Treasures Confined In An Old Sea Chest Ventilated By Gimlet Holes

A gimlet

One of things that is really rewarding in my position is exposing treasures to a wider audience. On the flip side of that is a frustration when you can’t share those treasures.

We have nearly finished our digitisation program for our Masters Thesis Collection. This has been a gratifying project except for the small fact is that we can’t share the results with the wider world. Most of the theses will stay in our “closed” archive which is accessible to staff and students only.

Which means when you come across beautiful bits of text like this I can’t share the source;

From a Victoria University thesis from 1948, on the early days of the New Zealand prison system:

“The first real attempt at law and order was made in 1838, when some of the more respectable elements amongst the thousand or so lawless inhabitants of Kororareka formed the Kororareka Vigilants’ Association. This association passed resolutions for the protection of life and property, and established a court, the decisions of which could be carried out by force. Fines could be imposed, or punishment inflicted by the effective means of tarring and feathering. Delinquents were confined in the first New Zealand gaol – an old sea chest ventilated by gimlet holes.”

A Good Moment: Getting More Stuff Out There – Spike and The Student Magazines of Victoria University

One of the elements I really like in my position is seeing new resources go up on the web.

Fifty years of Victoria University’s The Spike student magazine is now online. The University Library has digitised the complete run of The Spike Victoria College Review which ran continuously from 1902 – 1949, then in 1954, 1957 and 1964.

From the editorial in Issue one:

“We be wayfarers together, O Students, treading the same thorny paths of Studentdom, laughing at the same professorial jokes, grieving in common over the same unpalatable “swot,” playing the same games, reading the same indigestible books. Let us also pause for a few moments together and stretch out a hand of welcome to a small white stranger, that has come amongst us with little preliminary under the name of The Spike. Hast thou The Spike, fellow-student? If not, I pray thee make all haste to procure it, less worse things befall thee, and thou art impaled on its venomous point.”

The Spike is a fascinating view into student life at the University during the first half of last century. In particular we have found some interesting and moving pieces published during the World Wars. With the coming centenary of WWI in 2014 approaching these will be invaluable for researchers.

From the October 1916 The Spike in Extracts From Soldiers Letters;

Wellington,21st September, 1916.

Dear “Spike,”-

Extracts from Alan MacDougall’s letters will be of abiding interest to his old friends. These will be pardoned for thinking that when he died, Victoria College lost its most perfect student. In tribute to him, will you publish some extracts from certain recent letters of his which tell of the work he was engaged in and how he viewed it, and which unconsciously body forth those qualities of perception, faith, humour, generosity and noble courage which will keep his memory ever green in the hearts of those who loved him. At the end, with his friends in the line stricken down, he was lonely; and we do well to believe that he has passed into an immortal Fellowship.

I am, etc.,

D.S.S.

“We are well fed and clad; frequently well housed in billets, as now, and always pretty happy. It’s just as well to try and be happy in the face of the ever present possibilities of this life. The way we look at the facts is that if a Jack Johnson or whizz-bang is addressed to you, it will find you. The goods are always delivered-fatalism of a cheery sort. How one finds out the real men in this sort of work! the cool quiet ones, the gasbags, the dare-devils, the paralytic, the shirkers. From what I know of other battalions I conclude that we are to be reckoned fortunate beyond most in our personnel, both officers and men. We trust each other and we shall back each other.”

The Spike joins Hilltop in the collection of Victoria student magazines found in the NZeTC .

Joann Posts An Update On the Koha Trademark Dispute

Joann has posted an update on the status of the Koha trademark application for New Zealand. Since there was a lot of interest in this I am going to repost here. I am sure she won’t mind…

Update 2 on NZ Koha Trademark

Well things have been very quiet on this front while the lawyers work through the process.

We are being represented by Andrew Matangi from Buddle Findlay with  input from Rochelle Furneaux and feel very confident that he has a good  understanding of the Koha journey over the last decade or so and how we  have got to where we are. He is also a specialist  in this area so we have been quite relieved to have his hand on the  tiller and plotting the course. These things take time and have to be done discretely of course, but a  key date has passed and I think it is okay now to update everyone on  progress.

