Elsevier LibraryConnect Seminar

I attended the Elsevier LibraryConnect Seminar held at the State Library of Western Australia today. It was a good event, with some very interesting speakers.

Robert Gorter, the Elsevier Asia Pacific manager, spoke first to set the scene, defining Web 2.0 as the “evolution of the web into a technological platform which enables communication, and the sharing and understanding of data between humans and between computers.”

He reminded us of the changes in scholarly communication over the past 20 years:

• 1986 research findings communicated through journals
• 1996 research findings communicated through fulltext online databases
• 2006 communication through abstracting and indexing databases, aggregators, and fulltext databases – plus all the other technologies: search engines, podcasts, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, social networking, mashups, commenting, “wisdom of the crowd”

Told the audience that ScienceDirect (Elsevier’s key online product) needs to go 2.0 as well, aiming to increase user interaction with the content they provide.

Elsevier are launching a social bookmarking site: www.2collab.com

Also:

1. “More like this” linking
   – complementary/supplementary content to promote discoverability
2. Additional Article Information (AAI) – to be released end 2008?
   – information on additional material used by an author to create their work, including non peer-reviewed material such as powerpoints
3. Dynamic usage information
   – eg. “most read” articles

He then invited us to answer, in 50 words, the following question:
“How is your library using Web 2.0 to reach users?”
Answers can be emailed to “libraryconnect@elsevier.com, and may be published in the October 2007 edition of Elsevier’s LibraryConnect newsletter.

There were five other speakers (two sales pitches). I’ll blog about them next.

*Elsevier is a major Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) publisher.