I would like to be an abolitionist also, and I think I have some pretty good reasons for wanting to do so, to think that way, to consider myself an abolitionist.
Moral status is for many ethicists independent of the claimant’s social position in the ‘hierarchy’ (phylogenic scale, in this case) or their role in socially constructing ethical theory. In other words, moral status is not a private social product; it’s public to the extent that it is widely accorded the belief that it’s morally true (in some meaningful sense).
In other words, to claim that nonhumans ought not to be brutalized is somehow believed to be a morally true statement, and the place and status of the ‘ought’ will be thought to be correct. Is ‘ought’ indicative of a duty that is ‘owed’ to the claimants (in this case, those for whom the claim is made)? Yes.
To claims that animals ought NOT to be brutalized is further qualified by ‘in science’ or ‘in the name of science’.
There are at times qualifiers which modify the ‘ought’ (as in ‘just war’ theories), and I do NOT believe that science qualifies as a ‘just war’ modification of our obligation to not harm vulnerable sentient beings. Lab animals are not individually out to harm us deliberately; if rodents were to consume our grain or other crops, we with capacity to construct our social relations with the ecological ‘others’ could be expected to do so in order to protect OUR interests without negating ours.
We have many moral illustrations of the long history of attempting to benignly address the needs of others without harming ourselves – some more gracious, some more loving, some more brilliant than others. Consider one which many of us know: the Hebrew proscription (as in the narrative about Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz) to leave the corners of the field ungleaned so that the poor scavengers could find enough to get by with some reasonable effort. They didn’t have a free food pantry as such, but they were given (by conscious forethought) enough to take by a modest amount of effort on their parts – and it was 100% plant-based food, too, unlike many of the free food pantries you and are asked to support, which conflicts with many of OUR deeply-held moral values about not trading off the interests of some – the animals – in order to address the interests of others – the class of persons benefitting from our exploitation and abuse and murder).
But this illustration shows how those without ready access to meeting their needs are seen as morally significant persons with interests that we ought to consider. Short of socializing all effort and recruiting these persons (perhaps they were antisocial or uncooperative, but the narrative doesn’t paint them that way, nor even suggest as much), the social ‘solution’ seems to have been widely affirmed – at least b y those who subscribed to the moral teachings of ‘leaving the corners of the fields’ (of grain) for the outsiders to glean after the ‘main’ gleaning had been finished.
Was this a potential ‘waste’ of edible grain? Perhaps. Is there a risk of inefficiency? Perhaps. But the system was widely known.
In thinking about nonhumans in the context of our (socially constructed) ‘duties’ to care for our fellow human beings AND to provide extra for them (as a safety net when they are injured or get ill, whether because they have been personally careless or inept, or because they were vulnerable to the malice of others), one claim (the appeal to do science on behalf of future victims and potential victims) runs afoul of the prior moral claims of nonhumans to not be harmed by direct intentions, by direct interventions.
Given that there are these claims to provide a medical safety net, even those who favor those socially-constructed claims can understand that killing or harming unwilling animals because of their vulnerability is morally objectionable. In other words, it can REASONABLY be considered objectionable based on the physical characteristics of these sentient nonhumans.
Given the ‘moral difficulty’ of solving these problem, compromise solutions are often presented, as the ‘public option’ is offered in the USA as a compromise between single-payer and what single-payer’s opponents call ‘market-driven’ solutions. SP friends are unhappy with the compromise; free-market advocates are unhappy; whether the compromise works for the greater benefit and satisfaction of the vast majority is not yet known (and can only be reasonably predicted).
In the vegetarian (and vegan) world, we have the 10% solution, which is offered to meateaters to consider life with meatless meals. One meatless day per week would be about 1/7 (or 14.2857%), which they TERM ‘the 10% solution) in that (THEORETICALLY) it could free about 10% of agricultural land (and presumably return it to a ‘wild’ state (though it’s likely to be exploited by real estate developers). The term 10% is widely-known in monotheistic religious contexts when talking about ‘tithing’ (giving 10% ‘off the top’).
But I’ve long suggested the 30% solution as follows:
The overwhelming proportion of researchers in the life sciences (whether they use animals or not) are researchers only, not fund raisers. They depend upon funding (for laboratories, salaries, supplies, and animals). They seek funding from corporations, government grants, private foundations, individual benefactors, and some other sources. Grant money typically has an overhead percentage that goes to the hosting institution(s).
I propose that a ‘first 30%’ be given to fund aggressive research INTO nonanimal research methods – methodological research into developing and validating nonanimal research methods.
This suggestion itself is likely to make me (in the aggregate) far MORE enemies in the vegan world than I’ve already made in my 30-35 years of veganism, but let it be discussed.
It’s not abolitionism; it’s likely to be termed ‘welfarism!
However, short of addressing the CLAIM that is widely-accepted that some things NEED to be researched and understood and that, to date, nonanimal research methods (for doing WHAT WE THINK WE NEED TO DO/RESEARCH) are not yet available with a confidence level sufficient to warrant their use instead of animal methods (not in conjunction with animal research methods), we have no quick response EXCEPT the moral argument that animals are not ours to eat, wear OR EXPERIMENT UPON.
(I accept fully that NO person is ours to eat, wear, or experiment upon, and I wish folks like Bill Maher and the ‘social deconstructionists’ we accept into our camp would understand that some interpersonal social behaviors that are widely accepted by the morally casual’ either are or lend themselves more to experimenting upon sentient beings (and as such, should be frowned upon and denounced. But I digress.)
But let’s do a little analysis here of my suggested “30% solution” that would fund the development and validation of nonanimal research methods in the same way that tobacco taxes and penalties on tobacco companies fund aggressive health education about the risks and harmful effects of tobacco use. In a libertarian political context (and more and more dietary vegans are TERMING themselves libertarians; I’ll see HUNDREDS of such ‘libertarian vegans’ at the upcoming Boston Vegetarian Food Festival), what else can we do? Yes, it’s a political and moral compromise, and we’re not coming back to the animals OR ‘the district’ with the solutions we had wanted. But in the same spirit that we send elected representatives to our democratic legislative bodies and expect them to bring SOMETHING back that is better than no representation at all, is the 30% solution a totally contemptible half-way ‘solution ‘ in light of the historical hope that we WILL – with the intelligence, ingenuity, collaboration, funding, and moral will to do so – be able to develop somehow the social consensus that replacing animal models in ALL basic science (as in toxicology and other research, including military wound research) is both desirable AND feasible, and we offer a provisional means to help our societies get to that point of total abolition of animal research?
Here’s the current downside of NOT replacing animal models:
Not only are animals sacrificed in research facilities, but the credibility of the moral claim that NO animals are ours to eat, wear OR EXPERIMENT UPON is diminished BECAUSE we’ve already consented to let them be experimented upon BECAUSE of the moral gravity of the moral claim that our fellow humans need a medical ‘safety net’ that is perpetually improved.
Yes, we are being asked to trade off our abolitionism for two things: (a) funding (finite) and (b) widespread public support for the belief – consensus – that research on animals is something that is morally objectionable, needs to be replaced, and MUST be replaced within the foreseeable future. The ‘win’ here is that we work for the public agreement on the 3 Rs agenda, which they don’t FORMALLY approve or support AT THIS TIME.
This suggestion MAY be all wrong, but I’d like to see us incubate a discussion.
I further suggest that CLAIMS by researchers to love their animals because we can see that they love their dog(s) and/or cat(s) cannot be trusted BECAUSE they are not signing on to the replacement agenda in the 3Rs: reduce, refine, and replace.
For nearly 3 decades of street outreach, particularly at Harvard, when I see that I can make NO headway with researchers (some really DO want to see some possible consensus, perhaps because they tend to like me – as a bright person, accepted collegially), I suggest that the ACID TEST of whether or not they ARE talking in good faith is their public and wholehearted acceptance of the 3 Rs standard and THEIR willingness to fund and support replacement research. Short of that WHOLEHEARTED acceptance of the 3 Rs to the point of sharing funding, I call their ‘moral pleas’ (of innocence and good will in a morally difficult context) ‘mere huff’ (and something to be publicly protested).
Of course, if NO experiments on nonhumans have ANY applicability to human beings [http://www.safermedicines.org/faqs/faq16.shtml], then the 3Rs is moot and we should reject all medical experiments on animals (for human interventions) as unscientific . However, the 3 Rs seems to suggest that (a) some experiments on nonhumans are less than optimal and should be replaced; (b) some experiments on nonhumans are less than optimal and should be refined, and (c) some experiments on animals are morally objectionable but AT THIS TIME are scientifically necessary to get WHAT WE THINK we need to know (and we may find that there are other ways to reach the goal of health populations without pharmaceutical or surgical interventions.
That’s not how the 3 RS is always read, but closer study of the 3 Rs does seem to suggest that as a valid reading.
At the Longwood Medical Area’s annual lab equipment 2-day exhibition, a number of research facilities DO offer nonanimal research methods, but in that context there’s a certain anxiety about billing themselves as nonanimal research method developers. But here are some of the non-ethical ‘drivers’ or forces moving less-than-concerned animal researchers towards replacement of animal models wherever possible:
(a) Cost – experimental animals are VERY expensive to (i) purchase, (ii) house, and (iii) maintain, and (iv) hygienically and safely dispose of
(b) Contagion – working with experimental animals poses some health risk to human researchers AND to those (i) associated with those human researchers [cleaning cages, cleaning labs, in the department, traveling with them on public transportation, family members and friends, other colleagues] AND (b) those who deal in animals [hopefully HIPAA-compliance in the USA reduces some of this concern, but it’s still there].
