Walt at Random

Heather Morrison has a post about the “gratis v. libre” distinction that Peter Suber is suggesting as being more neutral than “weak vs. strong” when discussing the difference between open access as a way to read material and open access as a way to reuse material.

It’s a useful distinction. No, more than that, it’s a necessary distinction. And it allows people to start discussing whether “the goals” should be libre (which seems to be required by some of the OA declarations) or gratis (which opens readership–what a lot of us thought was the goal).

That’s why I featured it in Open access basics, the starting point for the PALINET Leadership Network’s cluster of articles on open access. (I believe I was one of the first to pick up on Suber’s usage–and note, with a little disappointment, that pretty much nobody but Suber has mentioned the PLN open access cluster. Too bad; I believe it’s a significant contribution and could use wider readership and discussion.)

Here’s the thing, though: Morrison includes this paragraph:

Since IJPE is not a peer-reviewed journal, the focus of the open access movement, it is not quite accurate to call IJPE OA - even though it is gratis, libre, and scholarly in nature.

Huh? Because the primary focus of the OA movement has been peer-reviewed articles, then anything else can’t be called OA? When did that happen?

The paragraph and those that follow do bring up another issue: Does “libre” mean anything at this point?

IJPE operates under a Creative Commons Attribution (BY), Noncommercial (NC), Sharealike (SA) license. That’s not the most restrictive CC license, but it certainly doesn’t remove the permission barriers that some people feel need to be removed: You can’t reuse IJPE material in commercial settings without permission, and the SA portion makes datamining and derivation a little tricky.

If I were to call Cites & Insights OA, I’d call it gratis, not libre, because I use a BY-NC license (but explicitly allow derivative works without requiring sharealike).

I would have left a shorter version of this as a comment at Morrison’s blog–but it doesn’t support comments.

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Update: It may be useful to quote Peter Suber, from his longer Open access overview:

• Royalty-free literature is the low-hanging fruit of OA, but OA needn’t be limited to royalty-free literature. OA to royalty-producing literature, like monographs and novels, is possible as soon as the authors consent. But because these authors will fear losing revenue, their consent is more difficult to obtain. They have to be persuaded either (1) that the benefits of OA exceed the value of their royalties, or (2) that OA will trigger a net increase in sales. However, there is growing evidence that both conditions are met for most research monographs. Nevertheless, this is still a minor front in the larger campaign for OA to royalty-free literature.
• Nor need OA even be limited to literature. It can apply to any digital content, from raw and semi-raw data to learning objects, music, images, multi-media presentations, and software. It can apply to works that are born digital or to older works, like public-domain literature and cultural-heritage objects, digitized later in life.
• I refer to “peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints” in my subtitle because it’s the focus of most OA activity and the focus of this overview, not because it sets the boundaries of OA.

There are plenty of issues and controversies around open access. This needn’t be one of them.

Cites & Insights 8:4, April 2008, is now available for downloading.

The 28-page issue is PDF as usual (or not as usual–I’m now using Word 2007 and Microsoft’s free PDF-output download), but HTML separates are available from the C&I homepage

The issue includes:

• Bibs & Blather - a very short introduction to the issue and what got left out.
• Library Access to Scholarship - Harvard and Institutional Repositories
• Old Media/New Media Perspective: Thinking About Kindle and Ebooks
• Making it Work Perspective: TechNos and TechMusts

By the way, if you know anyone who’s been getting issue alerts via email, let them know they need to sign up for C&I Updates or Walt at Random; Topica no longer accepts my posts (and entirely lacks help/contact info).

Cites & Insights 7:11 (October 2007) is now available.

The 30-page issue (PDF as usual, but HTML separates of each essay are also available) includes:

• Announcing Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples - a new book that every public library (and library school) should own.
• Bibs & Blather - Incidents and Sideshows: the accidental theme of most of this issue.
• Library Access to Scholarship - PRISM: Enough rope? (Will AAP come to regret the new “partnership”?)
• ©3: Balancing Rights - SFWA Takedowns: A Copyright Incident
• Making it Work - Library 2.0 discussions (and another sideshow)
• Net Media Perspective: Tracking High-Def Discs - The Battle Continues

Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large 7:9 (August 2007) is now available for downloading.

