Elias Tzoc blog!

Yes, after a great x-mas break with the familia and a some friends, now we’re back home and it’s the last week of 2009.  So before this week (year) wraps up, here I’m finishing up with a couple of proposals for 2010! …as well as advancing with an article draft which will be due in mid January.  Between the great food (tamales y chocolate) and these topics (Open Access, CONTENTdm, Diversity & LIS, Latin America & Technology) I plan to keep myself somewhat focused in the next 2 days!

Well, since writing is often a follow-up to some reading too, this afternoon I spent some time reading/thinking/reading the December issue of the Research Information Magazine. The main title on the cover can be a good source of inspiration for some new year’s resolution .  For me, a new programming skill will probably be Java -hello DSpace and/or IR+

Also, last week I had a very interesting conversation with an educator who talked about some of the future benefits of heavy text mining and machine translation for developing countries.  As many research studies have pointed out, one of the next goals of the global information society is “to reduce the information gap” …well, quick and efficient translation of abstracts may be a good start, and let’s not forget about the ongoing efforts towards Open Access in the developed world!  Will future generations be better off? …probably so, but in the meantime there is a lot do, see you in 2010!

As member of a new Scholarly Communication (SC) group, this semester we’ve been doing some research and work about this topic.  Since I’m leading the website design for this group, I recently proposed a site prototype based on three factors: structure, content, and usability.

Based on the principle “no need to reinvent the wheel” I initially spent some time browsing some other SC websites.  This was helpful, especially in identifying some of the key and consistent sections (e.g. copyright, journal pricing, Open Access, etc.) that other universities are using to communicate with their faculty.

Here is a short summary of the proposal:

• Structure, no more than 4 sections (pages), an appealing and faculty-oriented splash page, a consistent navigation menu, and an easy method for edits/updates.  For the sake of consistency, we’re going to use the Library’s template and probably use Drupal as well.
• Content, four proposed sections: Copyright (including an update for the Author Rights document), Journal Pricing (with some details by discipline), Alternatives for SC (description and links to green/gold models of publishing), and OA (news, facts or policies).
• Usability, information will be provided in clear and concise way in order to avoid scrolling, a prominent box for news and facts and contact information on the main page, and a link from the main library homepage.

In a second phase, it’d be interesting to include a section where faculty can share their opinion about SC -similar to what the University of California is doing.  Which reminds me of a “Faculty Profile” feature currently in progress for the Scholarly Commons project …see you soon!