introduction to the book:

This book brings together articles (and, in a few cases, sections of articles) on open access and other aspects of library access to scholarship that appeared in Cites & Insights (citesandinsights.info/).

Articles appear exactly as they did in the original journal, modified only to fit the book’s page size and typography. No updates or corrections have been made (except for one or two typographical errors. Articles appear in strict chronological order. There is no additional commentary.

This book appears only for the record. It is not a comprehensive overview of OA during the first decade of the new millennium, and it is not even a comprehensive view of what Walt Crawford thinks about OA. It is what it is: A record of what I published about OA during that decade, quite possibly omitting some short pieces.

The first C&I article related to OA, before that name was well established in the field, appeared in May 2001. (At the time, the term was FOS—Free Online Scholarship.) The last, as I was concluding that I was no longer able to value to OA-related discussions, appeared in November 2009. Quite a few appeared during those nine years. I’ve also included one “disContent” column from EContent that’s directly on topic (that column appears as submitted, not necessarily exactly as published).

It’s possible, even likely, that some OA-related commentary within Cites & Insights doesn’t appear here—for example, predictions from Peter Suber and others would have appeared in larger Trends & Quick Takes articles, not picked up for this compilation.

Thanks to Peter Suber for agreeing that this might be a worthwhile compilation.

But There’s No Index!

For which I apologize. I had planned to include a partial index—including people, journals, article titles, but probably not topics—using Word’s indexing facilities.

It was not to be. Perhaps it’s the sheer length of this book; perhaps it’s the number of sections. Maybe there’s some obscure bug in Word2007.

Whatever the case, whenever I go beyond the first 60 pages or so, using “Mark All” and “Mark” as appropriate to flag index points (hey, Peter Suber’s name appears a few dozen times!), then save the result, then open that result…well, the result is chaos. Last time, the 519-page book suddenly turned into 1,290 pages, with multiple lines of headers from various chapters making up a huge and unchangeable page footer on each page.

If this was a project expected to yield significant income, I might prepare a separate index document—but for a book this long, that would take scores of hours. I honestly can’t justify the time for a book that’s being given away in electronic form and sold for barely more than the cost of production in print form.

If this book is useful, maybe some reader will generate an index. If not, well, again, my apologies.

Actually, I have a pretty good idea what was causing the autoindex blowups (it was a bug, but between my ears more than within the software)–but the fix would make indexing more effort than I could justify. (It has to do with indexed terms appearing within page headings…)

What’s Here?

Here’s the table of contents–noting that articles appear in strictly chronological order.

Introduction. 1

Getting Past the Arc of Enthusiasm.. 3

Scholarly Journals and Grand Solutions. 23

The Access Puzzle: Notes on Scholarly Communication. 34

The Access Puzzle (January 2003) 50

Scholarly Article Access (Formerly The Access Puzzle) 58

Open-Access Journals. 64

Sabo, SOAF, SOAN and More. 70

Getting That Article: Good News. 89

Scholarly Article Access (November 2003) 92

Scholarly Article Access (January 2004) 102

Tipping Point for the Big Deal?. 113

Library Access to Scholarship. 121

Library Access to Scholarship (June 2004) 131

The Empire Strikes Back. 140

Library Access to Scholarship (September 2004) 167

Library Access to Scholarship (November 2004) 193

Library Access to Scholarship (January 2005) 210

Library Access to Scholarship (March 2005) 221

Library Access to Scholarship (June 2005) 233

Library Access to Scholarship (November 2005) 248

Library Access to Scholarship (May 2006) 261

Thinking About Libraries and Access. 279

Pioneer OA Journals: The Arc of Enthusiasm, Five Years Later 285

Pioneer OA Journals: Preliminary Additions from DOAJ 296

Library Access to Scholarship (December 2006) 313

Open Access and Rhetorical Excess. 334

Library Access to Scholarship (July 2007) 355

PRISM: Enough Rope?. 366

Harvard & Institutional Repositories. 382

Signs Along the Way. 399

OA Controversies. 408

The Death of Journals (Film at 11) 430

Library Access to Scholarship (November 2009) 443

Closing Notes

It’s a 6×9 trade paperback because single-column serif text set on a 4″ line is just about optimal for reading long text…there’s a reason most text-oriented books (other than mass-market paperbacks, which squeeze every word possible onto each page) are 6×9 or thereabouts.

