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Oren Beit-Arie: How Aggregators are Helping Users, Libraries and Publishers Benefit from Change
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Oren Beit-Arie: How Aggregators are Helping Users, Libraries and Publishers Benefit from Change
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Thanks very much, Silverchair, for inviting me to talk. I know I'm at the end of the program. And everybody needs to catch a plane or a boat or a unicycle and go back home. So I'll try to be as brief as I can. And I need-- that's where it is. So yeah, I'm with ProQuest. And just for those of you who don't know ProQuest, let me just spend a half a minute to tell you what we do.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: We have a number of thrusts of work. We're an information services provider, in which we provide aggregation services. We license content from folks like you and many, many others. And we curate information, open information and other types of information. We digitize information. We help create primary sources, special collections. We have a book platform.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: We have a lot of work in that area. And then, as Susan mentioned, I was originally part of the Ex Libris Group. Ex Libris is now part of ProQuest. And as such, ProQuest is also in education technology. So we provide technologies at an institutional level, working primarily with libraries, but not only, to providing things like workflow tools for library management, discovery, reading, curriculum tools, reading lists, and those sorts of things-- research management tools as well.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And I say this because I'm coming here to share with you some thoughts and some things that we do at ProQuest recently and plan to release in the future, but really coming from a little bit different perspective than, I think, that we heard in the last two days, both in terms of our role as an information services provider-- perhaps a little bit different-- but also the way that we're integrated into institutional and particularly library workflow.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So with such background, I would like to talk to you today about a couple of new approaches that we're taking in our business. I don't know if you're familiar. And I'm sorry it's a little grainy. But this is a photo took in Stockholm about 50 years ago almost to the date. Anybody recognizes what this is? This is a day that is called H Day.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Do we have Swedish people here, by the way? I don't want to embarrass myself. Well, close enough. Yeah, exactly. I won't attempt to say it in Swedish. But this is the day that Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side to the right-hand side. One day, you wake up in the morning, and you have to go on the other side.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: I love this photo. Interestingly enough, though, it actually went quite well. Now, I would love to say that I wasn't born at that time. That would be a lie. But I don't remember what happened. But I did hear that it went pretty well. And it went well because of planning, because of collaboration, because stakeholders understood what they had to do, some compromise.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Even if you love driving on the left-hand side, you may need to switch. So that's a little bit of an inspiration. So I want to talk about change a little bit and how we react to change and what we offer as part of that. And there's a lot to talk about. I think in the last two days, we talked a lot about-- we heard a lot about change, open signs, changing business models, affordability.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: We didn't talk much about that. But we see that a lot both at the level of the students and also at the level of the institution, budgets, libraries. You hear that a lot, I'm sure. I also want to just add that point of the increasingly complex networks, technology networks, both at the web scale level all around us, but also at an institutional level.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: When we go and work in context of an institution, you deal-- and every institution-- either they think or they do act as a snowflake. They have their customized version of the student information system and ERP and research management system and a bunch of other things, authentication, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And there's a lot of change there. So this is the context in which I would like to talk about changes today.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And then there is, of course, content. And whether to call it "content" or to call it "data"-- pick and choose your term. That's fine. But there is a lot of it. And there is both a lot and a lot of it. In other words, more types of content are becoming relevant to the discourse. So we talked a lot about the growth, the exponential, in some areas, growth-- certainly growth of content, the wide variety of content.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: What counts as scholarly discourse, part of the academic conversation? All that stuff is-- when thinking about this from the library perspective and from the user perspective, this is becoming really a challenge. Now, I should say that when we talk about us, we're working-- so our customers are libraries. Their customers are users.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: But we provide solutions both to libraries, like administrative tools, workflow tools, and also end-user solutions. So from now on, I'm going to talk about users, but capturing both librarians, library administration, research administration, et cetera, researchers, and users, such as researchers and students, as well. So all this is going on. I don't need to talk much about that.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: You know all about this. Is it possible, though, that it takes us more time to do less? That would be a problem because there's a lot more to do, apparently. There's a lot more data. This is a quote from an Elsevier-- we don't see the source here. But this is the Elsevier study that was research that was just published.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And really quite obscurely, it seems as if we are now spending more time-- there's a problem in the slide. So you don't see, actually, the complete slide here. But we're spending more time doing research. So researchers spend more time to do search and less time to do reading. And as a result, which you don't see on the slide-- I apologize-- is that they actually read less articles per week.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And this is measured over time between 2011 and 2019. Now, of course, during that time, time didn't change much. Where's Daniel? He's the theoretical physicist. I should test that assumption. But what's the problem here? What's going on here? This is something that I would like to focus in the remainder of this talk.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: We think that-- there's a lot to unpack here. And I'm not going to do it. And I don't know a lot of the reasons for why this is happening. But we think that it relates to two areas I would like to point out. One is that part of the content. What's it that we're searching, we're finding, we're dealing with as part of the academic discourse?