A letter was sent to PTFS on the 19th January essentially outlining the grounds on which our objection to their NZ trademark application is based and asking them to assign their NZ trade mark application to the Trust.  We also attached a Koha Trademark Usage Policy  which the Library Trust recently adopted, following consultation with  the Koha Subcommittee. We advised that unless a response was received by noon NZ time on the 1st of February we would file formal opposition.

Well that date has passed without word and so a formal Notice of Opposition is being prepared. The process from here is set out on the IPONZ website.

So there it is, due process being followed and no resolution in sight  but we are still very confident that the right decision will be made.

There’s A Smell Of Revolution In The Air

For a long while now I have felt that the business model from the Academic Journal Publishers is wrong. It cheaply exploits the work of academics and then sells it back to them. With the growing Open Access movement I have been waiting to see when many Academics wake up and realise the power they have.

This morning a number of reports have come out that indicate that a tipping point may have been reached. Elsevier will be watching this with extreme worry, and so they should!

Elsevier’s Publishing Model Might be About to Go Up in Smoke

Academic publishing is a very good game indeed if you can manage to get into it. As the publisher the work is created at the expense of others, for free to you. There are no advances, no royalties, to pay. The editing, the checking, the decisions about whether to publish, these are all also done for free to you. And the market, that’s every college library in the world and they’re very price insensitive indeed.

Back when physical, paper, copies of the journals were an essential part of any scientists’ life the cost structure could, perhaps, be justified. It is expensive to typeset, proofread, complex texts and then print them in numbers of hundreds or perhaps low thousands. However, now that everything is moving/has moved online then the amounts charged for access to the journals seems less defensible. More like the exploitation of a monopoly position in fact.

No, there isn’t a monopoly on scientific journal publishing: but there is on the last 50 to 60 years’ worth of papers that have been published and are now copyright of said publisher. This is leveraged into the power to make college libraries pay eyewatering amounts for subscriptions.

There’s not much new about this analysis and investors in Reed Elsevier, the owners of Elsevier, either do or should know all of this.

However, there’s something happening that might change this, for Reed Elsevier shareholders, quite delightful position. That is, a revolt of the academics who provide both the papers and the readership.

A start was made by British mathematician Tim Gowers, in a blog post here. That wasn’t the very start, but it looks like one of those pebbles that starts the avalanche rather than the one that just tumbles down the hillside. And there’s a great deal to be said for a scientific post which references Spike Milligan‘s superb book, Adolf Hitler, My Part in his Downfall.

And yes there is a great deal to be said about a post that references Spike…

Elsevier — my part in its downfall

The Dutch publisher Elsevier publishes many of the world’s best known mathematics journals, including Advances in Mathematics, Comptes Rendus, Discrete Mathematics, The European Journal of Combinatorics, Historia Mathematica, Journal of Algebra, Journal of Approximation Theory, Journal of Combinatorics Series A, Journal of Functional Analysis, Journal of Geometry and Physics, Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, Journal of Number Theory, Topology, and Topology and its Applications. For many years, it has also been heavily criticized for its business practices. Let me briefly summarize these criticisms.

Is It Hyperbole To Say That The US Research Works Act Is the Greatest Threat To Academic Publishing and The Open Access Movement?

I certainly don’t think so and I am not the only one.

Dr Mike Taylor at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol wrote the following article in the Guardian:

Academic publishers have become the enemies of science

The US Research Works Act would allow publishers to line their pockets by locking publicly funded research behind paywalls.

This is the moment academic publishers gave up all pretence of being on the side of scientists. Their rhetoric has traditionally been of partnering with scientists, but the truth is that for some time now scientific publishers have been anti-science and anti-publication. The Research Works Act, introduced in the US Congress on 16 December, amounts to a declaration of war by the publishers.

