Copyright Infingement, Intellectual Property, and Artistic Plagiarism: Do They Mix?

Canadian authors Wayson Choy, Paul Yee and Sky Lee have launched a $6 million lawsuit against Chinese author Ling Zhang, alleging copyright infringement against her book Gold Mountain Blues, a family saga about Chinese immigrants to Canada originally written in Chinese. The lawsuit not only includes Zhang, whose also the author of Aftershock,, but also Penguin Canada’s parent company, Pearson Canada Inc., and translator Nicky Harman.  The details of the case are available for all to see.

Although Zhang contends Gold Mountain Blues is the result of years of research and several field trips to China and Western Canada, the Chinese Canadian authors believe the book contains numerous elements copied from their work, including characters, plots and descriptions.  As the four Chinese Canadian authors articulate, their stories are not clichés and they are certainly are not common.

This is precisely why this case is so unique and fascinating.  According to Canadian copyright laws,  plagiarism isn't a concept that easily fits under the Copyright Act.  In Canada at least, copyright covers words of the same sequence, but does not extend to ideas.   To complicate matters, proving similarity of expression between Gold Mountain Blues and the other works may be particularly difficult since the English text is a translation of a Chinese one.

As Kate Taylor points out in the Globe and Mail

Copyright cases can be difficult to win: Infringement is a narrow legal concept that involves direct reproduction of a substantial part of the original – compared to the broader academic or journalistic notions of plagiarism that can involve unattributed borrowing of ideas or sentences.

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Points of comparison

Examples of plot and character similarities between several Chinese-Canadian novels and Zhang Ling’s Gold Mountain Blues:

1. Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café (1990): In grave danger, a young Chinese man is rescued and then cared for by a beautiful girl, Kelora, of rare Chinese/Native heritage.

Gold Mountain Blues (2011): In grave danger, a young Chinese man is rescued and then cared for by a beautiful girl, Sundance, of rare Chinese/Native heritage.

In Disappearing Moon Cafe, Wong Gwei-chang is searching for bones, is discovered by Kelora Chen who speaks to him in Chinese, and meets her father, a Chinese man. In Gold Mountain Blues, Kam Shan runs away from Chinatown after talking to anti-Qing revolutionaries, including Sun Yat-sen . . . falls into riverbank, and is rescued by Sundance, who speaks to him in broken English. While Gwei-chang leaves Kelora on the heed of his mother, who told him to go back to China to dutifully marry, Sundance voluntarily permits Kam Shan to leave as she catches him trying to run away as her Chinese grandfather did the same thing many yrs ago (pg. 285).

• This seems to be a common theme in other artistic works. In Dances with Wolves, John Dunbar rescues Stands With Fist, and eventually falls in love. In fact, it was said that Avatar stole from Dances With Wolves as Jake Sully is rescued by Neytiri, and also falls in love, with her and the tribe. On another note, Aboriginal-Chinese relations and marriages were quite common in BC. Larry Grant, Howard Grant, Cedar and Bamboo did a whole documentary on First Nations-Chinese relations).

2. Disappearing Moon Café: The Chinese man is old now. Full of regret for his long lost love, Kelora, he dies after a visitation from her.

Gold Mountain Blues: The Chinese man is old now. After searching for his long lost love, Sundance, he dies after a visit from her.  However, in Disappearing Moon Cafe the context of the visits are quite different.  While Kelora shows up in Wong's Gwei-chang as he is in the last moments of his life; Kam-shan is visited out of the blue by Sundance, who later indirectly reveals to him that she borne him a son. When he asks her, she is annoyed, expecting that he wants to ask her out on a date.

3. Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony (1995): Wong Suk is disfigured after working on the railway. He rescues a white foreman who becomes gratefully indebted as well as a good friend. When the foreman dies, his son passes along a precious piece of gold.

Gold Mountain Blues: Ah-Fat is disfigured in a fight while working on the railway. He saves the life of his white foreman. They become good friends over the years. When the foreman’s wife dies, her will leaves money to Ah-Fat’s son.