OREN BEIT-ARIE: At least this is the domain that we're looking at. So there's a lot of conversation about the change of the scholarly record, also discussed today, mentioned by many speakers, not just the final output, not just textual, et cetera, et cetera. So that's part of that. And I'd like to spend some time talking about that. But we would argue that there is also changing use cases and more use cases to what you actually do with that content.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And reading is not necessarily the only thing. And perhaps we're seeing some shift there in terms of what is done with the content. And all that matters because when we develop systems both at an institutional level and at the aggregation level, we want to be able to address the needs of the users, what they're looking for, and how they're using it. So we're working very closely with a lot of institutions. We have, at the ProQuest level, more than 25,000 universities-- institutions, I should say-- around the world, 170 countries.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And the way that-- we talked about software. And I think Stewart mentioned it in one of his pieces there-- that what defines agile is also the collaboration and getting the customer feedback as directly and as iteratively as you can. So we do a lot of that. We have lots of channels, user groups, focus groups, and development partnership.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: We work very, very closely with libraries and, in some cases, also with end users. But we also go out and ask them questions about this because we're really interested to understand where we need to focus. Now, one of the things that were talked about as well is I'm going to talk about two things that we do. We can spend another hour talking about, what are the things that we don't do?
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And some of those things we decide not to do because it's just lower priority. So it's important for us to get that feedback. I don't think that we are doing-- we're using a lot of the studies that folks at Ithaca and other organizations are doing. But we also like to go out and ask our users more directly. I just want to share with you a few of those insights. I'm going to run through this really quickly.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: But we try to do those type of interactions and studies quite frequently every year. These are three examples of studies, the latest one we did with Library Journal. And it's published. So we publish it. We use it internally, obviously. But we publish this information. It's all available on the web.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: The latest one was a librarian study. The previous ones before that were more end users, graduates to faculty in some cases, and one on students. And because we operate globally, we would like to have those studies happen on a global level, of course, segmented into regions because there are differences. So let me just share with you some things that led us to do work in the area, some of the findings.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Well, not surprisingly, but I think that the rate of growth here did surprise some of us-- is the inclusion of information types such as video and-- sorry you can't see the caption here. But this is video. These are nonpublishing platforms, like blogs. How relevant this information-- they were asked, how relevant was that to your study? This is study of graduate level through faculty researchers globally.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And we see a growth. We see a market growth in the relevancy of those types of contents over the year. So that definitely didn't surprise us. But the growth rate did, in a way. How important are open access? It's certainly growing. And again, it shouldn't surprise none of us.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: It is certainly depending on the domain and the discipline, but very much growing. The other one here, 60%, is with regard to non-English language. You can't see that. But that's interesting because that is also coming from an English-speaking environment. This is also growing. Some more specific questions that we've asked faculty is, what is the impact?
OREN BEIT-ARIE: How do you see? How do you value varied content types beyond the journal articles, beyond perhaps the books or the chapters? What's the importance of those varied types of information to your teaching? And I have to say that the responses were quite clear. They think it is very important. They think that students are getting better grades, developing better insights, developing better critical thinking, becoming better students.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: This is faculty. Librarians also point out the difficulty in dealing with those, again, growing number and wider spreads of variety of content types because they recognize the importance of those contents. But they're also seeing the challenges. And the challenges are challenges around discovery and challenges around contextualizing your work with masses of content, especially when it's varied.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And there are challenges in making those links between those different content types. So I'll talk a little bit more about that. But again, just kind of to summarize, there are really two areas focusing on the content where we're seeing change and where we're seeing challenges and opportunities. One is the multiformat aspect-- so that varied content, the videos, the VRs, and the ARs that are becoming more and more popular, certainly in research and teaching, et cetera.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So for that, what we're hearing is that ideally-- and this is the librarian perspective, not the end user, the librarian perspective. Ideally, they would like to see an opportunity to access the database that contains all that variety of content types. But they want to be able to, very finely in a very granular way, go down to specific types when necessary.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So they kind of want both worlds, both everything together, but the ability to go in a more siloed approach. The same applies to disciplinary and multidisciplinary. So the need that is expressed by many librarians is that they want to have those multidisciplinary. And again, I think that we heard voices around that need across the conference as well. The definition of what's disciplinary is changing.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: The cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary is obviously super important. But there is also a need to drill down into a specific discipline. And we'll get through that as well. So putting together this, this really created for us both a challenge, but also an opportunity. There's a lot of things going on here. But I would like just to emphasize why I wanted to share with you our approach to this because I think that we're coming to this a set of ingredients that might be interesting for some of you to hear about.