Impact of Desktop Access
and Delivery of Information on Your Work
Focus Group held on
Facilitator: Karen Liston
Recorder: Angela Lee
Coordinator: Terry Jankowski
Participants: Laura Little (Psychology), Penelope Leggott (Pediatric Dentistry), Trisha Davis (Biochemistry), Monica Jarrett (Nursing), Jeff Wilkes (Physics), Frank Greulich (Forest Resources), Carl Bergstrom (Zoology), Will Welton (Public Health), Jack Nicholls (Restorative Dentistry), George Martin (Pathology) and B Huang (Social Work).
Note: comments are not attributed to specific individuals per our agreement with them.
How do you find
information?
-Go on web; use search engines
-Use Google – find it’s well-designed, effective, fast
-Proxy service & ejournal is wonderful – works with Netscape not with IE so well.
It’s been difficult.
Microsoft creates problems for Netscape users.
Prefer pdf.
Some confusion about how to get on.
Barcode number too long.
-Prefer vanilla web pages where there are very little bells & whistles. How about addressing needs of people doing technical work outside Microsoft platform?
-UW homepage problematic; Library home page is good.
-Go straight to HealthLInks or some other people’s homepage
-Online access has been the single most transforming experience especially access to ejournals; would personally vote for more eresources; would like to get color copies
-What we don’t like is when you go onto journal website and they ask for a credit card (usually non-UW stuff).
-The Public Library of Science initiative is a great
model. Physicists send all articles to
the Physics archive (in
-Tend to gravitate toward ejournals. However, somewhat concerned about which journals are being used especially less expensive print vs. conglomerate ejournal package. Tend to go for the easy to access stuff first.
-Certain journals losing subscribers because of electronic age. Lose subscribers, lose submitters. Publish or perish mentality is a real problem. Publication in refereed journal is preferred in tenure and promotion appointments. Need to place academic pressure on our colleagues to change that way of thinking.
HOW DO YOU GET YOUR INFORMATION ABOUT THE PUBLISHING WORLD?
-Faculty generally know what is your A–level & B-level journals.
HOW DO YOU GET EXPOSURE TO SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING ISSUES?
-From spouse, from work with economist
-Struggle to get money
-
-Harold Varmus at NIH thought about starting something similar with biomedical journals
-Main problem with scholarly publishing is that too many competing groups struggling to control information.
-What is the future plans for
Don’t know
Current procedure is to first submit papers to the archives (as pre-prints) and then have them published in standard journals.
The archive is serving as a place for both published and unpublished research.
Aside: Libraries should move into archiving since it’s a small investment
The main problem with current e-archiving practice is due to the persistent changes in technology every month. Do we have the software and the equipment to read old formats? One faculty just saves his hard drive every year like a separate archive to keep up with latest format changes.
How long does paper last?
WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU WENT TO THE LIBRARY?
-A few said just last week; a number said not since the past few months
-Go to library to get recreational stuff
-Use JSTOR
-Would prefer access to back issues of core journals rather than huge collection of unknown ejournals
-Can papers/articles be automatically scanned to be archived? Yes, but the real question is how ownership rights impact archiving.
-Suggest supporting the role of libraries to develop archiving.
-Archiving is not a university issue but the university needs to support library archives initiatives.
-Do major libraries talk to each other around world about these issues? Yes, but done at various levels especially among consortial libraries.
-Would like to get journals from other parts of the world, e.g., Japanese, European, etc. Translations of Russian, Spanish, and French articles would be nice. Aside: Google does a neat albeit awkward translation job on the web.
CAN YOU SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCE USING ONLINE DATABASE?
-Pick up a few key articles and look at references
-Use ISI which allow for multiple links; bi-directional citation trees useful
-Use keywords for subject
-Call librarian
-Finds INSPEC search engine troublesome
-Did not find PubMed easy because there’s far too many articles or none at all; PubMed is not very intuitive.
-Has anyone used the “faculty of thousand” database? It’s neat but costly. A lot of these databases are beginning to proliferate because publishers find they can make money.
-Volume of information too big to just browse library journals
-There’s a new journal called Signal Transduction and Knowledge of Environment (?) which summarizes all the current knowledge of a discipline; it provides the latest information about the field.