While Jade Peony's relationship between the white foreman was purely platonic, the relationship between Kam Shan and the foreman (Rick Henderson) and his wife are much more complex. Ah-Fat sends his son Kam Shan to work for the Hendersons upon which Kam Shan and Mrs. Henderson is bound in an illicit affair. Upon her death, she leaves him $4000, half of which was supposed to go to her daughter (which already passed away after an accident, when she runs away from her mother's affair with the boy).

4. Paul Yee’s The Bone Collector’s Son (2003): Fourteen-year-old Bing works as a houseboy for a white couple in Vancouver. He becomes a target of white bullies but his employer Mrs. Bentley rescues him.

Gold Mountain Blues: Fifteen-year-old Kam Ho works as a houseboy for a white couple in Vancouver. He becomes a target of white bullies but his employer Mrs. Henderson rescues him.

• The idea that the houseboy is saved by his master is not an unfamiliar scene. In fact, this occurred often during the pre-Civil War America. When Frederick Douglass was about twelve years old, Hugh Auld's wife Sophia started teaching him the alphabet despite the fact that it was against the law to teach slaves to read. Douglass described her as a kind and tender-hearted woman, who treated Douglass like one human being ought to treat another..

5. Paul Yee’s Dead Man’s Gold (2002): Hard-working Shek buys a farm while younger brother

Ping hates farm work and goes to the city to gamble. Shek pays everyone but Ping. Ping is unhappy. Ping kills Shek.

Gold Mountain Blues: Hard-working Ah Fat buys a farm while his son Kam Shan hates farm work and goes to the city to gamble. Ah Fat pays others but not Kam Shan. Kam Shan is unhappy. He disappears.  The context is completely different. While Ping and Shek are in the same farm together, Ah Fat's two sons (Kam Shan and Kam Ho) are never physically together at one time in Vancouver although both do work for their father Ah Fat at different times. Unlike Ping's killing of Shek, Kam Shan does not kill his father, Ah Fat. Unlike Kam Shan who gambles in Chinatown with the money from his father's produce sales, Ping actually stopped gambling after working for his Shek, who never gives him any money.

• This scene of a farmer with a son who gambles his wealth away only to be forgiven by the father, is so common in literature that stretches back to the times of the bible. In fact, Luke 15:1 "Parable of the Lost Son" has been one of Christianity's most famous stories. (One which Tim Kelleher has written an entire book on, The Prodigal Son). I don't think it can be argued that this is an entirely unique scenario.

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Much has been written about the situation.  Part of the controversy stems from whether the Chinese language from Gold Mountain Blues has been plagiarized from original passages of these original Chinese Canadian English literary works. This episode highlights the transformative nature of the Internet.  A virtually unknown blogger who referred to himself simply as “Changjiang” alleged that Zhang had taken advantage of a "literary conundrum," one that Canadian Chinese writers cannot read Chinese, while Chinese readers and critics do not understand English.  So as a result, the lines are drawn and the legal and literary worlds clash intimately together over the results that will eventually set some precedents in the translation, publishing, and writing worlds.

Digital Scholarship Librarian - Simon Fraser University Library

Digital scholarship has been an emerging if not critical area in academia for the past decade.  From areas such as data management, to intellectual copyright, to digital humanities, almost every facet of intellectual inquiry has been somehow affected by the rise of digital scholarship.  It's not surprising to see academic libraries rising to the meet the needs of its users, namely that of faculty and researchers.   Simon Fraser University Library has posted a brand new position.   I'm salivating at this position - it seems to cover the gamut of what makes the new areas of librarianship so exciting.  Here are the details:

The full-time continuing position will support SFU faculty, graduate students, and other
users across the three SFU campuses and beyond.The incumbent will have the skills necessary to advance digital scholarship initiatives at Simon Fraser University by providing consultations, support, and project management for faculty, librarians, and students engaged in technology-rich scholarly projects. In conjunction with liaison librarians, Library Systems and others, he/she works directly with faculty, students, and others in identifying and facilitating the deployment of appropriate tools and technologies to meet research and/or publication needs.

The incumbent will also plan, implement, and promote scholarly communications services and increase campus awareness of author rights, Open Access, and new and existing funding mandates.  The Digital Scholarship Librarian will deliver or coordinate the delivery of individual and group instruction on scholarly communication and digital scholarship topics as a member of the Research Commons team.