It’s an odd issue: Four somewhat overlapping Perspectives and an Offtopic Perspective.

The 26-page issue (PDF as usual, but each Perspective is available as an html separate from the homepage) includes:

• Perspective: On the Literature

I believe that gray literature—blogs, this ejournal, a few similar publications and some lists—represents the most compelling and worthwhile literature in the library field today…

• Perspective: On Authority, Worth and Linkbaiting

Yes, it’s the dreaded Britannica Blog essay. Yes, I’m late to the game. No, this is not primarily about Michael Gorman, although his blogging (his blogging!) plays a crucial role in the discussion. There will be no fisking here, tempting though it might be—either of Gorman’s posts or of some over-the-top responses…

• Perspective: On Disagreement and Discussion

Are librarians willing to disagree with one another?
What a silly question. Of course we are (I’m counting myself as a librarian for this discussion). Consider some disagreements I’ve chronicled and taken part in here and in my blog, just for starters….

• Perspective: On Ethics and Transparency

How much do you need to know about who I am and how I deal with issues, people and organizations that might relate to my writing? What do you need to know about my ethical standards? How much disclosure assures adequate transparency?

• Offtopic Perspective: 50-Movie Classic Musicals, Part 2 - including Rhythm and Blues Review, Till the Clouds Roll By, All-American Co-Ed, Hi-De-Ho (an hour of Cab Calloway: how can you go wrong?), Royal Wedding…and a whole bunch more.

Not included in this issue: Perspective: On Clever Names for Perspectives. And the Bibs & Blather has appeared instead as an absurdly long post at Walt at Random.

What follows was written as the Bibs & Blather for the August 2007 Cites & Insights. I’m doing final work on that issue now. This isn’t worth the print space, but it might make an amusing, if very long, post.

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I’m starting this essay on July 4, 2007—the same day I start writing the first of several related essays for the August Cites & Insights, getting back to writing after a two-week break.

Why two weeks? ALA Annual came first. Then came the aftereffects of a difficult journey back home—it took three days to regain reasonable energy and catch up part of a sleep deficit. (“Sleeping” in Dallas-Fort Worth’s Terminal D was iffy at best). About the same time, I was finishing up the July issue (final copyfitting, etc.) and getting it out—and catching up on blog posts.

Oh, and doing the initial work toward producing a PoD book version of LIBRARY 2.0 AND “LIBRARY 2.0” and the followup PERSPECTIVE: FINDING A BALANCE: LIBRARIES AND LIBRARIANS. By the time this diary/essay is complete (which may be “by the time the August issue is complete”), either that book will be available at Lulu or I’ll have decided it’s not worth the trouble.

Anyway, the holiday gives me a chance to kickstart the writing process. I already knew there was plenty to write about: Folders filled with stuff on MAKING IT WORK, TRENDS & QUICK TAKES, separate essays, NET MEDIA…and some special folders relating to some essays I’ve been promising to do for a while, plus one I’d tried to avoid but find I can’t.Turns out the four essays I have in mind all overlap. They’re all real essays—opinion pieces informed by source material from others, rather than collections of citations and extracts with a few comments thrown in for seasoning.

I’m not sure how they’re going to turn out, or what’s going to wind up in the August issue. So I’m maintaining this essay as a sort of diary as I go along.

Making the sausage? Most of you probably get the reference already—you don’t want to know how sausage is made or how legislation gets written. You may not want to know just how messy the “creative” portion of Cites & Insights is. I think some of you might find it interesting to see how much can change between initial intent and final issue. Thus, this odd essay. Or maybe I’m just postponing actual writing for another 15-20 minutes. You think?

