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The Changing Face of Content 109394_v 11/17/10 7:21 AM Page 1 newsletter Volume 8 I VolumeNumber 1 4 II NumberNovember 1 I2010April I ISSN:2003 1549–3725 Welcome Theme: The Changing Face of Content How has content changed with the digital revolution, and what In this issue tools are available to access the knowledge within this new features information ecosystem? These are some of the questions 2 Virtual knowledge spaces are putting users content innovators addressed for librarians in this issue of the in the driver’s seat like never before Library Connect Newsletter. Colleen DeLory 3 Reimagining the journal article: The Article of the Future project Conrad Wolfram gives his perspective on applications, virtual knowledge spaces such as 4 Increasing the value of content through the Wolfram Demonstrations ProjectTM and the role of the librarian. He describes the “crowdsourced” innovation challenge of sifting through vast quantities of information online and finding ways to 5 Panoramas and perspectives: Anita de Waard on “The Changing Face of Content” make it usable as a “dead-center librarian kind of problem.” Michelle Lee’s article delves further into the world of applications as vehicles for collaboration and innovation. behind the scenes She provides background and insight into SciVerse Applications, where users will be 6 Five questions with Wayne Shebilske of Wright State University’s Learning with Disability PhD program able to choose from a gallery of applications to customize their experience. 6 Elsevier wins the first-ever JISC TechDis Publisher Lookup Award for Accessibility Other highlights include new ways to access content via the Article of the Future, links 6 Cultivating a culture of accessibility: between ScienceDirect and Reaxys, and image search on SciVerse ScienceDirect. We also find Elsevier’s efforts start on the inside out how Wayne Shebilske of Wright State University’s Learning with Disability program and 7 ScienceDirect journal content and Reaxys are now Elsevier’s own Accessibility Working Group are helping to make content accessible to people interoperable, improving research productivity with physical and learning disabilities. From the developing world, we hear from individuals 7 Recognizing tomorrow’s chemists today: whose assistance in providing access to digital content supports life-sustaining initiatives. Announcing the inaugural Reaxys PhD Prize winners community connections As the new editor of the Library Connect Newsletter, I didn’t imagine covering topics like 8 Tackling HIV/AIDS: Developing a health information the Semantic Web, computational linguistics and application development. Today’s library network in Cameroon librarians are faced with an increasingly complex operational environment; that became clear 9 Broadening our reach: By training trainers, the as we put together this issue. With this in mind, a new feature will offer a personal outlook on E-library Training Initiative expands use of HINARI resources the newsletter’s theme. I’d like to encourage you — our librarian reader — to use “Panoramas 9 In Tribute: Vimbai M. Hungwe and Perspectives” to highlight your viewpoints, to share your hits and misses. Are you on the road excited by the possibilities, or did nobody ever tell you there'd be days like these? 10 Librarians focus on internal and external strategies for library promotion Colleen DeLory 10 Evaluating research performance, management strategies Editor, Library Connect Newsletter and policymaking in Chile 10 Accepting the Semantic Web Challenge: Please e-mail your comments, suggestions and ideas to [email protected]. Software developers compete to make data more meaningful 11 Researchers and students on Chinese campuses this summer engaged in “Happy Reading” Finding images made easy: 11 A week of Library Connect events in South Africa culminates in a celebration of young scientists SciVerse ScienceDirect now offers image searching www.elsevier.com/libraryconnect Users of SciVerse Users gain faster access to final articles ScienceDirect can now with article-based publishing search across an estimated Illuminating the editorial process for 8 million images from the Politecnico di Milano researchers world’s largest collection Uruguay celebrates first Scopus award winners of scientific, technical and Mobile solutions featured at the NIH Handheld Technology Expo medical fulltext literature. staying connected Image searching on 12 Elsevier offers free access to online references for SciVerse ScienceDirect Expert Consult titles provides researchers 12 New iPhone app Top Doc helps doctors in training with immediate access improve their game to important visual information — tables, Example of image search result page within SciVerse ScienceDirect. FIND, FRIEND, FOLLOW online! figures, videos and other Share your thoughts on this and upcoming issues imagery — covering both journal and book content published after 1994. Users no longer