This position will be attractive to adaptable individuals with excellent communication and collaborative skills and interest in developing them further. It will appeal to those who have an understanding of discipline-specific and interdisciplinary research methodology and are highly motivated to provide innovative and responsive services to faculty and students.

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ASSIGNMENT:

• Foster collaboration on the creation and curation of digital objects for research.
• Collaborate with Special Collections, University Archives, and other campus stakeholders in the access and preservation of digital assets.
• Work closely with Library Systems to scope, develop, and support digital projects
• Partner with faculty, graduate students and librarians to incorporate analytical tools, digitized and born-digital resources into research and teaching activities
• Provide project management expertise to liaison librarians, faculty, and students
• Track current issues and trends in scholarly communication
• Support the development of liaison librarians' knowledge and understanding of scholarly communication issues
• Plan, implement, promote scholarly communications services including increasing campus awareness of Author Rights, Open Access, Funding mandates/compliance, etc. with faculty, graduate students and applicable campus units (Grant facilitators, VP Research, Office of Research Services, Ethics, Teaching and Learning Centre, etc.)
• Increase campus awareness of SFU Library Digital Scholarship Services (OA Fund, Scholarly Digitization Fund, Public Knowledge Project, SFU’s research repository - Summit, and new developing services, with stakeholders).
• Manage operations of OA Fund – funding requests /criteria /eligibility
• Develop and deliver or coordinate delivery of online and in-person instruction sessions for bot students and faculty.
• Participate on Library project teams and committees.
• Develop professional knowledge and skills on a continuing basis.

Search: The Final Frontier

Search as we know it now is based on words and text, but this is limiting in many ways.  Merely searching the web of links and URLs no longer works in the sophisticated evolution of the Web.   How do we push out of those traditional boundaries of search?   Bing Director of Search at Microsoft's Bing Stefan Weitz has come out with an excellent book called simply Search predicting the world of search engines in the future, particularly when "every device, every object that surrounds us, and every person is connected and we have systems that can distinguish patterns from the noise."

Of course, when we think of  search, it is language-based.  The problem of our current search is the "low resolution" approach of describing things.  The statement a picture is worth a thousand words in this aspect is really apt: it literally takes at least a thousand words to precisely to define the attributes of even the most basic object as a table (such as dimensions, materials, country of origin, date of purchase, etc).  This is for a simple object, too!

According to Weitz, searching and describing the world required a method that both search engines and humans could process: words mapped to pages, and those same pages mapped to information.  Even audio-visual information are associated through text.  

What if search is described by very fine details not by human language but by things?  What if  sensors through a billion connected devices become an Internet representation of a physical object?  No longer do we have to rely on language as a universal descriptor, but suddenly the world can be modeled in seemingly endless detail using facets that have little relation to language.

The boundaries between digital and physical worlds blend into each other and complement one another.   In this new search world, the increasing digitization of the world means that everything can be described at higher resolutions than ever before.

Timing is everything, too, as the Web has moved away from being an information repository to a bridge that transports data and enables services to happen in real life.  Weitz likens this transformation of search from a large library into a digital proxy for the physical world.   Just as humans are unable to think about things isolation, the Web needs to perceive the world holistically, away from a Web of words to a Web of the world.  When search understands every characteristic of every object on the planet, it will be finally able to make those connections.  I've written about this in previous posts about the current evolution of the technology and how it shapes our thinking as information professionals.

These connections are called graphs.  By linking these disparate graphs, the commonalities that emerges will assemble a complete picture of the world and everything in it.  Every person and object can be described in hundreds of ways, from photos from Facebook to your personal weight when you're on a scale, to the energy consumed by your smartphone.  In this smart-world, machines build models that re-create reality, becoming aware and sensitive to our needs and inquiries.

Such machine learning - an area of artificial intelligence (AI) - allows search systems the capability to make sense of the world.  Whether we call this brave new world a Web of Things, Web 3.0, smart web, or intelligent web, is still to be determined.  But the potential for for the interconnectedness of this system that will change the way we search is almost as exciting as when the Web first became ubiquitous.  The future of search feels bright indeed.  

