On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Leslie Carr <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I don't want to entirely dismiss this idea, but why ask authors to search
> the Web when they could much more fruitfully be searching their hard disks?

It may be worth thinking about what (most) authors think the web *is*.
For many, there is no difference between "on the web" and "accessed
via web browser."

So an author may not be thinking "search Google" when he says "search
engine." He may well be thinking "search EBSCO, search Web of Science,
search PsycInfo, search whatever databases I normally show up in" --
but he *says* "search the Web" because as far as he's concerned,
library-purchased Deep Web databases are part of the Web because he
gets to them through his Web browser.

This was part of the thought process behind the BibApp
(<http://bibapp.org/>). The BibApp has fallen on hard times, but the
idea is, you build up a bibliography for an author using whatever
citation tool is convenient and will export RIS or RefWorks XML, and
dump that into BibApp, which makes it look pretty.

The trajectory of Researcher Pages at Rochester and VIVO at Cornell
(which is having huge amounts of grant money thrown at it over here)
tends to indicate that this approach grabs a fair few authors. The
trick then (as noted in the thread running beside this one) is to
persuade them to provide an appropriate source of full-text in
addition to the mere citation. One obvious answer is to start with the
publishers who allow or require deposit of their version; that's one
way to bootstrap yourself to some kind of critical mass. The other
answers, as noted in the other thread, are slog through their websites
for archivable material or make a pest of yourself via email. (Usage
feedback is obligatory, of course, but I know Les already knows that!)

On the UK side of the pond, you've already overcome serious barriers
we face on this side: the amount of time/effort it takes to build up
the citation backfile. As usual, authors won't lift a finger (or tell
their proxies to lift fingers on their behalf) unless they are forced
to -- even seeing a benefit (like a clean web presence) is not enough.
You've overcome that, and good for you! What I don't think UK
institutional-bibliography managers have seriously turned their hands
to is using the data they have collected to create visible benefits
for their authors.

Consider, however, a single line of Javascript, easy to copy-and-paste
to a web page, that expands to a full list of citations, updated as
data enters the database... I can imagine that making friends pretty
quickly. (BibApp has callable XML and JSON data representations
envisioning this precise use-case, but we haven't gotten as far as
single-line-of-Javascript yet.) It might even reconcile some authors
to the citation-gathering process!

Dorothea

-- 
Dorothea Salo                [log in to unmask]
Digital Repository Librarian      AIM: mindsatuw
University of Wisconsin
Rm 218, Memorial Library
(608) 262-5493