First update, 3 p.m., July 4, 2007

I stopped postponing the actual writing. I was aiming for maybe 3,000 words on disagreement and discussion as the first of three or four essays. I hoped to be done by now. At this point, I have just over 6,000 words (2,000 imported from a Walt at Random post and comments on that post) and I’m not quite done with the first draft.

The overlap between this essay and the second essay (on the literature) is obvious and growing. My comments on toxicity aren’t going to make it into the essay, and maybe that’s for the best. My sense that much of the August issue will be about authority, voice, discussion and relevance—all overlapping—seems likely to be right. Now? Time for a break.

Second update, 4:30 p.m., July 4, 2007

Maybe it’s not time yet to make any decisions about the PoD book—although, as I think about updating the liblog piece from last year (and maybe the other one from two years ago), the future starts to look a lot more interesting than “the past” in the form of adding footnotes and index entries.

First, though, let’s see if it’s feasible to finish the draft of this essay. Today.

Last update for July 4, and close of the first essay

It was feasible. Unfortunately, the essay’s now 8,600 words long—way too long if I plan three other essays and other C&I departments—and I’m not sure how I’m going to cut it without losing context in quoted material. There are worse problems, I know—but when you’re discussing discussion, it’s important to keep the level of discourse clear and to retain context as much as possible. You may disagree. On to the next essay—but not today, and maybe not tomorrow or the next day.

Second Essay

It wasn’t “tomorrow.” It is the next day: Friday, July 6 at around 1 p.m. Yesterday included the last movie of the last disc of a 50-movie pack, so I finished off the OFFTOPIC PERSPECTIVE and posted the Disc 12 portion.

I also verified my tentative conclusion of late July 4 regarding the PoD book. It’s not going to happen for a couple of overlapping reasons:

• Gven ongoing job uncertainties and the dog days of summer, I only have so much energy. I’d rather devote it to new stuff (including “new old” stuff, namely revisiting liblogs from last year) than adding a little value to old stuff and making it pretty—particularly since I’d guess the book version would never reach high two digit sales, much less three digits.
• For the PoD book to make sense at all (that is, for time spent on the footnotes, bibliography, index, cover preparation, etc. to be worth at least minimum wage), I’d need to price it at $25 or more—and given that most of the content is from other people, that raises tricky questions I don’t feel like dealing with.

I took off work early today (making up extra time from earlier) to start on the second of what could turn out to be five interlinked essays. I can only hope none of the others will be nearly as long as the first; there is no way I’m doing a 40,000-word issue.

On the other hand, an “all PERSPECTIVES” August issue might not be a terrible thing if it’s not too heavy or too long. The second essay is much more “where I stand” informed by comments from others, on my view of the current literature. It should be easier and shorter. It also begins with a blog post—but this time, portions of the post appear at the start of the essay rather than the end.

Update, 3:15 p.m., Friday, July 6

The second essay, at least in draft form, is a one-shot: I was able to compose it in one sitting. It’s definitely shorter (around 2,800 words at the moment), if perhaps not as short as it could be. I feel as though I cheated a little at the end, pointing to two [later three] posts rather than fleshing out secondary topics, but I really did want to keep this one relatively short. More than enough for now (there’s already enough for a full issue, but I’m just getting started). Next? Either the Gorman/Britannica/linkbait commentary or an essay on ethics, transparency and disclosure. I’m not sure which.

Third Essay

Saturday morning (7/7/07, for what that’s worth)—the time between breakfast and grocery shopping. Time enough to check mail (all list mail except one LinkedIn invite), blogs (not much this morning, as expected), a few other sites—and to set the scene for the third essay, after making notes on some source documents last night.

Looks like it will be the Gorman/Britannica/linkbait/authority essay, and the fun part will be keeping it relatively short. Does an issue with a quartet of true Perspectives—personal essays—and one offtopic perspective make sense? Maybe yes: It’s summer and OK for regular departments to take a brief vacation.