Yes, you can download the PDF and print it out, and maybe save a couple of bucks (if you can print 519 pages for less than $17.50). You won’t get the cover, and I’m afraid you’d be wasting a lot of paper on a typical 8.5×11″ printer–but it’s your choice. The paperback version is there as a convenience; I obviously don’t plan to get rich off $2.10 times an anticipated sale of one to ten print copies. Especially since I bought one copy for my own records–and that wipes out the profit on the first seven sales.

The typeface is Berkeley Oldstyle Book, which is still my preferred text face for books (and was the C&I typeface for several years).

Oh…about the ePub version:

1. I never did find a truly satisfactory conversion that didn’t cost money.
2. Lulu seems to have offed a lot of their FAQs in favor of articles that are harder to make my way through, and at this point I don’t quite understand how I’d attach an ePub version to the project.

Therefore, until further notice, I’ll leave the most recent ePub version available from this post; just click on the link. Other versions will disappear as I get around to it.

A couple of months ago, I wrote three posts about a possible new book–and a possible ePub version of that book.

The February 4, 2010 post identified two attempts at an ePub version. I later added a third attempt and made the full “draft” PDF available.

I wasn’t particularly happy with any of the ePub versions, all created by Calibre (and viewed in Calibre’s version of an ePub ereader).

Nothing more happened with the book itself because I was hoping a volunteer would come through on producing an index–given that I’m giving this one (a collection of Open Access essays from Cites & Insights) away, except for maybe a buck or so “profit” on the paperback version, I couldn’t see spending a lot of time on an index.

That didn’t happen–the volunteer had better uses for their time.

Where Things Stand Now

I’m getting ready to go ahead with the book, Open Access and Libraries: Essays from Cites & Insights, 2001-2009. It won’t have an index. It won’t have textual corrections. It will be a proper 6×9 trade paperback, table of contents and all, running 519 pages (not all numbered)–a fairly fat book. The cover is going to be very simple, I suspect (I had a great idea having to do with primary OA terminology, but my 10-year-old graphics program isn’t cooperating, so…).

My current plan is to do the work on Thursday, May 6, and announce the book that day or the next. As usual, it will be available through Lulu.

Meanwhile, I tried something that seemed likely to generate a better ePub version–I took a copy of the Word document (the whole book), eliminated hyphenation and justification, stripped out page headers and footers (or, rather, left them all blank), saved as PDF, and converted to ePub.

Here’s that version. If you have an ereader that handles ePub, you might give it a try. Through the Calibre pseudo-ereader, I don’t think it’s any better than the others and maybe not as good–all the headings seem to be converted to standard body type, the links in the table of contents don’t work, and you still get lots of false paragraph breaks at page breaks. But maybe I’m missing something.

If you have reactions, I need them by 10 a.m.  (PDF) Thursday, May 6, 2010.

If you have any interest at all in the (admittedly specialized) books I’ve put out, now would be a great time to show that interest.

Through the end of April, you can get a discount on a print book equal to the cost of U.S. postal shipping for one book ($3.99). If you’re interested, send me email and I’ll respond with the coupon code.

Since I already reduced the price on most C&I books, this offers the best deal you’re likely to get any time soon.

I believe But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009 is well worth reading. That one’s still full price.

If you’re really interested in how blogs by library people have evolved, you’ll also want The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008: A Lateral Look.

For a bound, printed, indexed version of Cites & Insights itself, in some cases with exclusive extras, you’ll want one or more of:

• Cites & Insights 9, 2009
• Cites & Insights 8, 2008
• Cites & Insights 7, 2007
• Cites & Insights 6, 2006

And, of course, there’s my first attempt at PoD publishing (and the only one I’d consider a success in terms of sales), which is still worth reading: Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change.

To celebrate spring, and with the help of Lulu, here’s a special offer, from now through the end of April:

1. Go buy one or more of my books at Lulu:

• But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009
• Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change
• The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008; A Lateral Look
• Cites & Insights 9: 2009
• Cites & Insights 8: 2008
• Cites & Insights 7: 2007
• Cites & Insights 6: 2006
• If you plan to buy more than one, your best bet is to go to Cites & Insights Books.

2. Enter the code “SHOWERS” when you check out.

There’s a place in the checkout step to enter a coupon code. Enter SHOWERS.

3. Save 10% on the first $100 of books you buy

OK, so nobody’s going to buy more than $100 of books–that’s just to let you know there is a limit.

The 10% comes out of Lulu’s share, not mine.

If enough of you do this, I could even win a few hundred dollars…