(c) Ethical discord among researchers and their communities
(d) Risk of violence developing among researchers who work with animals (a recent study, I believe at Cornell, showed that interpersonal violence among researchers who deal with animals is potentially volatile).
(e) Potentially better results from nonanimal research methods
(f) Repeatability of experiments is easier and cheaper, and science is nothing if not repeatable.
(g) Training (surgical training specifically) needs to be done FAR more times than is affordable using animal-based models for surgical training; healthcare is plagued with medical errors, and systems- research, including work offered by Dr. Donald Berwick of Cambridge-based IHI – the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, suggests that we need to require much higher levels of surgical practice and that is not affordable without shifting to simulation modules, as offered by SimuLab and a few other providers (in the USA).
So let’s think NOW about the 30% solution and, as we near the tipping point for shifts in research paradigms, perhaps th entire house of cards (or most of it) will fall IN OUR LIFETIMES.
Vigorous debate is encouraged!
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
30 Scientists Accuse Tufts Researchers of Ethical Violations-- Nuremberg Code
30 Scientists Accuse Tufts Researchers of Ethical Violations-- Nuremberg Code
ALLIANCE FOR HUMAN RESEARCH PROTECTION
A Catalyst for Public Debate: Promoting Openness, Full Disclosure, and Accountability
http://www.ahrp.org
FYI
A report in the business forum, Zikkir, "Out of Sight" was prompted by the publicity surrounding the $79 million settlement of Pfizer's unethical Trovan experiment conducted on Nigerian infants.
http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/571/72/.
The Zikkir article touches on the problems related to the US pharmaceutical industry's increased outsourcing of clinical trials to off-shore locations, mostly in underdeveloped countries including Eastern Europe and Russia which do not conform to ethical restraints mandated by the Nuremberg Code or the Declaration of Helsinki. http://zikkir.com/business/6259?wscr=1024x768.
An in-depth report by the Institute of Science in Society, "The Golden Rice
Scandal Unfolds," demonstrates that academics who are shielded by the US
government seal of approval, have been conducting medical experiments that
are clearly prohibited by the Nuremberg Code. The article focuses on a
series of recent unethical Phase II trials conducted by Tufts University
researchers, who tested genetically modified "Golden Rice' (GR2) on children
in the U.S. exposing them to "an unapproved experimental genetically
modified rice enhanced in pro-Vitamin A that has the potential to cause
birth defects and developmental abnormalities."
The questionable experiments-which ISIS described as "an exercise in how not to do science"--are:
1. Project NCT 00680355.(10) Bioavailability of Golden Rice Carotenoids in Humans.
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/record/NCT00680355?term=golden
2. Project NCT 00082420. Retinol Equivalence of Plant Carotenoids in Children.
http://clinicaltrials.gov/archive/NCT00082420
The experiment compared the vitamin A value of b-carotene in oil capsule, spinach and Golden Rice - recruited 72 children 7 to 9 years of age. The starting date of the experiment was September 2004, it ended November 2005.
3. Project NCT 00680212. Vitamin A Equivalence of Plant Carotenoids in Children.
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/record/NCT00680212?term=golden
In this experiment, researchers recruited 72 children 6 to 8 years of age and registered start and finish dates July 2008 and January 2009.
The ISIS report (submitted to the FDA in March, 2009) states:
"The Golden Rice Project website [6] (accessed 17 March 2009), stated that "Golden Rice has gone through many tests since it was first obtained" Nine items are listed; but no feeding trial on animals among them." See: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/goldenRiceScandal.php
"Golden Rice" has been touted as a humanitarian effort to resolve vitamin A deficiency. However, it has met with significant opposition from environmental and anti-globalization activists who view it as a commercial threat.
For example, Dr. Vandana Shiva called it "a hoax:"
"Unfortunately, Vitamin A rice is a hoax, and will bring further dispute to plant genetic engineering where public relations exercises seem to have replaced science in promotion of untested, unproven and unnecessary technology."
"The problem is that vitamin A rice will not remove vitamin A deficiency (VAD). It will seriously aggravate it. It is a technology that fails in its promise.
Since the daily average requirement of vitamin A is 750 micrograms of vitamin A and 1 serving contains 30g of rice according to dry weight basis, vitamin A rice would only provide 9.9 micrograms which is 1.32% of the required allowance. Even taking the 100g figure of daily consumption of rice used in the technology transfer paper would only provide 4.4% of the RDA."
"In order to meet the full needs of 750 micrograms of vitamin A from rice, an adult would have to consume 2 kg 272g of rice per day. This implies that one family member would consume the entire family ration of 10 kg. from the PDS in 4 days to meet vitaminA needs through "Golden rice".
"This is a recipe for creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it."
"Even the World Bank has admitted that rediscovering and use of local plants and conservation of vitamin A rich green leafy vegetables and fruits have dramatically reduced VAD threatened children over the past 20 years in very cheap and efficient ways."
See: THE "GOLDEN RICE" HOAX -When Public Relations replaces Science
http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/GEessays/goldenricehoax.html
The ISIS report calls the Tufts experiments "morally inexcusable:"
"The phase II clinical trials of uncharacterized, unapproved, experimental GR2 events on children, some of whom may indeed be suffering from vitamin A deficiency, is morally inexcusable. GR2 has not been assessed for safety, and there are reasons to suspect it is unsafe."
See: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/goldenRiceScandal.php
In February, 2009, an open letter addressed to Professor Robert Russell, Professor Emeritus, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University School of Medicine (Email: rob.russell@tufts.edu) was signed by 30 senior scientists who protested the unethical testing of a possibly hazardous substance--"Golden Rice" (GR2) in children.
The letter states that the trials
"appear to be an experimental collection of transgenic events still in the laboratory, uncharacterized in terms of basic molecular genetics or biological and biochemical properties, not tested pre-clinically on animals, or subjected to any other safety assessment."
"The variety of Golden Rice used in these experiments (GR2) is inadequately described in terms of biological and biochemical characterization. anywhere else in the publicly available literature, and has woefully inadequate pre-clinical evaluation."
" It is a genetically modified product which has not been shown to be distinctive, uniform and stable over time. It has never been through a regulatory /approvals process anywhere in the world. There is now a large body of evidence that shows that GM crop/food production is highly prone to inadvertent and unpredictable pleiotropic effects, which can result in health damaging effects when GM food products are fed to animals (for reviews see Pusztai and Bardocz , 2006; Schubert, 2008; Dona and
Arvanitoyannis, 2009)."
"More specifically, our greatest concern is that this rice, which is engineered to overproduce beta carotene, has never been tested in animals, and there is an extensive medical literature showing that retinoids that can be derived from beta carotene are both toxic and cause birth defects."
No results have been made available for either of the pediatric studies (as of 17 March 2009).
The scientists noted that the three Tufts Projects breached the Nuremberg Code / medical ethics code "on a number of counts, and we urge you to call them to a halt immediately."
"They should not be resumed unless and until the researchers can demonstrate that a full range of laboratory and animal feeding trials have been completed and published for the Golden Rice strain being used, and unless and until appropriate regulatory bodies have had an opportunity to come to a view on the health and safety issues about which we are very concerned."
"We can assure you that such trials would not have been approved within the European Union in the absence of safety information, which highlights yet again the flaw of the USDA and FDA regulatory system in considering GM crops/foods as hypothetically "generally recognised as safe - GRAS" in the
absence of hard experimental data."
Further underscoring the U.S. academics' and government agency disregard for medical ethics, the ISIS report notes that an Indian newspaper reported that a clinical trial was cut short in China in July 2008, when the government found that 24 children 6-8 years of age at a primary school in Henyan, Hunan, were to be used as guinea pigs for a trial with Golden Rice."
That trial was also sponsored by Tufts University and approved by the US National Institute of Health--though not from the Chinese government, which was alerted by Greenpeace. Greenpeace has also warned the governments of Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam against the risky trials.
It would appear that the Chinese government conforms to higher medical ethics standards than the US National Institute of Health.
So, why has the media failed to pay any attention to these morally deplorable human experiments on American children ?
Contact: Vera Hassner Sharav
veracare@ahrp.org
212-595-8974
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/goldenRiceScandal.php
ISIS Report 18/03/09
The Golden Rice Scandal Unfolds
Phase II clinical trials on children have been conducted with unapproved experimental GM rice enhanced in pro-Vitamin A that has the potential to cause birth defects and developmental abnormalities Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Prof. Joe Cummins
This report has been sent to the United States Food and Drug Administration on behalf of ISIS
Clinical trials of unapproved, uncharacterized GM rice on children
EXCERPT:
According to a recent report [9], a sample of the Golden Rice grains was sent to Germany in 2001 for a feeding trial with mice. But when the grains were tested for carotenoid content, the scientists were "surprised to find it contained less than one percent of the amount expected." After the rice was cooked, this was reduced by another 50 percent, so the trial was abandoned.
In 2005, Syngenta made GR2 [10] using the maize version of the enzyme phytoene synthase that was transferred from daffodil. GR2 produced up to 23 times the amount of carotenoids in the original Golden Rice, GR1.
But GR2 was not a transgenic variety based on a single transformation event. On the contrary, it was explicitly stated that [10]: "The reported transgenic rice events [emphasis added] are experimental." There is no telling whether all the children or adults taking part in any of the trials
were given Golden Rice from the same GR2 event. The results of the trials, as yet unreleased, could well be utterly worthless.
Syngenta was donating these GR2 events, via the Humanitarian Project for Golden Rice, for further research and development (to institutes across China, India, Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Vietnam) "through license under certain conditions", which include "being governed by the
strategic direction of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board" Requests were to be directed to Adrian Dubock, a previous employee of Syngenta.