Maybe no: A couple of those departments are getting badly backed up…and there’s the “blog followup” issue looming beyond this one. Maybe it doesn’t matter: Looks like that’s what will happen, like it or not.

Odd. I was really nervous about two weeks without writing—and now I’m ahead of the game. That’s good in this case: I can print out the essays, let them sit for a while, revise them for better quality and shorter length—and get started on the liblog retrospective in the meantime. If I’m not busy looking for work and wondering whether the promised survival of C&I is really such a safe bet, that is.

Hmm. Just realized that it might make more sense to do more of the source markup and start the PERSPECTIVE this afternoon. Can’t possibly finish it this morning in any case. There’s a plan. So I’ll start the file, give it a title, and let it wait.

First update, 12:45 p.m., July 7, 2007.

“More of the source markup” doesn’t mean “all of the source markup”—there’s just too much source material (and I was selective in printing commentaries). It’s now clear that I need to make this one mostly summaries and pointers with relatively little quotation and direct commentary. Maybe one C&I can take four true personal PERSPECTIVEs; it certainly can’t take more than one or two very long PERSPECTIVEs. Splitting these across issues seems absurd given the amount of overlap. So, here we go.

Second update, 4:20 p.m., July 7, 2007

Done—or at least finished for the first draft. I concluded that it made sense to stop analyzing source material after a certain point, at least if the essay was going to be reasonably brief. It’s not terse by any means, but at least it’s not much over 3,000 words. Is it worthwhile? I’m not the judge.

Fourth Essay

Monday, July 9, 2007: I did “other stuff” yesterday, including prep work for the blog projects and finding interesting 50-movie packs for future exercise (two sets of westerns—who woulda thought? and a comedy set I’m still thinking about).

This essay won’t get written in one pass because I’m working “normally”—that is, after work (and exercise). That means no more than 60-90 minutes per day, and I don’t believe I can write this one in 60-90 minutes, although I might get the bones of it (and the cited material) in place. We shall see.

First update, 6:30 p.m., July 9, 2007

Off to a good start—cutting Lessig’s statement down to 20% of original size, offering initial notes, cutting about 20% from Houghton-Jan’s statement, preceding that with notes on previous Ethics essays. So, tomorrow, to deal with Houghton-Jan’s statement, consider the third post (Farkas), and maybe wrap things up with my own stance. Or maybe that will take until Wednesday.

Second update, 4:50 p.m., July 10, 2007

Can I finish this draft today? We shall see.

Final update, 6:15 p.m., July 10, 2007

Yes. It’s finished and it’s a good length—although it can certainly use polishing. So now I have 24,000 words, way more than enough for a summer issue. I’ll set them aside for a few days (maybe a week) while I get started on some other projects. Maybe then I can cut down the longest essay and make some balanced sense of the four interlinked essays.

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Afternote: 1,800 of those 24,300 words (after the first round of revisions) were the B&B you just read (if you’re still here). I trimmed another 600 words and did a fair amount of copyfitting to get it down to 26 pages.When will the August issue appear? Maybe Sunday, maybe not. I’m certainly not planning to compete head-on with HP–and there’s other stuff to complete.

Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large v.7, issue 8 (July 2007) is now available for downloading.

The 26-page issue (PDF as usual, but essays other than My Back Pages are available in HTML form) includes:

• Perspective: Pew Do You Trust? - “Pew Internet & American Life owes me an apology.”
• ©1: Term and Extent - PermaCopyright and other extremes, including my Modest Proposal for permanent copyright for truly original works
• Making it Work - Commentary on personal balance and library service balance.
• Interesting & Peculiar Products - Six products (and product groups) and another six Editors’ Choices/Best Buy roundups.
• Library Access to Scholarship - more of the “opposition literature” and notes about money.
• My Back Pages - seven snarky little mini-essays, exclusive to whole-issue readers.

Two quick notes: This was all written before ALA Annual (but with some touchup work and copyfitting done this week)–and there’s nary a word about my own future plans.