The USA’s main funding agency for health-related research is the National Institutes of Health, with a $30bn annual budget. The NIH has a public access policy that says taxpayer-funded research must be freely accessible online. This means that members of the public, having paid once to have the research done, don’t have to pay for it again when they read it – a wholly reasonable policy, and one with enormous humanitarian implications because it means the results of medical research are made freely available around the world.

This has slipped through under the radar. I wasn’t even aware of it until yesterday until an email on a  list a subscribe to (thanks Danny Kingsley) came through my desk which included the following:

The Research Works Act (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3699) is basically saying that publishers have intellectual property invested in work that they publish, so that the NIH and other mandates making research available open access are illegal.

Peter Suber says of the Act:  “A new bill, The Research Works Act (H.R.3699), designed to roll back the NIH Public Access Policy and block the development of similar policies at other federal agencies, has been introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives….Essentially, the bill seeks to prohibit federal agencies from conditioning their grants to require that articles reporting on publicly funded research be made accessible to the public online. Supporters of public access need to speak out against this proposed legislation.”

Arthur Sale said in a post to GOAL: “There is one aspect of the proposed Act HR3699 that is very interesting. It is an admission by the publishers involved that they do not at present have any intrinsic intellectual property right to control the disposition of the Version of Record  otherwise known as the ‘publisher’s pdf’. The Act is an attempt to create a new right. You should read the full proposed Act (see Note 4). It is absurd, and badly drafted, perhaps deliberately to mislead.”

More on this can be found here:

1. “Research Bought, Then Paid For”, Michael Eisen – New York Times – http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/research-bought-then-paid-for.html?_r=1
2. “Librarians, Open Access Advocates ‘Vehemently Oppose’ Research Works Act”, Michael Kealley, The Digital Shift – http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2012/01/publishing/librarians-open-access-advocates-vehemently-oppose-research-works-act/
3. Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research – Mike Eisen – http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=807
4.  Trying to roll back the clock on Open Access: Research Works Act introduced – American Library Association – District Dispatch
5. January 9 – http://www.districtdispatch.org/
6. An example of one of the letters to Congress opposing the bill is Tim O’Reilly’s here: https://www.popvox.com/bills/us/112/hr3699/comment/263013
7. Several AAP members have stated they do not want to have anything to do with the bill. Here are a couple of examples:
   1. Pennsylvania State University Press says No to Research Works Act – http://bit.ly/x9UzXE
   2. Peter Suber asks :” Can AAP Members stay neutral in the row over the Research Works Act?” http://poynder.blogspot.com/2012/01/can-aap-members-stay-neutral-in-row.html

 And on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23ResearchWorksAct

https://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23RWA

https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23stopRWA

Your opinion? Using iPads to teach information literacy.

Nothing sinister about this – I’m curious.  We have some iPads for teaching this year and I want to make the best use of them.  The “hive mind” might think of more stuff than I.

http://twtpoll.com/badge/if/?twt=2jls90&b=1&bt=1

A Brand For A Centenary

I have been to a few meetings around what various organisations are planning on doing for the Centenary of Word War I, one of which included discussions around a brand for the New Zealand celebrations. The idea around this brand is to help organisations tie together their activities so that there is a common platform for people to refer to.

I was interested to see the following report coming out of Australia.

Australian govt may brand Anzac Day

The Australian federal government is reportedly looking to brand the anniversary of the first major military action fought by Australia and New Zealand forces during World War I.

A market research company has been paid $103,275 to conduct focus groups nationwide last year on branding Anzac Day, News Limited reported.

“It is a political intervention which should be snuffed out immediately, not just because it’s a waste of money but because Anzac Day … (is) profoundly celebrated and commemorated,” former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett said.

A Department of Veterans’ Affairs spokeswoman told News Limited the concept for “a national brand or motif” came after an Anzac Centenary Advisory Board meeting on October 14.

She said the government was tendering for a design and that ideas would be focus group tested.

Victorian RSL boss David McLachlan would not comment until he had seen the plans.

I am not sure you could brand Anzac day, but if they are looking at something similar to what we were discussing then I don’t see what the problem is. I would need to see more details.