Dubock helped Potrykus and Beyer work out a deal in which Syngenta could develop Golden Rice commercially, but farmers in developing countries who make less than US$10 000 a year could get it for free [5]. Dubock retired from Syngenta in 2007, but remains a member of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board, chaired by Potykus.
Golden Rice, an exercise in how not to do science
Golden Rice, genetically modified to make pro-vitamin A in the endosperm (the grain remaining after polishing), was announced with great fanfare in 2000 as a cure for widespread vitamin A deficiency in developing countries.
The project had already cost US$100 million, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the European Community Biotech Programme and the Swiss Federal Office for Education and Science, and could cost as much again to develop. It was tied up in at least 70 patent claims on genes, DNA sequences and constructs, a problem only partly solved in the "ground-breaking deal" worked out by Dubock (see above)..
Condemnation was swift and widespread, not least because it was absurd to offer Golden Rice as the cure for vitamin A deficiency when there are plenty of alternative, infinitely cheaper sources of vitamin A or pro-Vitamin A, such as green vegetables and unpolished coloured rice (especially black and purple varieties [11], which would be rich in other essential vitamins and minerals, and hence much more nutritious. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) started a project in 1985 to deal with vitamin A deficiency using a combination of food fortification, food supplements and general improvements in diets by encouraging people to grow and eat a variety of green leafy vegetables. One main discovery from the project was that the absorption of pro-vitamin A depends on the overall nutritional status, which in turn depends on the diversity of the food consumed [12].
The main cause of hunger and malnutrition in the Third World is the industrial monocultures of the Green Revolution, which obliterated agricultural biodiversity and soil fertility, resulting in ever-worsening mineral and micronutrient deficiencies in our food. Golden Rice, like other GM crops, is industrial monoculture only worse, and will exacerbate this trend, as well as the destruction of agricultural land, and the impoverishment of family farmers that also accompanied the Green Revolution [13] (see Beware the New "Doubly Green Revolution", SiS 37).
GR1 was made with the standard 'first generation' genetic modification techniques, using GM constructs that cause uncontrollable mutations and other collateral damage to the host plant genome, with many unintended, uncharacterized effects [14]. In addition, the viral and bacterial sequences, including antibiotic resistance marker genes, in the construct and in the vectors created for gene transfer enhance horizontal gene transfer and recombination, the main route to creating new pathogens and spreading antibiotic resistance.
GR2 represents an improvement in so far as antibiotic resistance markers were no longer used, but still includes a medley combination of sequences\ from plant pathogens Agrobacterium (used in a binary vector system) and Erwinia uredovor, and from E. coli, inhabitant of the human gut, which also contains pathogenic strains. We have highlighted the special hazards of the Agrobacterium vector system since 2003 [15] (Agrobacterium & Morgellons Disease, A GM Connection?, SiS 38) (see below). The main reason for Golden Rice was revealed in the unusually long news feature article [16] accompanying the scientific publication [8] which stated: "One can only hope that this application of plant genetic engineering to ameliorate human misery without regard to short-term profit will restore this technology to political acceptability."
A detailed audit on the project [14] (The 'Golden Rice', An Exercise in How Not to Do Science, ISIS Report) uncovered "fundamental deficiencies" from the scientific and social rationale to the science and technology involved. It was being promoted "to salvage a morally as well as financially bankrupt agricultural biotech industry." The situation has changed little since.
The phase II clinical trials of uncharacterized, unapproved, experimental GR2 events on children, some of whom may indeed be suffering from vitamin A deficiency, is morally inexcusable. GR2 has not been assessed for safety, and there are reasons to suspect it is unsafe. GMO safety in question
The biotech industry has consistently found genetically modified food and feed 'as safe as their conventional counterparts', and regulators in the United States and European Union have accepted this assertion overwhelmingly based on studies carried out and interpreted by the industry [17] (GM Food Nightmare Unfolding in the Regulatory Sham, ISIS scientific publication).
There is now a string of evidence that exposure of many species of animals to a variety of genetically modified crops, and food and feed derived from them, can cause illnesses and death, raising the distinct possibility that genetic modification is inherently dangerous [18] (GM is Dangerous and Futile, SiS 40). This is reinforced in results obtained in the most recent studies.
....
Golden Rice particularly dangerous
In addition, the unbalanced enhancement of single nutrients in GM crops may do more harm than good [27] (GM Crops and Microbes for Health or Public Health Hazards? SiS 32). As David Schubert at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences La Jolla, California, in the United States points out [28], plants possess the ability to synthesize between 90,000 and 200,000 nonessential small molecules, with up to 500 in one species. The enormous repertoire is due in part to enzymes with very low substrate specificity, which are unpredictably altered by mutations and pleiotropic effects associated with GM technology. Furthermore, overdose of many single nutrients are known to be toxic, vitamin A being a case in point. Schubert highlights the toxic effects of retinoic acid and other metabolites of b-carotene, only a few of them can be identified and measured in the current state of technology.
Golden Rice is enhanced in b-carotene, which on ingestion, is cleaved in half to generate retinal for use in the visual cycle. Retinal is also reduced to retinol, or oxidized to retinoic acid (RA), which interacts with highly specific nuclear receptors. Essentially all of the biological activity of retinoids, apart from vision, involves RA. While high concentrations of retinol are toxic, RA is biologically active at concentrations several orders of magnitude lower than retinol. Hence, Schubert states [28]: "excess RA or RA derivatives are exceedingly dangerous, particularly to infants and during pregnancy." RA is required for the development of the nervous system, both by directly controlling nerve differentiation and by generating concentration gradients that direct cell migration, embryonic segmentation, and development. Therefore, RA and synthetic derivative of RA are teratogenic (able to cause birth defects). They can accumulate in fat and plasma, becoming a risk factor for pregnancy for up to 2 years following ingestion, and multiple low doses of retinoids have greater toxicity than a single high dose.
Because of the type of biological functions controlled by low levels of RA, any perturbation of its signalling pathways by plant-derived RA receptor agonists or antagonists will have clinical consequences. "Could the GM modifications used to enhance b-carotene synthesis create such compounds?"
(This question remains unanswered to this day.) Six hundred naturally occurring compounds exist in the carotene family, and at least 60 can be precursors to retinoids. "Therefore, plants have the potential to make many potentially harmful retinoid-like compounds when there are increased levels of synthetic intermediates to b-carotene as in golden rice."
While all retinoids and derivatives are likely to be teratogenic, good assays and information regarding the behaviour and teralogic activity are available for only three: retinol, RA, and retinal. Therefore, at the very least, "extensive safety testing should be required before the introduction of golden rice as a food."
See complete ISIS report with copious references at:
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/goldenRiceScandal.php
FAIR USE NOTICE: This may contain copyrighted (C ) material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. It is believed that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.
ALLIANCE FOR HUMAN RESEARCH PROTECTION
A Catalyst for Public Debate: Promoting Openness, Full Disclosure, and Accountability
http://www.ahrp.org
FYI
A report in the business forum, Zikkir, "Out of Sight" was prompted by the publicity surrounding the $79 million settlement of Pfizer's unethical Trovan experiment conducted on Nigerian infants.
http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/571/72/.
The Zikkir article touches on the problems related to the US pharmaceutical industry's increased outsourcing of clinical trials to off-shore locations, mostly in underdeveloped countries including Eastern Europe and Russia which do not conform to ethical restraints mandated by the Nuremberg Code or the Declaration of Helsinki. http://zikkir.com/business/6259?wscr=1024x768.
An in-depth report by the Institute of Science in Society, "The Golden Rice
Scandal Unfolds," demonstrates that academics who are shielded by the US
government seal of approval, have been conducting medical experiments that
are clearly prohibited by the Nuremberg Code. The article focuses on a
series of recent unethical Phase II trials conducted by Tufts University
researchers, who tested genetically modified "Golden Rice' (GR2) on children
in the U.S. exposing them to "an unapproved experimental genetically
modified rice enhanced in pro-Vitamin A that has the potential to cause
birth defects and developmental abnormalities."
The questionable experiments-which ISIS described as "an exercise in how not to do science"--are:
1. Project NCT 00680355.(10) Bioavailability of Golden Rice Carotenoids in Humans.
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/record/NCT00680355?term=golden
2. Project NCT 00082420. Retinol Equivalence of Plant Carotenoids in Children.
http://clinicaltrials.gov/archive/NCT00082420
The experiment compared the vitamin A value of b-carotene in oil capsule, spinach and Golden Rice - recruited 72 children 7 to 9 years of age. The starting date of the experiment was September 2004, it ended November 2005.
3. Project NCT 00680212. Vitamin A Equivalence of Plant Carotenoids in Children.
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/record/NCT00680212?term=golden
In this experiment, researchers recruited 72 children 6 to 8 years of age and registered start and finish dates July 2008 and January 2009.
The ISIS report (submitted to the FDA in March, 2009) states:
"The Golden Rice Project website [6] (accessed 17 March 2009), stated that "Golden Rice has gone through many tests since it was first obtained" Nine items are listed; but no feeding trial on animals among them." See: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/goldenRiceScandal.php
"Golden Rice" has been touted as a humanitarian effort to resolve vitamin A deficiency. However, it has met with significant opposition from environmental and anti-globalization activists who view it as a commercial threat.
For example, Dr. Vandana Shiva called it "a hoax:"
"Unfortunately, Vitamin A rice is a hoax, and will bring further dispute to plant genetic engineering where public relations exercises seem to have replaced science in promotion of untested, unproven and unnecessary technology."