I rarely do “link love” posts (which are on the decline anyway), and I’m trying to stick to my new rule of not basing comments on second-hand conference reporting, but…

This is just plain outrageous (specifically the second part–the first is more, well, silly).

Formal language does not grant authority. And it is certainly not the case that proper columns in print publications (in the library field or anywhere else) avoid informal language and personal observations. I’m sure there are publications with such rigid Editorial Standards that all columns are mangled into Proper Lifeless Neutral Prose, but I give up on such publications pretty quickly. Columns should function differently than formal articles, just as scholarly articles should function differently than other kinds of articles and reports even in the same journal.

Let’s go a little further. In the library field, it is my belief that degrees don’t confer authority, that the form of publication doesn’t confer meaningful authority, and that the concept of The Important People and the rest of us has long outworn its shelf life.

Michelle Boule (”Jane”) says useful and important things–some of which I disagree with (this is by no means a bad thing). She also posts casual blog entries that are part of real life. That’s exactly, precisely as it should be; it’s how her blog works and intelligent readers have (I believe) no difficulty distinguishing the off-the-cuff remarks from the serious arguments.

I believe in print publications and the role of refereed articles…as part, but not all, of an increasingly complex set of media and interactions. I also believe that blogs serve increasingly important roles in exposing and discussing real-world issues in librarianship (and other fields, of course).

Think of this as a temporary placeholder for an essay that needs to be written. When John Dupuis wrote his wonderful and thoughtful review* of Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change**, he noted that most of my source material was from blogs. Specifically:

Another really interesting thing about this book was how it advanced the form of scholarship. Here’s a self-published book with very serious intentions, not lightweight at all, which mostly referenced blogs in the bibliography. I find that really interesting. A book that’s about how librarians should engage the most important issues in their professional practice and it’s mostly propelled by bloggers and not by reams of articles in the official scholarly journals. By my quick count, 151/187, or about 80% of the items in the bibliography are blog posts. And he makes us sound pretty good too. And I’m not saying that because my blog appears three times in the bibliography. For the most past, Crawford showcases the best writing and the best thinking out there among the liblogs (except for Chapter 8, mentioned above, but even that showcases some real passion too); we are committed and engaged and thinking about the issues. If you are a liblogger and your colleagues are a bit skeptical about the the worth of what you are doing, show them this book. What we do, if we do it well, is worthy for our tenure files, for our professional CV’s. Our work on our blogs should be counted the same as any one else’s contributions in traditional media based on its intrinsic quality not its format or place of publication. Thanks to Crawford, we have an example of what we are capable of presented in a somewhat more traditional format and written by someone whose contributions to the field cannot be easily dismissed. We appreciate the support.

That was not accidental, and the shift in source material for Cites & Insights has not been (entirely) accidental. I need to write up what I’m thinking and doing in this regard, and that writeup belongs in the ejournal, I think. Soon. Real soon.

Meanwhile, I’m certainly not one of the Young Upstarts, but I’m with “Jane” 100% on this one…

* A review that could not, I believe, have appeared in most print journals, as it’s over 1,600 words long–and, to be sure, it wouldn’t have appeared for another 2-8 months if it did.

** I’m learning that self-publishing requires promotion whenever appropriate. But it’s also true that, if Balanced Libraries is a significant contribution to the literature–which I believe it is–that contribution rests on the work of scores of bloggers.

A few days ago, I had a respectable showing in Worldcat.org–26 items, I think, including my 15 books, Cites & Insights and some presentations that were cataloged in various AV forms.

Now I have 243, more or less (the “more” is if you just search for Walt Crawford, since there are a few dozen cases where Walt and Crawford show up as something other than a single author).

The difference is that a whole bunch of articles have been added. My American Libraries articles and columns show up early on, with books intermixed. Further down, Online columns and articles pop up–as do, eventually, my “disContent” pieces from EContent. There’s also a few others–actual Refereed Articles, stuff from Library Hi Tech.

