adventures in cat herding
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One STM Publisher’s Ongoing Experiments in Turning Users into Usage (and What We Really
Learned Along the Way)
Adventures in Cat-Herding
Larry M. BelmontManager, Online Product DevelopmentAmerican Institute of Physics
Session PUB1 – Wednesday, July 22, 2009 – 9:40-11:00Increasing Discoverability: Case Studies on Publishers Who Drove & Grew Usage
cat-herding (verb) : Persuading a group of independently minded
people to go in the same direction. (Merriam-Webster Open Dictionary.)
user (noun) : Someone doing "real work" with
the computer, using it as a means rather than an end. (Online Computer
Dictionary.)
usage (noun) : The act, manner, or amount of using. (The Free Dictionary.)
(Note to the Audience: Think of those bowls up there as your content.)
What is Content Usage? COUNTER says it’s something.
SUSHI says it’s something … er, ah … umm … similar.
BUT Article “object” access is up 300% since 2004 (Mabe, 2007) This means metrics must change. “Depth” of article use is becoming important. Number of parts accessed need to be measured.
What is Content Discoverability?
But All Roads Still Lead to …
The Article is King Steady 3% annual growth in articles
published since ‘81. Steady 3.5% annual increase in # of titles, 1665 – 2006. 1.5M new STM articles published in 2007. 1. 5B STM full-text articles downloaded globally in 2007.
BUT Maybe, just maybe, the parts are greater (or more powerful) than the sum.
Mission Goals Reduce article reading (and ultimately finding) time. Bring in more related content and/or ways to discover related content (and create meaningful relationships). Boost social interactivity options at the article level. Make citation-harvesting easier; bind more tightly to user workflow. Begin the process to make the article (and its free landing page) on Scitation more valuable than the article at ArXiv, or at Dr. X’s web-site, or at Repository Y. Lay the web framework to facilitate not only deconstruction of any article, but to also mix other content into any article’s online presentation.
Some Initial Design Strategies Increase the amount of data presented
and manage the visual presentation using new Web display technologies (Apache Tiles, AJAX).
Make as many key meta-data bits “actionable” by linking them to construct “guided searches.”
Take advantage of granularity of article XML to surface new article components in abstract display, i.e., journal-level meta-data, section heading of article, figure/table captions, etc.
Integrate Web 2.0 tools.
The Lay of the Land – Sept. 2007 Scholars are reading more journal articles, and
thus need to read them more quickly (and are), and there are more scholars/scientists alive right now than at any other time in history (Mabe, 2007).
“Need to read” is for many reasons (primary research, background, teaching, writing, current awareness). Journal browsing serves one set of purposes (mostly awareness); article parsing another (mostly research).
Depth of use is variable too (some need whole journal, some need one or more whole articles, some need only part of an article).
46% of all Scitation browsing sessions begin on the abstract (article-landing page in “Crossrefese”) page (currently: 60%).
Conspicuous Consumption
An Advert for Evelyn Wood?
Old Abstract Traditional, linearized,
“tower” or “skyscraper” display.
Virtual representation of printed page.
Density of linkable meta-data items very low (author names).
No social-networking integration.
Only the most basic “article actions.”
Designed for “linear reading.”
New Abstract Layered display, with tabbed access to long lists of references and citings; meta-data “rolodex” for other items. Fully hinted (“smart”) next/previous navigation. Expanded guided-search functions. Expanded article actions. New social bookmarking toolbar. Engineered for “strategic reading.”
Well, Did We Herd Them Cats?
Insert any stats (add slide if needed). Insert user feedback quotes, etc.
Would You Be Angry If I Said
the Jury Was Still Out? BUT WE FOUND OUT SOME THINGS…
65% of users surveyed liked it or loved it.
65% of users started their Scitation session on the abstract page (via Google/Google Scholar).
65% of users said the at-a-glance/one-eyeful presentation of multiple article components was a major improvement.