of the Library Connect Newsletter at your favorite need to scan entire articles to find relevant information to support their research. social media site: Images inform the researcher through visual explanations of a theory or concept and www.facebook.com/libraryconnect support the researcher in helping them to convey this information to others. After all, http://twitter.com/library_connect a picture is worth a thousand words. LC http://libraryconnect.blogspot.com www.info.sciverse.com/sciencedirect Library Connect Editorial Office G 525 B Street, Suite 1800, San Diego, CA 92101, USA G Phone +1.619.699.6719 G Fax +1.619.699.6310 G [email protected] 109394_v 11/16/10 9:10 PM Page 2 FEATURES Virtual knowledge spaces are putting users in the driver’s seat like never before Library Connect interviews Conrad Wolfram, Director of Strategic & International Development, Wolfram Research, Oxford, UK. The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is an instructional applet website with more than 5,000 knowledge spaces. Library Connect: What was the genesis of the How easy is it to create a demonstration? Demonstrations Project? Years ago it was quite hard to produce charts; Conrad Wolfram: At Wolfram Research, we’ve spent 20 years then spreadsheets came along, and everyone automating the method of how a calculation gets done, so users could do it. That’s where we want to go with are freed to focus on the task they’re trying to achieve. Within interactive applications. We’ve made a pretty our Mathematica program, there is now a process for automating good start, and people who are ahead of the Conrad Wolfram the construction of an application around your calculation so curve can do it easily now. With the technology coming up, that you don’t need to be an expert in programming to be able we’ll be at the stage where pretty much everyone can do it to share your ideas via an app. We also created a space online through linguistic programming. where they can share these apps, or demonstrations as we like We’ve started down that road with our knowledge engine, to call them. There are more than 5,000 demonstrations now Wolfram|Alpha. You type in a question, it tries to understand that any user can view by downloading the free player. what you’re asking, and then it produces a result. Behind the What kinds of demonstrations are currently posted? scenes, it’s analyzing your input and building a document, which They cross most fields that in any way might use computation. it then turns into HTML and puts back up on the Web. That’s There are ones you expect, like mathematics, and then there are pretty close to a process where you type in language, human other topics like physical and life sciences, economics, engineering language, and you end up with an application built. and creative arts. How do knowledge engines change the role of a technical librarian? Does the fact that we’ve encoded expertise in many fields mean that experts are redundant? My answer is no, quite the opposite. By encoding their expertise, they can have it much more used, making their role more important. Likewise, the skills that librarians have are extremely important in this new world; they’re just slightly differently deployed, informing the systems that are built. I think in the end one of the big problems in the modern world is that there’s too much data out there. The way around that is to have computers sift it appropriately, and to do that, the information has to be in a usable form. That’s a dead-center librarian kind of problem. The person in charge of all the curation and set up of Wolfram|Alpha is a librarian. What are you predicting for the future of static content, such as traditional textbooks and journals? Regarding more technical subjects, they have to evolve. I was at the Royal Society in London, where the first scientific journal was published some 350 years ago in Newton’s time. The content of journals hasn’t changed much since then. There were all "Galileo's Experiment at the Leaning Tower of Pisa" from The Wolfram Demonstrations Project, kinds of constraints then about how difficult it was contributed by Enrique Zeleny. to publish, and interactivity was impossible, but those limitations just aren’t there anymore. Why are we still What is the benefit of using a demonstration? accepting this dead output? From the user’s perspective, I think you understand more about a subject if you can drive. Taking control of the route through Publishers come from a world of documents, while software which you explore an idea and the questions you ask of a model developers come from a world of apps. At Wolfram Research, is a very powerful methodology in learning. Authors set up we believe they are two sides of the same coin. What we’ve workspaces for their readers, and readers will interact with those been doing over the years, and we’ll continue to do, is to put workspaces in ways that authors may not have envisaged.
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