I’m impressed.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) issued E-Journal Archiving Metes and Bounds: A Survey of the Landscape in September 2006. From the abstract page you can download the whole 120-page report for free as a PDF, read and print it online as a series of HTML files, or order it as an 8.5×11″ paperback for $30.

The study, written by Anne R. Kenney, Richard Entlich, Peter B. Hirtle, Nancy Y. McGovern and Ellie L. Buckley, is well-organized and very readable. It looks at a dozen e-journal archiving programs in some depth. addressing “concerns expressed by directors of academic libraries in North America.” While the authors and CLIR may be North American, the survey was worldwide, including two European and one Australian project.

If you’re concerned about long-term access to e-journals (as opposed to open access, a related but separate subject), you’ll want to know about this publication–but you probably already do. For a variety of reasons, I just didn’t get around to reading it in a timely manner, and by now it’s a little late to do a proper review. I learned a fair amount from the publication and certainly recommend it to anyone interested in e-journal archiving (which includes archiving electronic versions of print journals).

You can’t assume that publishers will take care of it: That’s never been part of publishers’ charge, and JSTOR already discovered that even publishers that are still in business may not have complete archives of their own journal publications. (This is not an attack on publishers: Archiving simply isn’t part of the publishing business, or at least it hasn’t been.)

So what are “metes and bound”? Here’s what the publication says:

A survey “by metes and bounds” is a highly descriptive delineation of a plot of land that relies on natural landmarks, such as trees, bodies of water, and large stones, and often-crude measurements of distance and direction. This was accepted practice before more precise instruments and methods were developed—indeed, the original 13 U.S. states were laid out by metes and bounds. More accurate means of measuring were established to overcome the method’s serious shortcomings: streambeds move over time, witness trees are struck by lightning, compass needles do not point true north, and measuring chains and surveyor strides can be of slightly differing lengths. However, the metes and bounds system is still used when it is impossible or impractical to make more precise measurements.

Highly recommended.

Which archival programs were studied?

• Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI Csi)
• LOCKSS Alliance and CLOCKSS
• Koninklijke Bibliotheek e-Depot (KB e-Depot)
• Kooperativer Aufbau eines Langzeitarchivs Digitaler Informationen (kopal/DDB)
• Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library (LANL-RL)
• National Library of Australia PANDORA (NLA PANDORA)
• OCLC Electronic Collections Online (OCLC ECO)
• OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center (OhioLINK EJC)
• Ontario Scholars Portal
• Portico
• PubMed Central

There are very brief descriptions of other “promising e-journal archiving programs” mostly from national libraries–the British Library, Det Kongelige Bibliotek (Denmark), Library and Archives Canada, National Diet Library (Japan), National Library of China, and several others starting out.

If you don’t wish to read the full report, read the conclusion and recommendations–but you really should read the whole thing. To cite the first of ten conclusions:

It is a matter of when, not whether, e-journal publishing programs will suffer significant trigger events that put at risk ongoing access to vital scholarly resources.

Marcus Elmore alerted me to this:

The March 2007 College & Research Libraries includes an article by Kelly Blessinger and Michele Frasier, “Analysis of a Decade in Library Literature: 1994-2004.”

That article includes a table of the most frequently cited personal authors, ranked from 1 through 28 (but there are 32 authors on the list, thanks to ties), apparently choosing 50 citations as a cutoff.

I’m number 27, with 53 citations to 29 items.

Not quite up there with Birger Hjorland (#1, with 165 citations), but still…I’m honored.

A year ago I did this commentary on the reach and popularity of Cites & Insights volume 5 (2005). Here’s a similar breakdown for volume 6–but with a modest amount of confusion, since volume 6 is split across two domains….using two different log stats systems.

For the old site (where the final issue was C&I 6:8, July 2006), statistics cover the period 12/19/2005 (the day C&I 6:1 was posted) through 12/18/2006–exactly one year. For the new site, which includes all the old issues and began on July 10, 2006, statistics cover 7/10/2006 through 12/18/2006.