Class Hierarchies and the Ivy Leagues

In Excellent Sheep, the author, essayist, and literary critic Bill Deresiewicz writes about the state of American education: the the entitled and the elite.  Examining the decaying state of education in the United States, the author pulls no punches in his disparaging assessment of how Ivy Leagues have shaped American higher education for the worse.

A professor of English at Yale University, there is no other with such insider knowledge of the intellectual factory than Deresiewicz himself, who ironically is himself a product of the Ivy league privileged class (whom he comfortably acknowledges) before he decided to abandon his faculty position in favour of freelance writing.

In 2008, Deresiewicz published a controversial essay in the The American Scholar titled The Disadvantages of an Elite Education which criticizes Ivy League and elite higher education institutions for supposedly coddling their students and discouraging independent thought.  Deresiewicz asserts elite institutions ultimately produce students who are unable to communicate with people who don't have the same background as themselves.

Fast-forward to 2014 and in Excellent Sheep, he continues the argument:

. . . the problem is the Ivy League itself - the position it and other schools have been allowed to occupy.  The problem is that we have contracted the training of our leadership class to a set of private institutions.  However much they claim to act, or think they're acting, for the common good, they will always place their interests first.  They will always be the creatures of the rich.  The arrangement is great for the schools, whose wealth and influence continue to increase . . .

Credentialism -  Colleges have become inundated with job fairs and the two most coveted: consulting and finance.  It seems as if the number of degrees and the most prestigious jobs have curtailed society's sense of worth - and this has crept up and in fact this mindset is being cultivated early in the student's mind.  

Corporatization - In many ways it is the fall of Humanities and the rise of a technocracy which thirsts for fame and wealth.   The results of this has been further monetization and privatization of  higher education; whatever cannot be measured as an "outcome" for the institution's bottom line is cut and slashed in the name of efficiency and global competition.  What are MOOCs but further watering down of quality instruction, less face-time with professors, and further reduction of adjunct instructors altogether?

Class Privilege - In conspiratorial fashion, the system is fixed (but not flawed) in that it's designed specifically to sustain the class hierarchy, mirroring many of current society's problematic income gaps.  Deresiewicz points out an appalling fact: the majority of American presidential candidates since 1984 had been educated from the Ivy Leagues.  On the surface it appear as if the "best of the best" rise to the top to be a nation's leaders; however, the underpinnings of how the structure of such a rigid class system sustained by the (wealthy) elite for the elite is troubling to say the least.

Cynical, you say?  The situation is more pronounced in America than it is here in Canada (although Deresiewicz praises Canada, Finland, and Singapore for their egalitarian systems not yet tainted).  However, I already do see symptoms of this higher education vortex.  Each year as funding is reduced is one year closer we move the needle to the meritocratic hierarchy that Deresiewicz so despises.   We can only hope that Deresiewicz's early warning signs are just an exaggeration.  I fear not.

Welcome to New Beginnings, and New Endings in 2015

This site started as an experiment in 2006 during a professional practicum with my now colleague and mentor Dean Giustini at the Biomedical Branch Library at the University of British Columbia.  My first assignment?  To create a blog and keep track of my experiences through concise and succinct written reflections.

An exciting time 2006 came to be -- Web 2.0 emerged as a force to be reckoned with and the possibilities and opportunities for implementing these new technologies had just begun.  New positions within organizations were ripe within a booming economy and the rise from the ashes of the dot-com crash.  It seemed like the right time for the beginning of many things.

Well, nine years later, and we find that the evolution of social media has not quite changed the world, but it's certainly made a difference.  Mobile technologies, semantic web, and Internet of Things, have all surfaced as potentially game-changing technologies that will impact the world.   My site has attempted to follow these important trends and help me keep abreast of these rapid changes.

But when does one begin to turn the corner?   I have found that a passion to connect and inform with my audience has waned at times and the quantity of posts has dipped to levels that I am not comfortable to continue the site.  Has it become a hobby or a burden?  

2015 is a new start.  A re-branding is in order.  Here are three things I pledge to work on for my resolution in this upcoming year:

1. Focus on liaison, reference, and collection building work. This site will be situated as a canvas on which to paint new ideas, experiment, and synthesize experiences together on a coherent and continual basis.  The convergence of technology and demographic shifts has brought librarianship into uncharted territory - open data, open education, digital humanities (just to name a few of many) mean the landscape of academic libraries will be shifting tectonically in the next few years.  There's much listening and watching to do.  This site will aim to follow those trends and conversations.