"The problem is that vitamin A rice will not remove vitamin A deficiency (VAD). It will seriously aggravate it. It is a technology that fails in its promise.
Since the daily average requirement of vitamin A is 750 micrograms of vitamin A and 1 serving contains 30g of rice according to dry weight basis, vitamin A rice would only provide 9.9 micrograms which is 1.32% of the required allowance. Even taking the 100g figure of daily consumption of rice used in the technology transfer paper would only provide 4.4% of the RDA."
"In order to meet the full needs of 750 micrograms of vitamin A from rice, an adult would have to consume 2 kg 272g of rice per day. This implies that one family member would consume the entire family ration of 10 kg. from the PDS in 4 days to meet vitaminA needs through "Golden rice".
"This is a recipe for creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it."
"Even the World Bank has admitted that rediscovering and use of local plants and conservation of vitamin A rich green leafy vegetables and fruits have dramatically reduced VAD threatened children over the past 20 years in very cheap and efficient ways."
See: THE "GOLDEN RICE" HOAX -When Public Relations replaces Science
http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/GEessays/goldenricehoax.html
The ISIS report calls the Tufts experiments "morally inexcusable:"
"The phase II clinical trials of uncharacterized, unapproved, experimental GR2 events on children, some of whom may indeed be suffering from vitamin A deficiency, is morally inexcusable. GR2 has not been assessed for safety, and there are reasons to suspect it is unsafe."
See: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/goldenRiceScandal.php
In February, 2009, an open letter addressed to Professor Robert Russell, Professor Emeritus, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University School of Medicine (Email: rob.russell@tufts.edu) was signed by 30 senior scientists who protested the unethical testing of a possibly hazardous substance--"Golden Rice" (GR2) in children.
The letter states that the trials
"appear to be an experimental collection of transgenic events still in the laboratory, uncharacterized in terms of basic molecular genetics or biological and biochemical properties, not tested pre-clinically on animals, or subjected to any other safety assessment."
"The variety of Golden Rice used in these experiments (GR2) is inadequately described in terms of biological and biochemical characterization. anywhere else in the publicly available literature, and has woefully inadequate pre-clinical evaluation."
" It is a genetically modified product which has not been shown to be distinctive, uniform and stable over time. It has never been through a regulatory /approvals process anywhere in the world. There is now a large body of evidence that shows that GM crop/food production is highly prone to inadvertent and unpredictable pleiotropic effects, which can result in health damaging effects when GM food products are fed to animals (for reviews see Pusztai and Bardocz , 2006; Schubert, 2008; Dona and
Arvanitoyannis, 2009)."
"More specifically, our greatest concern is that this rice, which is engineered to overproduce beta carotene, has never been tested in animals, and there is an extensive medical literature showing that retinoids that can be derived from beta carotene are both toxic and cause birth defects."
No results have been made available for either of the pediatric studies (as of 17 March 2009).
The scientists noted that the three Tufts Projects breached the Nuremberg Code / medical ethics code "on a number of counts, and we urge you to call them to a halt immediately."
"They should not be resumed unless and until the researchers can demonstrate that a full range of laboratory and animal feeding trials have been completed and published for the Golden Rice strain being used, and unless and until appropriate regulatory bodies have had an opportunity to come to a view on the health and safety issues about which we are very concerned."
"We can assure you that such trials would not have been approved within the European Union in the absence of safety information, which highlights yet again the flaw of the USDA and FDA regulatory system in considering GM crops/foods as hypothetically "generally recognised as safe - GRAS" in the
absence of hard experimental data."
Further underscoring the U.S. academics' and government agency disregard for medical ethics, the ISIS report notes that an Indian newspaper reported that a clinical trial was cut short in China in July 2008, when the government found that 24 children 6-8 years of age at a primary school in Henyan, Hunan, were to be used as guinea pigs for a trial with Golden Rice."
That trial was also sponsored by Tufts University and approved by the US National Institute of Health--though not from the Chinese government, which was alerted by Greenpeace. Greenpeace has also warned the governments of Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam against the risky trials.
It would appear that the Chinese government conforms to higher medical ethics standards than the US National Institute of Health.
So, why has the media failed to pay any attention to these morally deplorable human experiments on American children ?
Contact: Vera Hassner Sharav
veracare@ahrp.org
212-595-8974
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/goldenRiceScandal.php
ISIS Report 18/03/09
The Golden Rice Scandal Unfolds
Phase II clinical trials on children have been conducted with unapproved experimental GM rice enhanced in pro-Vitamin A that has the potential to cause birth defects and developmental abnormalities Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Prof. Joe Cummins
This report has been sent to the United States Food and Drug Administration on behalf of ISIS
Clinical trials of unapproved, uncharacterized GM rice on children
EXCERPT:
According to a recent report [9], a sample of the Golden Rice grains was sent to Germany in 2001 for a feeding trial with mice. But when the grains were tested for carotenoid content, the scientists were "surprised to find it contained less than one percent of the amount expected." After the rice was cooked, this was reduced by another 50 percent, so the trial was abandoned.
In 2005, Syngenta made GR2 [10] using the maize version of the enzyme phytoene synthase that was transferred from daffodil. GR2 produced up to 23 times the amount of carotenoids in the original Golden Rice, GR1.
But GR2 was not a transgenic variety based on a single transformation event. On the contrary, it was explicitly stated that [10]: "The reported transgenic rice events [emphasis added] are experimental." There is no telling whether all the children or adults taking part in any of the trials
were given Golden Rice from the same GR2 event. The results of the trials, as yet unreleased, could well be utterly worthless.
Syngenta was donating these GR2 events, via the Humanitarian Project for Golden Rice, for further research and development (to institutes across China, India, Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Vietnam) "through license under certain conditions", which include "being governed by the
strategic direction of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board" Requests were to be directed to Adrian Dubock, a previous employee of Syngenta.
Dubock helped Potrykus and Beyer work out a deal in which Syngenta could develop Golden Rice commercially, but farmers in developing countries who make less than US$10 000 a year could get it for free [5]. Dubock retired from Syngenta in 2007, but remains a member of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board, chaired by Potykus.
Golden Rice, an exercise in how not to do science
Golden Rice, genetically modified to make pro-vitamin A in the endosperm (the grain remaining after polishing), was announced with great fanfare in 2000 as a cure for widespread vitamin A deficiency in developing countries.
The project had already cost US$100 million, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the European Community Biotech Programme and the Swiss Federal Office for Education and Science, and could cost as much again to develop. It was tied up in at least 70 patent claims on genes, DNA sequences and constructs, a problem only partly solved in the "ground-breaking deal" worked out by Dubock (see above)..
Condemnation was swift and widespread, not least because it was absurd to offer Golden Rice as the cure for vitamin A deficiency when there are plenty of alternative, infinitely cheaper sources of vitamin A or pro-Vitamin A, such as green vegetables and unpolished coloured rice (especially black and purple varieties [11], which would be rich in other essential vitamins and minerals, and hence much more nutritious. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) started a project in 1985 to deal with vitamin A deficiency using a combination of food fortification, food supplements and general improvements in diets by encouraging people to grow and eat a variety of green leafy vegetables. One main discovery from the project was that the absorption of pro-vitamin A depends on the overall nutritional status, which in turn depends on the diversity of the food consumed [12].
The main cause of hunger and malnutrition in the Third World is the industrial monocultures of the Green Revolution, which obliterated agricultural biodiversity and soil fertility, resulting in ever-worsening mineral and micronutrient deficiencies in our food. Golden Rice, like other GM crops, is industrial monoculture only worse, and will exacerbate this trend, as well as the destruction of agricultural land, and the impoverishment of family farmers that also accompanied the Green Revolution [13] (see Beware the New "Doubly Green Revolution", SiS 37).
GR1 was made with the standard 'first generation' genetic modification techniques, using GM constructs that cause uncontrollable mutations and other collateral damage to the host plant genome, with many unintended, uncharacterized effects [14]. In addition, the viral and bacterial sequences, including antibiotic resistance marker genes, in the construct and in the vectors created for gene transfer enhance horizontal gene transfer and recombination, the main route to creating new pathogens and spreading antibiotic resistance.
GR2 represents an improvement in so far as antibiotic resistance markers were no longer used, but still includes a medley combination of sequences\ from plant pathogens Agrobacterium (used in a binary vector system) and Erwinia uredovor, and from E. coli, inhabitant of the human gut, which also contains pathogenic strains. We have highlighted the special hazards of the Agrobacterium vector system since 2003 [15] (Agrobacterium & Morgellons Disease, A GM Connection?, SiS 38) (see below). The main reason for Golden Rice was revealed in the unusually long news feature article [16] accompanying the scientific publication [8] which stated: "One can only hope that this application of plant genetic engineering to ameliorate human misery without regard to short-term profit will restore this technology to political acceptability."
A detailed audit on the project [14] (The 'Golden Rice', An Exercise in How Not to Do Science, ISIS Report) uncovered "fundamental deficiencies" from the scientific and social rationale to the science and technology involved. It was being promoted "to salvage a morally as well as financially bankrupt agricultural biotech industry." The situation has changed little since.
The phase II clinical trials of uncharacterized, unapproved, experimental GR2 events on children, some of whom may indeed be suffering from vitamin A deficiency, is morally inexcusable. GR2 has not been assessed for safety, and there are reasons to suspect it is unsafe. GMO safety in question
The biotech industry has consistently found genetically modified food and feed 'as safe as their conventional counterparts', and regulators in the United States and European Union have accepted this assertion overwhelmingly based on studies carried out and interpreted by the industry [17] (GM Food Nightmare Unfolding in the Regulatory Sham, ISIS scientific publication).
