When the Data hits the Fan!

Figure 1:  img_japanese04, Bridgestone Museum of Art, 17.146 px/in, 2016. Fujishima Takeji, 1867-1943, Black Fan, 1908-1909, Oil on canvas, 63.7 x 42.4 cm, Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo. This digital surrogate is © Bridgestone Museum of Art. Open GLAM: The Rewards (and Some Risks) of Digital Sharing for the Public Good by Simon Tanner The research-led exhibition experiment Display at Your Own Risk provides an exciting opportunity to ask some fundamental questions regarding the behavioral gaps between ‘what we say’ and ‘what we do’ in regard to museum practice and with art/images. Sometimes this is driven, as the exhibition organizers point out, by the gap between institutional policies and public understanding. By selecting 100 digital surrogate images of public domain works for this exhibition and printing them to the underlying artwork’s original dimensions this exhibition poses some interesting questions.

Barnes & Noble is shutting down its Nook app store , (effective from March 15, 2016) through which it sold ebooks for its e-reader, the Nook. Unless Nook owners in the UK take action immediately then their ebooks (& films) could be lost to them. It is yet another example of how you don’t own your ebooks with DRM - you’re merely licensing the right to read them for a time. This announcement is a bit like a commercially driven virtual Fahrenheit 451 "fireman" is going to disable your eBooks in a fast digital fire.

February is a month of discovery. Not just of gravitational waves but for increased evidence for Open Access, for the costs of publishing monographs and for academic journal markets. This blog focuses on the highlights of Professor Adam Tickell’s  OA report to Jo Johnson (Minister of State for Universities and Science) that has been published today, with the Minister’s response . It also mentions the Costs of Publishing Monographs report from Ithaka and the Academic journal markets report from SCONUL, RLUK, ARMA and Jisc.

Please help me to define and understand value and impact from your perspective.

The recent Nurse Review "Ensuring a Successful UK Research Endeavour" mentions "science" 94 times and the "arts" and/or "humanities" less than half a dozen times. That's not much for arts and humanities so here are all those mentions in full.

When Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species  was voted the most influential academic book ever as part of the inaugural Academic Book Week I wondered what the result might look like through the lens of book analytic data provided by Google.

During my keynote at the DCDC2015 Conference I challenged the audience to consider whether the value that exists in a digital resource reflected the analogy of: is the value in the wine, the glass or the drinking? It is obvious all three are needed (and you could add other features), but maybe to a greater or lesser degree. If Wine = Content, the Glass = Infrastructure and the Drinking = Access then which one has precedence? So we voted via Twitter and the results are in.