2.  Curriculum - speaking of which, there is also an Asian Canadian & Migration Studies program in development at UBC - a unique program that encourages students to explore the rich history, culture, and contemporary development of Asian communities in Canada by supporting co-creation of knowledge with community-based organizations.  In a multi-culturally diverse country we live in here in North America, it's one of many that are evolving in the academic ecology.  Where is the academic library's place in this knowledge creation, especially in community-based research?   I hope to add to this developing discussion with my own experiences and insight throughout the process.

3.  The Personal & the Professional - I've been asked why this site doesn't show more of me.  It doesn't, but it should.   There are book reviews to be written; film reviews to be articulated; news stories to analyze.  So onward and so forth.

Telling Everyone What A ‎Serious Attempt to Analyze What Change Really Means #Socialmedia

I've followed UBC Journalism professor Alfred Hermida, who's known as a "news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator," for a number of years.  So when his latest book Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters came out, I couldn't resist from taking a look look at this title.  Indeed, it is packed with progeny of insight about the different angles of social media.   Hermida is often quoted in the media and cited in academic circles for his research about the evolution of digital journalism.  The book certainly doesn't disappoint in its analysis of the transforming media landscape - one where citizen journalists and bloggers blur the line between what is reporting and rumour.  Audiences have become editors and emotion often drives the primeval urge to share and be social.  As Hermida puts it, social media

. . . requires a different mindset from the way we approached things like the newspaper.  The daily paper was finite.  It had a set number of pages, column inches and words.  And even then, most didn't read every single story and perhaps ignored some sections altogether.  Social media is the ambient music of the every day.  Much of what is shared consists of the mundane details of life, the small talk and casual exchanges that are important in fostering societal bonds.  It is flowing in attention.  Like ambient music, we know it is there, but it is unobtrusive.

This book is a real game changer - it's no coincidence it's on best sellers lists and at the front of bookstores.

From Crisis to "Revolution"? The new paradigm of collection management in university libraries

As a liaison librarian in Asian Studies, I'm still in the learning stages of collection development - the nuances of balancing purchases with budget constraints.  Approval plans amidst the restructuring of firm orders.  E-books versus print titles.  DDA packages that no longer seem to be to the advantageous to publishers who pass on the costs to academic libraries.  It's sometimes feels like a whirlwind tour of changes.

However, after coming across Blanca San Jose Montano's "The new paradigm of collection management in university libraries: from crisis to revolution," it helps contextualize the current chaos of collection management.  Montano positions collection management in an historic timeline, one with a very long process where "internal" and "external" factors interact to transform the collection and its management activities.  Libraries are living organisms in continuous change that adapts to the context where they exist and which is the cause of their progress. It is formed by “vital elements” such as the collection – which is its basic element and the nucleus of its activity.

We can look at then, Thomas Kuhn, whose theory of the "paradigm shift" in science views science as ultimately a product of human activity – and being a social product, it is formed by processes where internal and external factors interact - a theory that divides science evolution different (altogether five stages).  This article puts things into focus with three salient points for us academic librarian selectors who are often too steeped in our work that we can sometimes forget to take a step back and look at the greater picture.  Here are three takeaways:

1. Libraries adapt to their historical context.  Libraries live and breathe on the technological, social, cultural and political transformations that converge and interact, with a cause – effect correlation that is difficult to establish for its rapid evolution. In the past decades, the developments in the digital fields have gained momentum, the library maintains and increases the relevance of its fundamental mission to organize and preserve that has neither changed nor has been deprecated. The library is no longer a static place and becomes a space; the collection remains a tangible possession deposited in a place and becomes a material network with value-added services, and the user becomes an active element of conversation.

2. University libraries are information systems. They have transformed their aims and functions to become a unified university information system, enlarging their mission of conserving and preserving the teaching and researching collections to make them more useful and competitive. These libraries seek to facilitate learning and academic communication, adapting to the digital world, their institutions and their users.