Sustaining interest: One clear fact is that readership continues long after an issue has been posted, with much of that readership going directly to issues and essays, not the home page. Strongest indications: Although hits per month at cites.boisestate.edu dropped from an average of 56,753 per month for February through June [January 2006 was abnormally high thanks to the Library 2.0 issue] to 32,364 per month for July through November–a drop of 43%–visitors per month only dropped from an average of 17,805 January-June to an average of 16,766 July-November (a drop of 6%). Basically, the daily visitors graph since the site change, entirely to old issues, looks about the same as it did before the site change, but lopping off the spikes that occur just after each issue is loaded.

Overall readership: C&I was visited from 50,818 unique IP addresses on the old site and 11,374 unique IP addresses on the new site. Combining the two, there were some 663,000 total hits (up about 56% from 2005), with an average of 578 visitors per day on the old site, 172 sessions per day (the closest comparison) on the new.

Geographic distribution: Noting that some of these may be spambots, total countries are about the same as last year (166 vs. 167) on the old site with exactly the same number (143) showing more than one visit. The new site shows 92 for the half year, 72 with more than one session. For the old site, 72 countries show 20 or more visits, 61 show 50 or more, and 49 (same as last year) show 100 or more.

I didn’t look at browsers, OS, and spiders in any detail; I believe Firefox is running about 20% of browsers, Mac OS about 3% of OS–and Yahoo! Slurp continues to be the most hyperactive spider by far.

Popularity: It’s tough to make overall judgments for two reasons: The split between the two sites (with only the 50 most visited pages available for the old one) and the clear sense that a pretty substantial portion of an article’s readership comes some time after it was published–with a significant portion coming more than six months later. It would make more sense to look at popularity for the August-December issues no earlier than next July.

For what I’m willing to conjecture, I’m using the same algorithm as last year: 1.5 readers per PDF download and one reader per HTML page visit. Using that metric, here’s what I can say with moderate assurance:

• The full-issue essay Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0″ was by far the most widely read essay and issue–nearly 28,000, almost four times the readership of the second highest, and a whole bunch more than 2005’s top piece (Investigating the Blogosphere)
• Looking at Liblogs: The great middle (6:10) came next, with more than 7,000 readers. This essay was in the August issue, which makes its high readership particularly noteworthy.
• Folksonomy and Dichotomy (6:4) had around 6,600 readers; Beyond Library 2.0 and (C)2: What NC Means to Me (both 6:3) round out the top five, with more than 6,000 readers each. The July Bibs & Blather (asking for help on liblogs)also had just over 6,000.
• Six other essays had more than 5,500 readers. In descending order: (C)2: Will Fair Use Survive? (6:1), my commentary on OCLC’s Perceptions report (6:3); Library Stuff from March (6:4); the August Bibs & Blather [meaningless: those are just PDF numbers for people reading Looking at Liblogs]; (C)4: Analog hole and broadcast flag (6:3), and (C)1: Term and Extent (6:4).

More significant, I think, is that readership was strong across the board–every essay prior to September (except the PDF-only 75th issue) shows at least 3,700 readers, and every issue first posted on the new site has already been downloaded as a PDF at least 1,100 times–including 6:14, which hasn’t been out all that long.

I won’t draw conclusions as to popular and unpopular types of articles; it’s not that clear–except, to be sure, that Library 2.0 and liblogging are big draws. Heck, even the silly 75th anniversary issue had close to 1,800 downloads…

See this post for background on this series of Cites & Insights feedback invitations.

3. Library Access to Scholarship

This one’s tough. It’s not that coverage has stopped by any means. Sections appeared in May and December, only half as often as in 2005 and 2004, but there was also a Perspective: Thinking about Libraries and Access in June and a two-part Perspective on early OA journals in October.

On one hand, several blogs provide exceptionally thorough coverage of open access issues; the SPARC Open Access Newsletter also provides Peter Suber’s thoughtful commentaries. I won’t cover certain aspects of OA, and I’ve never quite succeeded in expanding “Library Access to Scholarship” substantially beyond OA-related issues.