IS ANYONE ACCESSING INFORMATION THAT LIBRARY DOESN’T OWN?
-Try never to go to commercial publisher; go straight to document delivery cause it’s cheaper.
-For commercial publishers you pay up to $35 an article.
BARRIERS
-Intuitive searching needed (in a lot of databases), e.g, Inspec doesn’t provide a good search engine
-Cross-searching by author, year range, type of publication, and other less known fields would be preferred.
-Google provides convenient & quick access to information. It works best when you place key words in proper order. You get lots of hits & get top 4-5 references. You get articles, homepages of investigators, conference seminars, etc. And with searchable PDF documents Google is certainly superior. However, it is a proprietary search engine with lots of employees supporting the work behind it.
-Often don’t know what’s new, what’s the new search engines, what ejournals are available.
-Need someone to tell me what to do
-Thank God for librarians; there’s no way to replace them
-Like the fact that librarians are proactive and are willing to come to show how to search
ANY OTHER KINDS OF AIDS YOU WOULD LIKE?
-Library sending email to update me on latest
-Like getting Books & Bytes (B&B) in print; if have time will cut out tidbits of B&B.
-Something about reading on paper that’s better; always print out my emails and articles.
-Have high color printers to print articles. Seems strange that color printers are not as
prevalent as in
-Important that people have access to color printer especially for scientific graphics.
-As a faculty who works with fairly large undergraduate courses I know students want only ejournals. We don’t have APA journals online which is the biggest chunk of our research literature that’s not available to us. Of course, the APA journals package is extremely expensive.
-A number of faculty don’t know about ejournals & ereserves
-Undergraduates read less; they tend to want or get excerpts of information.
-Problem with print is that everything’s missing when need to get an article
-Prefer ejournals because you can get information it broadly and fast.
-Reserve system works but requires lots of time to get articles processed.
-In Health Sciences things don’t stay in reserve. Actually prefer OUGL reserve since there’s more security and students naturally go there.
-In OUGL, everything is well-done, i.e., media, videos, reserves, etc.
DO YOU THINK ELECTRONIC HAS CHANGED YOUR WORK? YOUR PRODUCTIVITY?
-Absolutely
-For the better
-Missing a lot less things
-Big improvement that I can share information (pdf) with other folks in lab immediately.
-However, you miss the serendipitous discoveries; because terminology is different in every field you don’t normally pickup related findings electronically.
-Miss browsing the books on the adjacent shelf
-Also when you’re in computer mode you tend to scan very quickly going straight to the source thus avoiding other accidental links.
-Library used to be a leisurely place now that’s changed.
-Now you get tremendously impatient with searching information especially on the web.
-You spend more time doing more things, looking comprehensively on the web even though you find lots of red herrings.
-Faculty tends to put lectures on PowerPoint, post on web & sell them in course packs.
Electronic resources have allowed us to insert and link things to PowerPoint easily.
-Health sciences librarians are very active in teaching about accessing information in very good ways. Outreach efforts by librarians are very valuable.
-Electronic information is great but it gets harder & harder to find information; librarians will play a greater role in information access than ever.
-Rules-based searching is very hard; Google has more intuitive based searching.
Have a Google search engine for Inspec.
DO YOU THINK YOUR STUDENTS’ EXPECTATIONS HAVE CHANGED?
-Expect students to know how to find and use protocols
-Surprised at the low level of ability of grad students vs. undergrad. Kids who grew up with Atari different from PC & Windows different from Web.
-The tasks students need to know for school is very different from what they already know about technology (such as MP3 downloads and burning cds).
Teaching TECHNOLOGY A PROBLEM?
-Doesn’t make sense to just teach technology; makes more sense to teach conceptually.
FUTURE
-More ejournals
-Better way to search PubMed
-Search engine sympathetic to our needs
-Need people support such as teaching, answer questions, etc.
RELATED ISSUES
-What percentage of libraries budget is electronic vs. print (vs. other)? What’s rate of change been? Compared with peer institutions?
-Examples of costs of subscriptions such as the price for the Science suite of titles.
-How does this relate to the makeup of faculty (age vs. experience, training)?