LibraryLink

Rice University Press closed in 1996. The usual congeries of factors was responsible…costs, sales, marketing and so forth. But now, like Dracula sitting up in his coffin, RUP is returning and showing some encouraging signs of life, or at least, undeadness. Let’s not get carried away here. University Presses are definintely still on the endangered species list, and they struggle against long odds. It’s an oft-told tale, so the Blogging Grouch won’t get too deeply into it, but flat or declining library budgets, plus spiraling journal subscription costs really put the squeeze on the UPs, which in many cases have to make a profit or at least break even, since their parent schools won’t/can’t carry them. But RUP redivivus is adding a new wrinkle or two. First, all its offering will be available online only. This will get them out of the trap caused by the need to sell a certain number of physical copies to break even, and do this in a very tough market. Anyone can read an RUP book online and download it for a small fee. Second, RUP will operate as a traditional scholarly publisher, with manuscript vetting, editorial services, talent hunting, and peer review. They want to avoid any hint of self-publishing or cheapo vanity press operations. Only serious scholars need apply. Third, RUP will work with CONNEXIONS, an inter-institutional educational “utility’ offering freely accessible modules and courses in varrious academic areas. CONNEXIONS is sometimes touted as a new model in competing with the established textbook publishing industry. It’s early days yet, as the Brits say, but things are looking pretty good. The BG would like to see RUP add a POD feature….publishing on demand. I don’t want to download a book. I hate reading screens, so I’ll wind up printing it, which is tedious and costs me something in paper and toner. So, I’ll pay a reasonable fee to print one from a digital source, give it a decent binding and ship it to me. Push it a little. Why not have POD installations in Tar-Mart or the public library, the way you have “take your own mug shot” photo booths, blood pressure machines and all the other gear we already are accustomed to. Only here, the product would be a warm, nicely bound paperback. In another twenty years, we will look back on these feeble beginnings and laugh at how long it took to realize the obvious possibilities, or at least you will. I’ll probably be finding out the truth of that remark by Borges: “I think that heaven will be something like a Library”. Anyway, welcome back RUP and the best of luck.
Rice University Press

Well, don’t be. At least, wait until you have read The Rock from Mars: A Detective Story on Two Planets. by Kathy Sawyer. She details the science and the politics surrounding the gradual elucidation of the mystery surrounding meteorite ALH84001, found in Antarctica in 1984. The object could claim a Martian origin, based on the analysis of trapped gases very similar to those in the Red Planet’s atmosphere. David McKay, a NASA geologist, formed a group to investigate the characteristics of the meteorite, and came up with results at the microscopic level that suggested the presence of life at some time on Mars. The McKay group were extremely careful, meticulous in their work and prudent in utterance, but the “Life on Mars” thing was dynamite, and railroad carloads of prudence could not have prevented sensationalist misrepresentation. That was bad enough, but the problems within the scientifiic “community” were even worse. Claims, counterclaims, and a rapid descent into personalities and invective soon made the poor little Mars rock look like the assassin’s pistol at Sarajevo; something that started a much bigger conflict. Much of it all got ironed out, in the time-honored way. But it all cost the McKay group plenty in terms of stress and upset. The review in American Scientist continues that publication’s honorable tradition of lengthy and informative discussions of important scientific books. The reviewer suggests that paradigm-busting is not for everyone, and that most scientists are probably better off not doing it. Even if you turn out to be right, a lot of people will call you a charlatan or a fool.
Rock

At least, that’s what the Chronicle of Higher Education says. Digital technology is generating such a mass of data that merely finding it again, much less figuring out what it all means and how it might fit into a greater interperative matrix, is getting to be a very tough job. Who will ride to rescue scientists from the threat of being overwhelmed by the data they derive from their own experiments? Librarians, that’s who. You got a problem wit dat, as the expression goes? The Chronicle piece, written by Scott Carlson,says: “librarians will have to step forward to define, categorize and archive the voluminous and detailed streams of data”. Librarians at Hopkins, Purdue and UCSD are already moving into the gap to see what can be done. Some of the efforts are interesting and seem promising. At Hopkins, librarians are working with astronomers, attempting to create an archive of the images created from the scans of the night sky. These are important, because comparison of images taken over time is crucial to discovery. Purdue librarians are striving to create and apply metadata to the various records stored on faculty computers, or deposited on the TeraGrid, a large scale, university based computing project. This distributed approach is a departure from previous positions, which all more or less envisioned some kind of super-archive or data library, in the form of a centralized facility. But the Purdue group is doubtful whether the funding for such an approach can be found and guaranteed over time, especially once administrators figure what the costs would be. There are other problems… such as getting academics to part with the data in the first place, or agree to do something with it other than discard it, once the papers have been accepted and published. This apparent insouciance on the part of scientists to the fate of the data they create is even more upsetting when Carlson notes, quoting Chris Greer, an advisor to the NSF, that many contemporary research projects are born from imagining new uses for data created by somebody else in some other context. It seems to these old eyes that too many people have been ducking this question for too long, and a situation has emerged which may be beyond redemption. I’m the last one to knock librarians, but what, exactly, are they supposed to do? In the time it takes me to scratch my nose, another avalanche of data has fallen from sensors of all sorts onto recording devices of all sorts. Who did the work? Why? How? Can anybody remember? The implications are really upsetting. Even the projects that are mentioned in Carlson’s article seem quite daunting. Librarians can’t do this on a part-time basis, and lots of academic librarians are entering the retirement/death bracket, with fewer replacements in the pipeline. We may be entering an era in which we get ever better informed about the world, for about five minutes, and become ever less sure what we know. Retirement is sounding better and better.
Lost in data