3. The tools for conventional “collection management” have changed.  In fact, they have gone through a "revolution." The new model of “cooperative collection management” should be configured so as to provide the library and its community with a balanced, homogeneous and standardized view of its purposes, strategies and good common practices.

Thus, it is important to reflect (and breathe) when doing collection management work.  It's not easy, particularly with the barriers and constant barrage of seemingly shifting priorities and moving targets.  Collection management is a continuum - if we aren't careful to move along with the changing profession, not only will it remain stale, we risk becoming obsolete to our users.  

How Not to be a Digital Zombie

You know who I am, what I do, and more importantly, whether or not I can help you or someone you know.

Author and management consultant Bernard Marr offers excellent advice on how to introduce ourselves in the often chaotic world of small talk and cocktail party conversations.  It's not as easy as it looks - looking and sounding like an intelligent human being while not nervously cracking under the pressure.   

Asian Canadian Archives - a Window Into the Past

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I recently had the good fortune to work with a prominent community organizer in donating his archives to the UBC Library.  Wong-Chu was born in Hong Kong and described himself as nomad for many years. He didn’t settle in Vancouver until 1965 when he was an adult. A writer, photographer, historian, radio producer, community organizer, activist, editor, as well as a literary and cultural engineer, Wong-Chu kept meticulous records which include his work with:

• Canadian cultural and literary communities; 
• Asian Canadian writers; 
• social justice and historical issues related to discrimination of Chinese and other Asian ethnic groups; 
• Canada and Vancouver's Chinese and other Asian cultural communities

As Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art puts it,

 a persistent activist and cultural producer Jim co-founded the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop, Ricepaper Magazine, Pender Guy Radio, the Asian Canadian Performing Arts Resource (ACPAR), literASIAN: A Festival of Pacific Rim Asian Canadian Writing and the Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Festival. With the sheer girth of his activity Jim has been instrumental in creating a cultural scene inclusive of Asian Canadian talent.

As an academic librarian, community engagement has been an important part of my role in the library.    The recent creation of a program called Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM) is a new multidisciplinary initiative that provides students with the opportunity to explore the rich history, culture, and contemporary development of Asian communities in Canada. The minor will support the building of a dynamic and sustainable Asian Canadian community initiative at UBC that aspires to build strong peer-to-peer linkages between researchers and provide mentoring and training for students, in concert with supporting collaborative partnerships in the co-creation of knowledge with Asian Canadian community-based organizations.

So instead of textbook-focused program, the collection of these courses focuses on the local history, providing students opportunities to connect and learn from the pioneers that made the community the diversity it is today, and creating course materials through archival research and new documentary approaches such as oral histories - something which brings in the experiential component that academia sometimes misses the point on.

Over the next decade, it will be fascinating to see the rise of this grassroots approach to teaching and learning - the library in many ways is the focal point of this process.  I'm looking forward to reporting back on our progress.

Horizon Report 2014 - The Academic Research Library Edition

It’s that time of year when the NMC Horizon Project, a 12-year effort established in 2002, unleashes what it identifies and describes as the emerging technologies likeliest to have the largest impact over the coming five years in every sector of education around the globe. 

As I’ve written in previous postings about Horizon Report, it’s always like Christmas Eve anticipation. This year is even more exciting and interesting as this version of the NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Library Edition examines six key emerging technology trends for their impact on academic and research libraries worldwide. 

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less

Electronic Publishing
If the first revolution in electronic publishing was making publishing platforms accessible to anyone, the next phase is now to link these platforms together in producing new combinations and new types of content. New concepts such as responsive design and open access will allow that content to be archived as well as ported to any device, making it easier for libraries to publish resources that assist and reach people outside of the physical buildings.

• Academic and research libraries are currently focused on growing their activity around the creation of original publications through e-journals or e-books, research data, and learning content that supports their institutions
• As a growing amount of educational content becomes readily available via the Internet, libraries have a major incentive to more seamlessly connect people with their resources and scholarly information
• Well-established initiatives include the publishing of a range of scholarly content, such as conference proceedings, monographs, and theses and dissertations libraries have adapted to publishing content, rather than simply purchasing content to share with their constituents. 
• For example, University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh, for example, now publishes more than 35 scholarly online journals, developed through an online workflow that enables content to be consumed by students, faculty, and researchers across a variety of devices

Mobile Apps
For several years now, a revolution has been taking place in software development that parallels similar shifts in the music, publishing, and retail industries. Mass market is giving way to niche market, and with it, the era of highly priced large suites of integrated software has shifted to a new view of what software should be. 

