In the latest SPARC Open Access Newsletter Peter Suber talks about the use of Google ads as a way of supporting electronic journals. There often has been a prejudice against advertising on scholarly sites, the perception that ads - particularly those from Google - somehow lessen the integrity of a site. However, every site - especially scholarly open access e-journals - needs a way to pay the bills. My own experience with Google ads on a couple of my blogs indicate that advertising can be done in an effective way and produce a decent revenue stream.

Of course, a lot of Web sites and a lot of blogs exist primarily as a way of producing income for the publisher through advertising. Then again, a lot of print publishing serve the very same purpose: generating income for the publisher. Librarians certainly know that is true for many scholarly publishers, hence the need for open access online publishing. Yet, I no longer think that placing ads on open access e-journals is a means of “selling out”.

I would caution open access publishers to think carefully about the placement of their ads and how ad programs, such as Google adsense, operate. The default color scheme and appearance of Google ads are rather ugly. There are a number of options that allow publishers to slightly change the appearance of ads. Also, publishers have control over the location of the ads and, to a large degree, the format of the ads. Also, publishers can change the location or remove the ads from their site at any point.

The colors of the ads should blend well with the color scheme of the e-journal itself. In one sense, this makes the ads less intrusive. However, in another sense, it also makes it more likely that a user will click on the ads. Open access publishers need to weigh carefully this balance, though it’s likely that regular readers are not going to click on an e-journal’s advertisement. The advertising clicks will like come from non-regular readers who stumble across the site through an Internet search engine.

There are ways of highly optimizing Web sites for advertising that may result in a site generating a thousand dollars of income per month, just from Google ads. It’s unlikely that an open access e-journal will produce this type of revenue. Sites with high ad revenue often are plastered with ads to the point that the site becomes unreadable. Certainly, not a goal for e-journals. But careful arrangement of the ads should generate a revenue that offsets some of the costs. And for most open access publishing, every bit of funding helps.

E-journals and other open access scholarly sites that are considering advertising should read the blogs that specialize in these topics. One very helpful blog is problogger, which has the best information on the Web for generating income online. While the information on that site is focused on blogs, it can equally be applied to non-blog sites. Indeed, while I’m on the topic of blogs, any e-journal that is considering Google’s adsense should also considering adopting a blog platform, such as WordPress, for managing the e-journal itself. The customization of WordPress for an e-journal is a topic for another post, another day.

Discussions about the future of libraries are abundant. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang has started an intriguing discussion about the end of cyberspace. Alex is Research Director at the Institute for the Future and former managing
editor at the Encyclopedia Britannica.

In an article for the Berkshire Savant, (PDF) published by the Berkshire Publishing Group, he writes about the future of libraries when cyberspace itself no longer exists. He finds that even as the library becomes more digital, the “social aspects of learning, knowledge work, and scholarship will remain; and we’ll continue to need places that support them.” I agree that there’s plenty of work to keep librarians busy for decades.

This follows the thinking behind learning spaces and “library as place” or the perspective of “place as library“.

Even in a digital environment that is largely wireless, populated with small, flexible, portable devices for reading and manipulating information, Alex sees that “the primary business of libraries will be creating and supporting collaboration and knowledge creation.”

“In a world with such technologies,
the notion of cyberspace as a different,
superior dimension will seem quaint, and
either/or arguments about digital versus
physical media will seem misguided. The
great challenge of this new age will be to
design objects, services, and institutions
that combine the flexibility and freshness of
bits with the affordances and permanence
of atoms.

What will that mean for books and libraries?
First, books won’t die; they’ll come alive.
Some information devices will copy the
look and feel of books, just as the graphical
user interface copied the metaphor of
desks and documents. Electronic paper will
let publishers add animations and video to
books, à la Prospero’s Books or Harry Potter.
Another interesting possibility is that books
that spark scholarly discussions, or are the
focus of particularly close reading, could integrate
reviews, notes by readers, marginal
annotations, or visualizations showing their
place in citation networks.”

Despite the professions’s emphasis on learning spaces, many users - particularly younger generations - are developing competely different perceptions of the library. Indeed, they may even have no perception at all of the library. For some, the library may simply become not a place but simply part of the world that exists around them, resources and services available digitally that they take for granted, that they simply expect to exist and access as needed. For these users it’s not even about going to a library’s web site or accessing a database; the library experience becomes an unconscious act, part of the normal routine of life. It reminds me of the title of a 1989 article in EDUCOM Review: “The network is the library.”

The new front-end to the NCSU library catalog is likely to get a lot of attention in the library community. (And, well it should). It’s certainly a great example of searching a library catalog. I immediately liked the way that it displayed search results. Yet, I think that libraries are not likely to rush out and adopt the same solution as NCSU.

For most academic libraries, even the larger ones, the third-party e-commerce approach taken by NCSU is likely to be cost and resource prohibitive. Most libraries are likely better off to wait for other solutions, either from their system vendors or OCLC. ILS vendors are in the process of upgrading their OPAC systems.

But as Lorcan Dempsey so elegantly discusses in his weblog on libraries, services, and networks, “the library needs to be in the user environment and not expect the user to find their way to the library environment”. The full post by Lorcan and the rest of his writings are certainly worth reading closely.

Wandering around Google early this morning I stumbled across an interesting PowerPoint presentation, by a talented librarian invovled in developing the new NCSU catalog front-end, which states that users

learn to go to Amazon first and then back to the library catalog when they know what they want

I think that’s pretty much true. I often have done it myself. Or, even more, gone from the catalog to Amazon in order to check the reviews or get more information about the book before wandering up into the stacks.

Reading that statement reminded me of a recent entry by Lorcan about a person at the University of Huddlesfield who had developed a greasemonkey script that automatically would search the library’s catalog from within Amazon and indicate to you on the Amazon page itself if the library held that item. I installed the greasemonkey script, tried it myself on amazon.co.uk and was really impressed. It may not be fully ready for deployment to a broad user base but it’s certainly the right direction as a tool that many users would find very helpful.

Lorcan suggests that such a tool could scale up to multiple libraries, which is a good point. I also wonder how it could be used to initiate interlibrary loan requests for items found in Amazon not held by one’s local library. Understanding the possibilities of such tools can lead to thinking about library services in entirely different ways. OpenURL resolvers and bookmarklets go a long way also towards these services even though many (perhaps most) libraries utilizing OpenURL are still not exploiting its full potential.

Libraries have to decide where to focus their staffing resources and their money. Developing new front-ends for library catalogs and databases while continually revising a library’s web site in order to make it more appealing to users are time consuming efforts. At the same time, developing new Web-based services using emerging technologies are also time consuming. Most libraries will need to choose where to focus their attention. Perhaps, it’s time that more libraries think about how to get into the user’s environment rather than attempting to perfect the library’s own environment.