80% voted for exposing tables, figures, and captions in the abstract view as what we should work on next.
And the Signs Are Clear 52% want something better than a PDF (=HTML).
52% want a mobile rendering for everything, including the full-text (=“mobiHTML”).
48% want to see “articlemetrics” (# of times cited, # of times commented on, # of times shared, etc.).
Citation harvesting was the #1 workflow action among those surveyed.
Commenting on articles was the #1 social activity those surveyed were interested in.
Some Conclusions Researchers hate reading/searching as we know it (no time). Therefore, the following is increasingly important: Ultra-granular discoverability/findability (not searching).
No. of citations indicates something worth … scanning.
Peer recommendations (via comments, # of shares, etc.) indicates something worth … skimming.
Skimming terminology used, indexing, captions, images, data is replacing top-to-bottom reading of “narrative text.”
Semantic enrichment of, and ontological overlays on, the content – driven by text-mining the articles – will be necessary to make scanning, skimming, and finding time spent increasingly fruitful.
What’s Next? The next-generation abstract, of course: Surface indexed “article objects” (figures, tables), their captions, and their specific descriptors and classification.
Add “Find more (articles/objects) like this” discovery tools.
Mix more related content into the article display.
Expand the social linking and sharing toolbox.
The mobile view is just as important as the desktop view, so deliver one.
Enable user-tagging, which begets “find other articles tagged liked this,” and commenting.
And (DUH!) the Next-Gen Article Chunked = Easier to read more quickly;
navigate by document parts that can be bookmarked/clipped/saved. Inline reference, figure, table, and other object citations. Figure, table, and multimedia viewers with “context-browsing.” “Facet” the references and citings. Boost the semantic markup (nomenclature/terminology used, product names, device names, experiment names, materials properties, geocoded data, chemical names/formulas, …) ;drives “more articles like this/mentioning this” discovery. Personalized annotation/commenting/sharing. Ultra-accessible (mobile, DAISY, etc.)
The Next-Gen Scitation?
Thank you!
Larry M. [email protected]
twitter.com/larrymbelmont57www.facebook.com/people/Larry-Belmont
/661181894 http://www.linkedin.com/in/larrymbelmont
About AIP & Scitation AIP was founded in 1931 as a service organization …
Charter: to diffuse and advance the knowledge of physics and its application to human welfare.
Service mission: to supply economy-of-scale publishing services to Member Societies and other scholarly publishers.
Currently has 10 member societies, 23 affiliated societies, and several other organizations under its umbrella (most have a publishing program).
A publisher of 10 journals, conference proceedings, database and other electronic products. http://aip.org
Scitation … AIP’s online hosting platform; on the web since 1996.
http://scitation.org Aggregation of publications (journals, books, magazines) for
25+ publishing partners.
Sources, Credits, Inspiration, Reading
“The Daydreams of Cat Herders,” from Doctor Fun, David Farley, October 2002. All charts and graphs from Carol Tenopir and Donald W. King, “Electronic Journals and Changes in Scholarly Article Seeking and Reading Patterns,” D-Lib Magazine (November/December 2008), Vol. 14, No. 11/12 [http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/november2008-tenopir]. Future-casting inspired by Allen H. Renear and Carole L. Palmer, “Strategic Reading, Ontologies, and the Future of Scientific Publishing, Science 325, 828 (2009) [http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1157784]. Numerous STM publishing stats via Mike A. Mabe, Serials 16(2), 191 2003) and http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/rts/faflrt/initiatives/workshops/2007-mabe.pdf The iArticles concept is a riff on Geoffrey Bilder’s iPub concept. (Google it.) The photo of successfully herded cats was kindly provided by Kellan Elliott-McCrea , http://www.flickr.com/photos/kellan/ .“The End” was screen-capped from “The Wizard of Oz.” Company logos and other graphics from their respective “owners” or iStockphoto.