There is now a string of evidence that exposure of many species of animals to a variety of genetically modified crops, and food and feed derived from them, can cause illnesses and death, raising the distinct possibility that genetic modification is inherently dangerous [18] (GM is Dangerous and Futile, SiS 40). This is reinforced in results obtained in the most recent studies.
....
Golden Rice particularly dangerous
In addition, the unbalanced enhancement of single nutrients in GM crops may do more harm than good [27] (GM Crops and Microbes for Health or Public Health Hazards? SiS 32). As David Schubert at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences La Jolla, California, in the United States points out [28], plants possess the ability to synthesize between 90,000 and 200,000 nonessential small molecules, with up to 500 in one species. The enormous repertoire is due in part to enzymes with very low substrate specificity, which are unpredictably altered by mutations and pleiotropic effects associated with GM technology. Furthermore, overdose of many single nutrients are known to be toxic, vitamin A being a case in point. Schubert highlights the toxic effects of retinoic acid and other metabolites of b-carotene, only a few of them can be identified and measured in the current state of technology.
Golden Rice is enhanced in b-carotene, which on ingestion, is cleaved in half to generate retinal for use in the visual cycle. Retinal is also reduced to retinol, or oxidized to retinoic acid (RA), which interacts with highly specific nuclear receptors. Essentially all of the biological activity of retinoids, apart from vision, involves RA. While high concentrations of retinol are toxic, RA is biologically active at concentrations several orders of magnitude lower than retinol. Hence, Schubert states [28]: "excess RA or RA derivatives are exceedingly dangerous, particularly to infants and during pregnancy." RA is required for the development of the nervous system, both by directly controlling nerve differentiation and by generating concentration gradients that direct cell migration, embryonic segmentation, and development. Therefore, RA and synthetic derivative of RA are teratogenic (able to cause birth defects). They can accumulate in fat and plasma, becoming a risk factor for pregnancy for up to 2 years following ingestion, and multiple low doses of retinoids have greater toxicity than a single high dose.
Because of the type of biological functions controlled by low levels of RA, any perturbation of its signalling pathways by plant-derived RA receptor agonists or antagonists will have clinical consequences. "Could the GM modifications used to enhance b-carotene synthesis create such compounds?"
(This question remains unanswered to this day.) Six hundred naturally occurring compounds exist in the carotene family, and at least 60 can be precursors to retinoids. "Therefore, plants have the potential to make many potentially harmful retinoid-like compounds when there are increased levels of synthetic intermediates to b-carotene as in golden rice."
While all retinoids and derivatives are likely to be teratogenic, good assays and information regarding the behaviour and teralogic activity are available for only three: retinol, RA, and retinal. Therefore, at the very least, "extensive safety testing should be required before the introduction of golden rice as a food."
See complete ISIS report with copious references at:
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/goldenRiceScandal.php
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Wednesday, September 30, 2009
After Losing Users in Catalogs, Libraries Find Better Search Software
After Losing Users in Catalogs, Libraries Find Better Search Software
Technology 
September 28, 2009
After Losing Users in Catalogs, Libraries Find Better Search Software
Lisa Billings/Freelance
Jean A. Bauer, a graduate student in American history at the U. of Virginia, has been frustrated with the confusing search results from the university library's old online catalog. A new one is in the works.
Enlarge Photo
Lisa Billings/Freelance
Jean A. Bauer, a graduate student in American history at the U. of Virginia, has been frustrated with the confusing search results from the university library's old online catalog. A new one is in the works.
By Marc Parry
Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. So you might think that typing his name into Virgo, Virginia's online library catalog, would start you off with a book about him.
Jean A. Bauer tried it the other night. At the top of the results list were papers from a physics conference in Brazil.
The problem is that traditional online library catalogs don't tend to order search results by ranked relevance, and they can befuddle users with clunky interfaces. Bauer, a graduate student specializing in early American history, once had such a hard time finding materials that she titled a bibliography "Meager Fruits of an Ongoing Fight With Virgo."
That's changing because of two technology trends. First, a growing number of universities are shelling out serious money for sophisticated software that makes exploring their collections more like the easy-to-filter experience you might find in an online Sears catalog.
Second, Virginia and several other colleges, including Villanova University and the University of Rochester, are producing free open-source programs that tackle the same problems with no licensing fees.
A key feature of this software genre is that it helps you make sense of data through "faceted" searching, common when you shop online for a new jacket or a stereo system. Say you type in "Susan B. Anthony." The new system will ask if you want books by her or about her, said Susan L. Gibbons, vice provost and dean of Rochester's River Campus Libraries. Users can also sort by media type, language, and date.
These products can also rank search results by relevance and use prompts of "Did you mean … ?"
"It's sort of our answer to, Why it is you need a library when you have Google?" said Ms. Gibbons. "What this is going to do is show how much you've been missing."
It's a pressing issue. Libraries once had a monopoly on organizing data about content. No longer. And today some users gripe about how libraries present materials online: how scattered they are, how sluggish searches can be, and how often those searches are useful only if you already know exactly what you want.
The worry for Jennifer Bowen, assistant dean of the River Campus Libraries, is that library catalogs could become "marginalized."
"There are people who just cannot find what they need," she said. "And they're just sort of giving up on libraries."
A Single Entry Point The issue concerns professors, too. One software developer pointed to a 2006 study by Ithaka, a nonprofit group that promotes the use of information technology in higher education. It found that faculty members value the campus library but "perceive themselves to be decreasingly dependent on the library for their research and teaching." The report described what appeared to be "growing ambivalence about the campus library."
The buzzwords for the technology that librarians hope will allow users to rediscover their collections are "Web-scale index searching."
That, in Ms. Gibbons's translation, is a fancy way of saying that the system, like Google, works by searching against a vast index of information. It's a contrast with an earlier attempt to deal with the search problem through "federated searching," where there is no local index, and each query is taken from the user and sent individually to various databases.
You expect a Google search to cast the broadest possible net. The same should apply to a library catalog, the thinking goes. That means a single entry point to the collection. The entire collection: books, articles, digital objects. Heck, why not even herbarium specimens?
Marshall Breeding, director of innovative technology and research at the Vanderbilt University library, calls the concept "an ambitious goal—and at this point I think it's more of a goal than reality."
But the move toward simplified, silo-busting, relevant-result-returning library searches may come with its own problems.
Mr. Breeding, who founded the Web site Library Technology Guides, has observed "pockets of resistance" in the library community. Some argue that new search products—sometimes called next-generation catalogs or discovery interfaces—amount to a dumbing-down of catalogs.
By contrast, traditional search tools reinforce the idea that library users need a clear understanding of the different materials involved in research, Mr. Breeding said, such as the difference between articles and monographs. New interfaces that mix many different information sources blur all that, he said.
And then there are the slew of devil-in-the-details questions that arise from the content convergence.
Will users understand it? Will they find what they want? Will books be properly represented among the flood of articles? What about image collections? Could the pile of stuff just get too big?
Libraries' online catalogs are typically one module of an integrated software system that runs library functions like the circulation desk, acquisitions, and cataloging. They are a window into what libraries manage inside their integrated systems, Mr. Breeding said, which tends to be mostly the print collections. But the problem is they lack a good way to include the growing electronic part of the library collection, he said.
What the new interfaces share is the ability to derive material from catalogs and combine it with other data in a modern package.
The commercial market for these interfaces has already produced Encore, from Innovative Interfaces, adopted by at least 44 academic libraries in the United States, according to Mr. Breeding's tally; AquaBrowser, from Media lab Solutions, used by 23 libraries; and Primo, from Ex Libris, adopted by 13 libraries.
How much institutions will have to pay for new commercial systems will vary depending on both what comes with the software and the size and complexity of the library. That could mean a price as low as $10,000 for a small academic library to one in the $100,000 range for a much larger one, Mr. Breeding said.
A 'Shift of Power' In the open-source world, at least 10 academic libraries have turned to VuFind, which originated at Villanova. Virginia's Blacklight, with Stanford University as a development partner, is in a beta phase. And Rochester's eXtensible Catalog, or XC, backed by $1.2-million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will be rolled out in the spring.
The shift from commercial products to open-source ones is about more than money, though.
Bess Sadler, chief architect of the online library environment at the University of Virginia, sees the open-source Blacklight project as a "shift of power," as she wrote recently in the journal Library Hi Tech. The idea is that libraries, which know their local needs, should control the technology that patrons use to gain access to their collections. That's a change from the one-size-is-good-enough-for-everybody, commercially managed model that has prevailed in the industry.
The ability to customize is important when it comes to something like a music collection. A librarian might get this question: "I play the guitar. My boyfriend plays the flute. What duets can we play together?" In the past, even though Virginia had cataloged the instruments used in all of its sheet music, a search of that information was impossible because the fields that were indexed were maintained by a vendor, Ms. Sadler said.
"The problem with a vendor solution is that it's hard for vendors to tailor that solution for different collections, for different user populations, for different specializations," she said.
With an open-source system, a library can set its own relevance rankings and adjust them based on what users want. By maintaining the system itself, Virginia is now able to search by musical instrument.
The downside is libraries need someone on staff who can install and maintain the open-source program. So far, vendors aren't supporting products like VuFind the way they support established open-source products like Koha and Evergreen, both integrated library systems, said Mr. Breeding. Vendors will install software like Evergreen, host it on their own servers, and provide a help desk that you can call if something breaks. Not so for the newer software. Another barrier is going to be trusting that an open-source project is sustainable. There is always a concern that there will not be a community of users to keep developing it.
Also, the open-source systems have been slower to fold in article-level data, Mr. Breeding said. Most of that action is on the commercial side.