• Mobile apps embody the convergence of several technologies that lend themselves to use in academic and research libraries, including annotation tools, applications for creation and composition, and social networks.
• Mobile apps continue to gain traction in academic and research libraries, because they are particularly useful for learning as they enable people to experience new concepts wherever they are, often across multiple devices.
• As academic and research libraries begin to understand the potential of external apps, they are going beyond providing searching and reading tools by developing their own apps to create greater awareness of how libraries can assist students and faculty.

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years

Bibliometrics and Citation Technologies
Viewed as a set of mathematical and statistical methods to quantitatively analyze citations and content of academic literature, the technology has advanced rapidly in the age of computers as new algorithms are being developed to better gauge an author or journal’s impact in the field, and help researchers efficiently filter through research databases or select the most appropriate journal for publication.

• Bibliometrics encompasses citation count, journal impact factor (JIF), and h-index, among other metrics that can be used to support grant applications, attainment of new and tenured positions, and requests for raises or promotions. 
• Bibliometrics is crucial to quantitatively demonstrating the quality of an institution’s research, and these measures
• Advances in bibliometrics are helping academic and research libraries maintain a competitive edge by maximizing the influence of their scientific outputs, and thus reinforcing their effort to gain funding.

Open Content
Open content uses open licensing schemes to encourage not only the sharing of information, but the sharing of pedagogies and experiences as well. Part of the appeal of open content is that it is a response to both the rising costs of traditionally published resources and the lack of educational resources in some regions. 

• Increased use of OER in higher education has made academic libraries the coordinators of campus units in the development of open content
• Institutions that are implementing large-scale open content initiatives are relying on their libraries to lead the charge
• OSU Libraries of Oregon State University embarked on a pilot program that manages OSU Press and OSU Extended Campus in the creation, review, and support of open textbooks
• The movement toward open content reflects a growing shift in the way scholars in many parts of the world are conceptualizing education to a view that is more about the process of learning than the information conveyed. 

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years

The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of connected objects that link the physical world with the world of information through the web. Embedded chips, sensors, or tiny processors attached to an object allow helpful information about the object, such as cost, age, temperature, color, pressure, or humidity to be transmitted over the Internet. 

• This simple connection allows remote management, status monitoring, tracking, and alerts if the objects they are attached to are in danger of being damaged or spoiled. Many web tools allow objects to be annotated with descriptions, photographs, connections to other objects, and other contextual information; the Internet of Things makes access to these data as easy as it is to use the web.
• Connect people’s interactions with library catalogs online with their experiences in the physical facilities. Many catalogs currently offer a “favorite” so users can easily add items to their virtual list of preferences and readings. Through an IoT-enabled app, maps and directions to each of those resources can be provided to patrons upon entering the library.

Semantic Web and Linked Data
Tim Berners-Lee originally envisioned the semantic web as a natural evolution of the web. His idea is that eventually the semantic web might be able to help people solve very difficult problems by presenting connections between seemingly unrelated concepts, individuals, events, or things — connections that it would take many people many years to perceive, but that could become obvious through the kinds of associations made possible when the semantics of the data are exposed.

• Academic and research libraries are in a unique position to benefit from the increased exposure and contextualization that semantic tools can bring to their collections. 
• Library catalogs will be a more valuable information resource if their metadata is an interoperable part of the semantic web and not siloed in separate inaccessible databases. 
• It is no longer enough for libraries to have their own websites with collection data; there is growing emphasis to integrate these collection catalogs into sites and services more frequently accessed by users. Students and researchers need to be able to connect from Google, for example, back to their specific library.
• As an increasing number of librarians recognize the importance of sharing information about collections across institutions, they are forming communities of practice, such as Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums (LODLAM), a global network of professionals interested in working with linked open data in their institutions.

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So there you go - the Horizon Report has been accurate on a number of fronts since it was first released.