RE: Chapter by Clifford Lynch

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

Carol Goble at UKSG hit on some of these same issues:

"Bioinformaticians do not distinguish between data and 
publications; publishers need to recognise there's not a 
difference between these 2 types of content for users."

"Termina software (Imperial College & Univ Manchester?) looks for 
terms and recognises them to associate them with a term from a 
gene ontology -- using text mining -- but would be easier if text 
mining wasn't necessary i.e. if terms could be identified and 
flagged at point of publication. The information/knowledge (that 
these terms are controlled vocabulary) is there at the point of 
publication -- so why lose it, only to have to reverse engineer 
it later."

http://liveserials.blogspot.com/

Are we at an impasse, where publisher contracts limit systematic 
downloading which could lead to systematic data mining of 
articles.? There are legitimate uses of massively downloaded text 
is one conclusion from both Clifford Lynch's chapter and the 
report from UKSG.

Are we artificially attempting to limit access to the working 
tools of researchers?

Are we at a point where semantic indexing is critical now in 
fields that are years from its development?

Should they and are indexing and abstracting services developing 
the next phase of expertise needed, and will they need to work 
with publishers much more closely than now?

Are we wasting money on outmoded indexing and abstracting 
systems?

Chuck Hamaker
Associate University Librarian Collections and Technical Services
Atkins Library
University of North Carolina Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph J.
Esposito
Sent: Friday, May 05, 2006 9:16 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Chapter by Clifford Lynch

As an aspect of attempting to reduce the amount of sodium in my 
diet, I have withdrawn from the Open Access debate.  I do, 
however, want to call attention to a fascinating document by 
Clifford Lynch, an excerpt of which follows:

"As the scholarly literature moves to digital form, what is 
actually needed to move beyond a system that just replicates all 
of our assumptions that this literature is only read, and read 
only by human beings, one article at a time?  What is needed to 
permit the creation of digital libraries hosting these materials 
that moves beyond the "incunabular" view of the literature, to 
use Greg Crane's very provocative recent characterization.  What 
is needed to allow the application of computational technologies 
to extract new knowledge, correlations and hypotheses from 
collections of scholarly literature?"

Here is the link to the piece (a chapter from a forthcoming book):

http://www.cni.org/staff/cliffpubs/OpenComputation.htm

Joe Esposito