With Blacklight, you won't be able to get individual journal articles. If you're doing research on cell division, for example, a search will tell you that Virginia subscribes to the journal about cell division, but you'll have to go to a journal database for the article.
"That's going to be true for a very long time," Ms. Sadler said. "For the foreseeable future, you're going to need to go to separate interfaces in order to search licensed content."
But commercial vendors, smelling a new market, are stepping in. Serials Solutions, a subsidiary of ProQuest, released a software product in July called Summon. The company has been negotiating deals with publishers and content providers to create a searchable index of their content. It's like Google, except what Summon provides is an index of the "deep Web" of paid content. So now university libraries that pay for a subscription to Summon can let their users search their licensed content as well as locally owned stuff, together. Summon has 17 customers so far, including Arizona State University and Dartmouth College.
The catch? It can be expensive.
Andrew S. Nagy, senior discovery-services engineer at Serials Solutions, wouldn't say how expensive. But the cost of a subscription can run into the tens of thousands, said one university administrator who was not authorized to discuss price and thus wanted to remain anonymous. Summon also does not have permission to display the full text of articles.
At Virginia, the open-source Blacklight has paid off for Ms. Bauer.
"You know the feeling of when you go into the stacks, and you're usually looking for one book, but then it's almost always the book that's next to it that's the one you really need?" she asked. "It helps replicate a bit of that experience."
And if you search for Thomas Jefferson, it even starts you off with a book about him.
Share Comments paievoli - September 28, 2009 at 09:18 am
Need to find a way to self sustain these costs or they are going to become prohibitive in the future. Self sustaining models are the future of all business and academia. Read Chris Anderson's "Free".
It explains how to deal with this new economic model that will affect us all.
mitt4jp - September 28, 2009 at 03:47 pm
Report Abuse I found this article a little mis-leading. First of all, a library catalog is structured differently from a search engine. To find items about Thomas Jefferson, the correct way is to use "Thomas Jefferson" as a subject, not as keywords anywere search.
Unfortunately, instead of teaching students how to conduct a precise search with few relevant results, faculty and librarians have found an easy way out -- googlize everything.
uvalibmobile - September 28, 2009 at 06:26 pm
Report Abuse The University of Virginia is using both Blacklight and Summon in its new mobile site (lib.virginia.edu/mobile). We created a web service called "Blacksummon" which merges results from the two indices and allows faceted browsing. A third API from Ebsco allows direct downloads of some PDFs.
bsparris - September 29, 2009 at 09:07 am
Report Abuse The problem is people are trying to use the catalog the wrong way. Instead of a keyword search like on the internet and online databases, the catalog offers something unique-- direct access to exactly what you want through a browse or exact search using subject headings, authors, titles. An old idea but it still works--give it a try!
bsparris - September 29, 2009 at 09:07 am
Report Abuse The problem is people are trying to use the catalog the wrong way. Instead of a keyword search like on the internet and online databases, the catalog offers something unique-- direct access to exactly what you want through a browse or exact search using subject headings, authors, titles. An old idea but it still works--give it a try!
bsparris - September 29, 2009 at 09:07 am
Report Abuse The problem is people are trying to use the catalog the wrong way. Instead of a keyword search like on the internet and online databases, the catalog offers something unique-- direct access to exactly what you want through a browse or exact search using subject headings, authors, titles. An old idea but it still works--give it a try!
pucciot - September 29, 2009 at 09:58 am
Report Abuse The Library was once considered to be the center of the University. It is now treated the same as the food court in the student center. It seems that the University Libraries (and Librarians) are not being rightly considered as an important part of the educational process. Teaching students what to search, how to search, and how to choose good resources is an important part of the the University education. Today it seems that just because our students come in knowing how to perform a google search that that is all they need. Library databases are "tools". Knowing how to use a tool properly must be taught. To apply a simple metaphor would be to think that just because a student took _Shop_ in High School that they should be able to be brought into a factory to build a car.
The University Library and the use of its resources should be considered part of the University Education. Web level discovery layers are new useful tools - but they do nothing to educate a student to be more information literate.
ladykaty - September 29, 2009 at 10:50 am
Report Abuse If the graduate students don't know the difference between a keyword and a subject search, I think, perhaps, that the university would do better to invest in a comprehensive information literacy instruction program rather than expensive "improvements" to the catalog.
commentarius - September 29, 2009 at 03:50 pm
Report Abuse Much as I am also irritated by users who don't know a keyword from a hole in the ground, the tendency to blame the user for not knowing how to use a catalog is exactly the kind of thinking that got us into this mess to start with. Yes, users are idiots. But good systems are designed for idiots and help idiots be successful despite their idiocy. That's why Google is so popular, and why catalogs are not. Any tool that requires "instruction" to use is doomed.
11134078 - September 29, 2009 at 04:22 pm
Report Abuse There is a serious difficulty in all this. Faceted cataloging is inadequate. We have to start from this realization. Good old LC subject headings are still (SHOULD still) be the way to go. Learning to use them takes a few hours, but it is really not a big deal. (I taught this stuff until just a few years ago.) Once the concepts of the free-floating headings and the authority files are understood and there is also a basic knowledge of the material that used to be in the introductory section of the "big red books" and now should pop up online when needed, the system is at its base quite simple (despite its occasional bouts of illogic) and very effective. By the way, the current OCLC search engine is an unusable abomination.
11134078 - September 29, 2009 at 04:24 pm
Report Abuse There is a serious difficulty in all this. Faceted cataloging is inadequate. We have to start from this realization. Good old LC subject headings are still (SHOULD still) be the way to go. Learning to use them takes a few hours, but it is really not a big deal. (I taught this stuff until just a few years ago.) Once the concepts of the free-floating headings and the authority files are understood and there is also a basic knowledge of the material that used to be in the introductory section of the "big red books" and now should pop up online when needed, the system is at its base quite simple (despite its occasional bouts of illogic) and very effective. By the way, the current OCLC search engine is an unusable abomination.
11134078 - September 29, 2009 at 04:24 pm
Report Abuse There is a serious difficulty in all this. Faceted cataloging is inadequate. We have to start from this realization. Good old LC subject headings are still (SHOULD still) be the way to go. Learning to use them takes a few hours, but it is really not a big deal. (I taught this stuff until just a few years ago.) Once the concepts of the free-floating headings and the authority files are understood and there is also a basic knowledge of the material that used to be in the introductory section of the "big red books" and now should pop up online when needed, the system is at its base quite simple (despite its occasional bouts of illogic) and very effective. By the way, the current OCLC search engine is an unusable abomination.
rattebur - September 29, 2009 at 05:01 pm
Report Abuse Commenters who claim that students need to be taught the correct way to use existing catalogs need to come up with a comprehensive way to teach every student at a university this information. Librarians don't often have access to a wide swath of students for instructional purposes; at many institutions, they are dependent on teaching faculty and instructors to want to integrate library instruction. More user-friendly catalogs seem much more realistic at this point.
rattebur - September 29, 2009 at 05:03 pm
Report Abuse Commenters who claim that students need to be taught the correct way to use existing catalogs need to come up with a comprehensive way to teach every student at a university this information. Librarians don't often have access to a wide swath of students for instructional purposes; at many institutions, they are dependent on teaching faculty and instructors to want to integrate library instruction. More user-friendly catalogs seem much more realistic at this point.
11134078 - September 29, 2009 at 05:52 pm
Report Abuse rattebur, my friend, there are lots of things students need to be taught. Many of them are now subjected to freshman seminars, how to study sessions, long harangues to the effect that credit card companies really do send bills and really do charge extortionate rates of interest if those bills are not paid promptly. Come on now, how about a session on how to use subject headings? And "user friendly catalogs" are in fact hostile to users who actually know how to use catalogs because they are so damnably primitive and therefore yield so many irrelevant hits (or, alternatively) none at all.
jhough1 - September 30, 2009 at 08:05 am
Report Abuse I teach at Duke and live in Washington D. C. The LC catalog is wonderful. You can make a mistake in spelling, type in half a name, you name it, and you get something. Duke, I assume, has bought something, and you must have a perfectly spelled name, usually with first name and maybe the middle initial to get a reasonable response even on the author catalog. I just use LC and check the Duke stacks. Unfortunately, older books are off campus. Is it not possible to use LC technology?
erla32 - September 30, 2009 at 08:24 am
Report Abuse Duke uses an open-source solution developed by the NC State libraries and used to search all of the Triangle Research Network institutions (Duke, NCSU, UNC-CH, NCCU). Library of Congress has a purchased system -- Ex Libris.
zizzer - September 30, 2009 at 09:37 am
Report Abuse I guess I have finally reached the tipping point of the generational divide, maybe it's just my learning style, but I don't like getting a muddle of everything and the kitchen sink from search tools. I like knowing what media the tool I am searching indexes and where it will ultimately lead me.
Short of that I would want clear delineations in any results, and I see that frequently from students who didn't grow up digital. They don't want an eBook, they want a "real" book they can check out and take home. (We serve a rural area with spotty Internet access.) They don't want a citation, they want full text - right NOW - that they can print or save to a flash drive for later. We have a federated search tool to a set of consortium resources and many find it very confusing and it often yields inferior results because the searches have to be dumbed down to adapt to each individual database. In short, it stinks, and users often don't understand the results and miss great information. The smart ones ask for help, which gives me concern about the rest.