On the other–well, I’m pretty sure all three Perspectives this year were valuable, and I got some positive feedback on the two sections as well. I’m not suggesting the possibility of dropping access-related coverage altogether; Perspectives only happen when the mood strikes, but the topic will stay in the mix.
Maybe there’s enough of a need for OA independents and heretics (T. Scott’s word) so that I should keep this, at least at a simmer.

What do you think?

1. Dump the Library Access to Scholarship sections; it’s all done better elsewhere.
2. Keep them around, but focus on new perspectives and synthes.s
3. Expand them (unlikely): People may be getting access-related stuff here who don’t (and won’t) read OAN and the other sources.

#3 strikes me as improbable on the face of it, but…

Comments welcome here, or send email to waltcrawford at gmail.com.

Don’t expect quick responses in either case; this post is postdated, and I’m actually on my way to or in New York at the moment, traveling without technology.

Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large 6:14 (December 2006) is now available for downloading.

This 28-page issue, PDF as usual (but each essay is available as an HTML separate from the home page includes:

• Perspective: The Lazy Man’s Guide to Productivity - A slightly extended answer to “How do I do all that writing on my own time?”
• Net Media Perspective: “C&I is Not a Blog” - A section on blogs, mostly metablogging.
• The Library Stuff - Eight items cited and discussed
• Library Access to Scholarship - FRPAA and more
• Offtopic Perspective: 50-Movie All Stars Collection, Part 2 - 26 more TV movies (but one of them isn’t really…)

Please note that, while this is the final text issue for 2006, it does not complete the volume. The index (including title sheet, for anyone printing a bound volume) will be out in a week or two. Or three.

Just another quick link, this time to this post at Improbable Research.

As a usually-solitary author (well, writer: author’s pretty hifalutin’ for my stuff), fortunately not in STM, I’m blown away by the notion that some gargantuan number of “authors” actually wrote an article in ScienceNature. (No, I’m not going to count the list.)

Update: Science, Nature, one of those… And I count (rather, Word’s replace function, replacing a comma with a comma, counts) between 190 and 192 authors for a six-page paper. Which, as Wow!ter’s comment notes, is tiny compared to an IgNobel Prize Winner.

Another vaguely whimsical coffee-break post…

Peter Suber wants to keep us in the know. When an available article about open access isn’t in English, he does the only economically viable thing: Post a link to a machine translation (in this case Google). Here’s the translation (and here, I hope, is the Suber item–I got it today because he updated it today).

Some of the language is simply charming (noting that this is Google, not the writer):

“this shears manifest themselves in uncounted PowerPoint foils” - haven’t you wanted to say that?

“I know myself in the bibliothekarischen Community mentioned not out, do not see it however in principle not as disadvantage that one completely unideologisch, also for purely monetary reasons for open ACCESS its kan.” - Would that I could know myself this well!

“That is common, with thesis 3. that, pardon, stupidest and most arrogant Palaver, which I read in recent time in the academic surrounding field!” - No comment,

“Oh, is hypocritical that! Universities, scientist, studying may get the output of publicly financed research not free of charge, because the bad industry would then get that also free of charge.” - Also no comment.

Leading to the summary:

“Mr. Ball summarizes that open Acces represents definitely no revolution in scientific communication and it at the time is that the bibliothekarische Community is concerned with more important things.
I summarize for me that the Mr. Ball arranged arguments, illusory arguments, prejudices, Ignoranz and half truths to a high song in the production way of the established publishing houses.”

Two serious comments:

• Despite the sometimes-charming problems of machine translation, it’s not hard to figure out what’s being said in this long and vigorous refutation of an anti-open-access piece.
• The writer appears to know their stuff, and it’s clear that the myths of anti-OA argumentation are not restricted to the English language.

And one whimsical comment: Google’s translate tools may have a future in Joyce simulation, particularly given that “I know myself…” comment.