I would that we had more time to teach Information Literacy. When I was in elementary school our library visits had three components: Time that we learned about the library, story time, and time to find books to check out. In my freshman year of college I had to take a half-semester course called Bibliography where we learned to use the library and its resources. As it is now, we are lucky to get 50 minutes with the students who take Study Skills, but not all students are required to take it, and many consider the library day a day to blow off.
blackbart - September 30, 2009 at 09:38 am
Report Abuse I _think_ the issue that this article is trying to probe is the dichotomy between binary searching and search engines. Most well-established library catalogs use binary searching--you type in a term, and the catalog returns only those records that contain the term you typed (in whatever fields you did or didn't specify, depending on the search and the catalog interface). The results are binary: either the record matches the search string and is retrieved, or it doesn't and isn't. Search engines like Google, by contrast, use complex algorithms to interpret the search string in an effort to show you what the software "thinks" you wanted based on that search string.
It takes all of five minutes to explain that difference to students. It might take as long as an hour to drill the difference into them by demonstrating identical searches on binary and search-engine interfaces. Each has tremendous strengths; each has weaknesses relative to the other model. But do we really need to spend a gajillion dollars in software development and retrain the entire university community just because students were using Google before they got to campus?
greebie - September 30, 2009 at 09:44 am
Report Abuse Library instruction is limited. To remember what special ritual dance you need to do in your specific discipline, you need to actually practice it. That means dancing with each and every student for quite a long time. Personally, I'd rather put the teaching resources into critical thinking skills, source evaluation, finding learning networks (the best way to get the 'classic' tomes of a field is still knowing a prof and then tracing the scholarly pedigree via the bibliography).
Open source models look promising and hold the best option for sustainability over time. These products are very expensive for what they do - they shouldn't have to be.
September 28, 2009After Losing Users in Catalogs, Libraries Find Better Search Software
Lisa Billings/FreelanceJean A. Bauer, a graduate student in American history at the U. of Virginia, has been frustrated with the confusing search results from the university library's old online catalog. A new one is in the works.
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Lisa Billings/FreelanceJean A. Bauer, a graduate student in American history at the U. of Virginia, has been frustrated with the confusing search results from the university library's old online catalog. A new one is in the works.
By Marc Parry
Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. So you might think that typing his name into Virgo, Virginia's online library catalog, would start you off with a book about him.
Jean A. Bauer tried it the other night. At the top of the results list were papers from a physics conference in Brazil.
The problem is that traditional online library catalogs don't tend to order search results by ranked relevance, and they can befuddle users with clunky interfaces. Bauer, a graduate student specializing in early American history, once had such a hard time finding materials that she titled a bibliography "Meager Fruits of an Ongoing Fight With Virgo."
That's changing because of two technology trends. First, a growing number of universities are shelling out serious money for sophisticated software that makes exploring their collections more like the easy-to-filter experience you might find in an online Sears catalog.
Second, Virginia and several other colleges, including Villanova University and the University of Rochester, are producing free open-source programs that tackle the same problems with no licensing fees.
A key feature of this software genre is that it helps you make sense of data through "faceted" searching, common when you shop online for a new jacket or a stereo system. Say you type in "Susan B. Anthony." The new system will ask if you want books by her or about her, said Susan L. Gibbons, vice provost and dean of Rochester's River Campus Libraries. Users can also sort by media type, language, and date.
These products can also rank search results by relevance and use prompts of "Did you mean … ?"
"It's sort of our answer to, Why it is you need a library when you have Google?" said Ms. Gibbons. "What this is going to do is show how much you've been missing."
It's a pressing issue. Libraries once had a monopoly on organizing data about content. No longer. And today some users gripe about how libraries present materials online: how scattered they are, how sluggish searches can be, and how often those searches are useful only if you already know exactly what you want.
The worry for Jennifer Bowen, assistant dean of the River Campus Libraries, is that library catalogs could become "marginalized."
"There are people who just cannot find what they need," she said. "And they're just sort of giving up on libraries."
A Single Entry Point The issue concerns professors, too. One software developer pointed to a 2006 study by Ithaka, a nonprofit group that promotes the use of information technology in higher education. It found that faculty members value the campus library but "perceive themselves to be decreasingly dependent on the library for their research and teaching." The report described what appeared to be "growing ambivalence about the campus library."
The buzzwords for the technology that librarians hope will allow users to rediscover their collections are "Web-scale index searching."
That, in Ms. Gibbons's translation, is a fancy way of saying that the system, like Google, works by searching against a vast index of information. It's a contrast with an earlier attempt to deal with the search problem through "federated searching," where there is no local index, and each query is taken from the user and sent individually to various databases.
You expect a Google search to cast the broadest possible net. The same should apply to a library catalog, the thinking goes. That means a single entry point to the collection. The entire collection: books, articles, digital objects. Heck, why not even herbarium specimens?
Marshall Breeding, director of innovative technology and research at the Vanderbilt University library, calls the concept "an ambitious goal—and at this point I think it's more of a goal than reality."
But the move toward simplified, silo-busting, relevant-result-returning library searches may come with its own problems.
Mr. Breeding, who founded the Web site Library Technology Guides, has observed "pockets of resistance" in the library community. Some argue that new search products—sometimes called next-generation catalogs or discovery interfaces—amount to a dumbing-down of catalogs.
By contrast, traditional search tools reinforce the idea that library users need a clear understanding of the different materials involved in research, Mr. Breeding said, such as the difference between articles and monographs. New interfaces that mix many different information sources blur all that, he said.
And then there are the slew of devil-in-the-details questions that arise from the content convergence.
Will users understand it? Will they find what they want? Will books be properly represented among the flood of articles? What about image collections? Could the pile of stuff just get too big?
Libraries' online catalogs are typically one module of an integrated software system that runs library functions like the circulation desk, acquisitions, and cataloging. They are a window into what libraries manage inside their integrated systems, Mr. Breeding said, which tends to be mostly the print collections. But the problem is they lack a good way to include the growing electronic part of the library collection, he said.
What the new interfaces share is the ability to derive material from catalogs and combine it with other data in a modern package.
The commercial market for these interfaces has already produced Encore, from Innovative Interfaces, adopted by at least 44 academic libraries in the United States, according to Mr. Breeding's tally; AquaBrowser, from Media lab Solutions, used by 23 libraries; and Primo, from Ex Libris, adopted by 13 libraries.
How much institutions will have to pay for new commercial systems will vary depending on both what comes with the software and the size and complexity of the library. That could mean a price as low as $10,000 for a small academic library to one in the $100,000 range for a much larger one, Mr. Breeding said.
A 'Shift of Power' In the open-source world, at least 10 academic libraries have turned to VuFind, which originated at Villanova. Virginia's Blacklight, with Stanford University as a development partner, is in a beta phase. And Rochester's eXtensible Catalog, or XC, backed by $1.2-million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will be rolled out in the spring.
The shift from commercial products to open-source ones is about more than money, though.
Bess Sadler, chief architect of the online library environment at the University of Virginia, sees the open-source Blacklight project as a "shift of power," as she wrote recently in the journal Library Hi Tech. The idea is that libraries, which know their local needs, should control the technology that patrons use to gain access to their collections. That's a change from the one-size-is-good-enough-for-everybody, commercially managed model that has prevailed in the industry.
The ability to customize is important when it comes to something like a music collection. A librarian might get this question: "I play the guitar. My boyfriend plays the flute. What duets can we play together?" In the past, even though Virginia had cataloged the instruments used in all of its sheet music, a search of that information was impossible because the fields that were indexed were maintained by a vendor, Ms. Sadler said.
"The problem with a vendor solution is that it's hard for vendors to tailor that solution for different collections, for different user populations, for different specializations," she said.
With an open-source system, a library can set its own relevance rankings and adjust them based on what users want. By maintaining the system itself, Virginia is now able to search by musical instrument.
The downside is libraries need someone on staff who can install and maintain the open-source program. So far, vendors aren't supporting products like VuFind the way they support established open-source products like Koha and Evergreen, both integrated library systems, said Mr. Breeding. Vendors will install software like Evergreen, host it on their own servers, and provide a help desk that you can call if something breaks. Not so for the newer software. Another barrier is going to be trusting that an open-source project is sustainable. There is always a concern that there will not be a community of users to keep developing it.
Also, the open-source systems have been slower to fold in article-level data, Mr. Breeding said. Most of that action is on the commercial side.
With Blacklight, you won't be able to get individual journal articles. If you're doing research on cell division, for example, a search will tell you that Virginia subscribes to the journal about cell division, but you'll have to go to a journal database for the article.
"That's going to be true for a very long time," Ms. Sadler said. "For the foreseeable future, you're going to need to go to separate interfaces in order to search licensed content."
But commercial vendors, smelling a new market, are stepping in. Serials Solutions, a subsidiary of ProQuest, released a software product in July called Summon. The company has been negotiating deals with publishers and content providers to create a searchable index of their content. It's like Google, except what Summon provides is an index of the "deep Web" of paid content. So now university libraries that pay for a subscription to Summon can let their users search their licensed content as well as locally owned stuff, together. Summon has 17 customers so far, including Arizona State University and Dartmouth College.
The catch? It can be expensive.
Andrew S. Nagy, senior discovery-services engineer at Serials Solutions, wouldn't say how expensive. But the cost of a subscription can run into the tens of thousands, said one university administrator who was not authorized to discuss price and thus wanted to remain anonymous. Summon also does not have permission to display the full text of articles.
At Virginia, the open-source Blacklight has paid off for Ms. Bauer.
"You know the feeling of when you go into the stacks, and you're usually looking for one book, but then it's almost always the book that's next to it that's the one you really need?" she asked. "It helps replicate a bit of that experience."
And if you search for Thomas Jefferson, it even starts you off with a book about him.
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Comments paievoli - September 28, 2009 at 09:18 amNeed to find a way to self sustain these costs or they are going to become prohibitive in the future. Self sustaining models are the future of all business and academia. Read Chris Anderson's "Free".
It explains how to deal with this new economic model that will affect us all.
mitt4jp - September 28, 2009 at 03:47 pm
Report Abuse I found this article a little mis-leading. First of all, a library catalog is structured differently from a search engine. To find items about Thomas Jefferson, the correct way is to use "Thomas Jefferson" as a subject, not as keywords anywere search.
Unfortunately, instead of teaching students how to conduct a precise search with few relevant results, faculty and librarians have found an easy way out -- googlize everything.
uvalibmobile - September 28, 2009 at 06:26 pm
Report Abuse The University of Virginia is using both Blacklight and Summon in its new mobile site (lib.virginia.edu/mobile). We created a web service called "Blacksummon" which merges results from the two indices and allows faceted browsing. A third API from Ebsco allows direct downloads of some PDFs.
bsparris - September 29, 2009 at 09:07 am
Report Abuse The problem is people are trying to use the catalog the wrong way. Instead of a keyword search like on the internet and online databases, the catalog offers something unique-- direct access to exactly what you want through a browse or exact search using subject headings, authors, titles. An old idea but it still works--give it a try!
bsparris - September 29, 2009 at 09:07 am
Report Abuse The problem is people are trying to use the catalog the wrong way. Instead of a keyword search like on the internet and online databases, the catalog offers something unique-- direct access to exactly what you want through a browse or exact search using subject headings, authors, titles. An old idea but it still works--give it a try!
bsparris - September 29, 2009 at 09:07 am
Report Abuse The problem is people are trying to use the catalog the wrong way. Instead of a keyword search like on the internet and online databases, the catalog offers something unique-- direct access to exactly what you want through a browse or exact search using subject headings, authors, titles. An old idea but it still works--give it a try!
pucciot - September 29, 2009 at 09:58 am
Report Abuse The Library was once considered to be the center of the University. It is now treated the same as the food court in the student center. It seems that the University Libraries (and Librarians) are not being rightly considered as an important part of the educational process. Teaching students what to search, how to search, and how to choose good resources is an important part of the the University education. Today it seems that just because our students come in knowing how to perform a google search that that is all they need. Library databases are "tools". Knowing how to use a tool properly must be taught. To apply a simple metaphor would be to think that just because a student took _Shop_ in High School that they should be able to be brought into a factory to build a car.
The University Library and the use of its resources should be considered part of the University Education. Web level discovery layers are new useful tools - but they do nothing to educate a student to be more information literate.
ladykaty - September 29, 2009 at 10:50 am
Report Abuse If the graduate students don't know the difference between a keyword and a subject search, I think, perhaps, that the university would do better to invest in a comprehensive information literacy instruction program rather than expensive "improvements" to the catalog.
commentarius - September 29, 2009 at 03:50 pm
Report Abuse Much as I am also irritated by users who don't know a keyword from a hole in the ground, the tendency to blame the user for not knowing how to use a catalog is exactly the kind of thinking that got us into this mess to start with. Yes, users are idiots. But good systems are designed for idiots and help idiots be successful despite their idiocy. That's why Google is so popular, and why catalogs are not. Any tool that requires "instruction" to use is doomed.
11134078 - September 29, 2009 at 04:22 pm
Report Abuse There is a serious difficulty in all this. Faceted cataloging is inadequate. We have to start from this realization. Good old LC subject headings are still (SHOULD still) be the way to go. Learning to use them takes a few hours, but it is really not a big deal. (I taught this stuff until just a few years ago.) Once the concepts of the free-floating headings and the authority files are understood and there is also a basic knowledge of the material that used to be in the introductory section of the "big red books" and now should pop up online when needed, the system is at its base quite simple (despite its occasional bouts of illogic) and very effective. By the way, the current OCLC search engine is an unusable abomination.
11134078 - September 29, 2009 at 04:24 pm
Report Abuse There is a serious difficulty in all this. Faceted cataloging is inadequate. We have to start from this realization. Good old LC subject headings are still (SHOULD still) be the way to go. Learning to use them takes a few hours, but it is really not a big deal. (I taught this stuff until just a few years ago.) Once the concepts of the free-floating headings and the authority files are understood and there is also a basic knowledge of the material that used to be in the introductory section of the "big red books" and now should pop up online when needed, the system is at its base quite simple (despite its occasional bouts of illogic) and very effective. By the way, the current OCLC search engine is an unusable abomination.
11134078 - September 29, 2009 at 04:24 pm
Report Abuse There is a serious difficulty in all this. Faceted cataloging is inadequate. We have to start from this realization. Good old LC subject headings are still (SHOULD still) be the way to go. Learning to use them takes a few hours, but it is really not a big deal. (I taught this stuff until just a few years ago.) Once the concepts of the free-floating headings and the authority files are understood and there is also a basic knowledge of the material that used to be in the introductory section of the "big red books" and now should pop up online when needed, the system is at its base quite simple (despite its occasional bouts of illogic) and very effective. By the way, the current OCLC search engine is an unusable abomination.
rattebur - September 29, 2009 at 05:01 pm
Report Abuse Commenters who claim that students need to be taught the correct way to use existing catalogs need to come up with a comprehensive way to teach every student at a university this information. Librarians don't often have access to a wide swath of students for instructional purposes; at many institutions, they are dependent on teaching faculty and instructors to want to integrate library instruction. More user-friendly catalogs seem much more realistic at this point.
rattebur - September 29, 2009 at 05:03 pm
Report Abuse Commenters who claim that students need to be taught the correct way to use existing catalogs need to come up with a comprehensive way to teach every student at a university this information. Librarians don't often have access to a wide swath of students for instructional purposes; at many institutions, they are dependent on teaching faculty and instructors to want to integrate library instruction. More user-friendly catalogs seem much more realistic at this point.
11134078 - September 29, 2009 at 05:52 pm
Report Abuse rattebur, my friend, there are lots of things students need to be taught. Many of them are now subjected to freshman seminars, how to study sessions, long harangues to the effect that credit card companies really do send bills and really do charge extortionate rates of interest if those bills are not paid promptly. Come on now, how about a session on how to use subject headings? And "user friendly catalogs" are in fact hostile to users who actually know how to use catalogs because they are so damnably primitive and therefore yield so many irrelevant hits (or, alternatively) none at all.
jhough1 - September 30, 2009 at 08:05 am
Report Abuse I teach at Duke and live in Washington D. C. The LC catalog is wonderful. You can make a mistake in spelling, type in half a name, you name it, and you get something. Duke, I assume, has bought something, and you must have a perfectly spelled name, usually with first name and maybe the middle initial to get a reasonable response even on the author catalog. I just use LC and check the Duke stacks. Unfortunately, older books are off campus. Is it not possible to use LC technology?
erla32 - September 30, 2009 at 08:24 am
Report Abuse Duke uses an open-source solution developed by the NC State libraries and used to search all of the Triangle Research Network institutions (Duke, NCSU, UNC-CH, NCCU). Library of Congress has a purchased system -- Ex Libris.
zizzer - September 30, 2009 at 09:37 am
Report Abuse I guess I have finally reached the tipping point of the generational divide, maybe it's just my learning style, but I don't like getting a muddle of everything and the kitchen sink from search tools. I like knowing what media the tool I am searching indexes and where it will ultimately lead me.
Short of that I would want clear delineations in any results, and I see that frequently from students who didn't grow up digital. They don't want an eBook, they want a "real" book they can check out and take home. (We serve a rural area with spotty Internet access.) They don't want a citation, they want full text - right NOW - that they can print or save to a flash drive for later. We have a federated search tool to a set of consortium resources and many find it very confusing and it often yields inferior results because the searches have to be dumbed down to adapt to each individual database. In short, it stinks, and users often don't understand the results and miss great information. The smart ones ask for help, which gives me concern about the rest.
I would that we had more time to teach Information Literacy. When I was in elementary school our library visits had three components: Time that we learned about the library, story time, and time to find books to check out. In my freshman year of college I had to take a half-semester course called Bibliography where we learned to use the library and its resources. As it is now, we are lucky to get 50 minutes with the students who take Study Skills, but not all students are required to take it, and many consider the library day a day to blow off.
blackbart - September 30, 2009 at 09:38 am
Report Abuse I _think_ the issue that this article is trying to probe is the dichotomy between binary searching and search engines. Most well-established library catalogs use binary searching--you type in a term, and the catalog returns only those records that contain the term you typed (in whatever fields you did or didn't specify, depending on the search and the catalog interface). The results are binary: either the record matches the search string and is retrieved, or it doesn't and isn't. Search engines like Google, by contrast, use complex algorithms to interpret the search string in an effort to show you what the software "thinks" you wanted based on that search string.
It takes all of five minutes to explain that difference to students. It might take as long as an hour to drill the difference into them by demonstrating identical searches on binary and search-engine interfaces. Each has tremendous strengths; each has weaknesses relative to the other model. But do we really need to spend a gajillion dollars in software development and retrain the entire university community just because students were using Google before they got to campus?
greebie - September 30, 2009 at 09:44 am
Report Abuse Library instruction is limited. To remember what special ritual dance you need to do in your specific discipline, you need to actually practice it. That means dancing with each and every student for quite a long time. Personally, I'd rather put the teaching resources into critical thinking skills, source evaluation, finding learning networks (the best way to get the 'classic' tomes of a field is still knowing a prof and then tracing the scholarly pedigree via the bibliography).
Open source models look promising and hold the best option for sustainability over time. These products are very expensive for what they do - they shouldn't have to be.
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