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: We work at great scale. We're serving 25,000 institutions. We're working with billions of items, large variety, very, very diverse types of content. We're doing this not just by crawling the web, but with working with a lot of partners, including some of you here, hopefully, in bringing that content into a platform and being able to do something useful for this because you're trusting a company like ProQuest to do that for you.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: You want to be able for that material to be discoverable, accessed, used, and so forth. So in order to do that well, especially in that scale in that context, you have to apply methods-- curatorial methods. It's not just bringing stuff over. You need to enhance the metadata. I think some of you talked about that. It was mentioned around how important it is.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: You have to pull some information into the records from other records, for example, to create a link. There's a lot of enrichment, an enhancement process that happens when you bring it into such a big pool. Now, we have a lot of people that do a lot of manual work. But of course, there's also a lot of technology that is involved in that.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And again, when we talk about technology, I want to again emphasize the fact that the scale of the audiences is also enormous. A piece of information that you bring into the platform can be viewed by millions of people, and this happens. So technology is a big play here. It's a big play here for us. It's a play not just to create efficiency so that we can do things faster, but also to create better quality.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And the two other ingredients that I think are very important is the fact that we work at an institutional level providing workflow solutions, providing library discovery, et cetera. We work with local communities. And integrating those solutions, the content discovery and content access solution-- integrating it into institutional workflows is really the holy grail for users and for librarians, not to go to somewhere and do it in a disconnect fashion.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: They want it to be more integrated. Why? Because it helps them to be more efficient. It helps them to produce better quality, whether it's studying or research. So these are the components that we play with when we come to create new products or think about how we can solve matters. So let me just very briefly go through a couple of areas.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: This is only a couple of areas. There are other things that we are doing that, obviously, I won't have time to talk about. I'm primarily focusing here more on the end user and less on the administrative side, the workflow side of librarians, is very important. The first one has to do with that gigantic pool of content that keep growing, keep being more diverse. People are spending-- we saw that, and we know that.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: People are spending a lot of time trying to search those growing amounts of contents just to find the right piece of content that matters to them or an area that they want to explore. And therefore it's extremely important to optimize the way that we treat that content so that they can find it so that the content that you produce or enable through platforms like this is actually discoverable and accessed.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: This is the challenge that we have on a large scale. And when it comes to disciplinary and multidisciplinary, as I stated before in showing some quotes, librarians want both. This is not surprising. Somebody said earlier that we have more views than members in libraries. That's probably true. But I think in this case, having both a disciplinarian and a multidisciplinary or cross-disciplinary approach is true.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So we spend a lot of time in collecting a lot of information, licensing information, and creating some of that information. This information used to stand in silos-- the books and their archival content and digitized content, historical content, journals, newspaper content, videos. Bringing it all together into a place where you can start offering unified environments for discovery, a place where you can have users search across that multiplicity of formats-- but do it in a way that makes sense.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Make the right connections. Link from a citation that can lead you to a book or to a video. See the transcript. And perhaps go from there to a research article, et cetera. This is quite a big effort. But this is what the users want. They want to be able to go into a big pool and not be divided by those different formats.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So we gather all those formats. We create a single unified environment to search in a multidisciplinary fashion, but also creating the infrastructure for a disciplinary drill. And that's where I just want to spend a couple of minutes telling you a little bit more about that because that's where a lot of the scale, the curation, and the technology effort is going towards.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So what we're talking here about is the ability to create a more disciplinary lens to the very large set of content. This is about the ability to create a more specific, contextualized knowledge discovery environment for researchers so that if they want to drill into, for example, literature studies, they can do that. And they can do that by using the right tools that are right for this discipline.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So this is about us taking a very big step in introducing a framework on our platform that enables us to start cutting those disciplinary, if you want, verticals. Now, the important thing about this is that you have to have your data being prepared to do that. You need to identify the data. You need to be able to link the data.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: There's a lot of work that is included in that. We're doing this work, though, not alone. We're doing this in partnership. There's an academic advisory group. There is a library development partner group that works with us. And this is going to go out in stages. The first stage for us is literature. We're creating that lens, the literature lens in which we do-- working in partnership with those folks that I mentioned, we create a literary study product that facilitates research and teaching and learning and enables the discovery of their richness and the diversity of a canon of both historical and contemporary work of literature from around the world.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So this is really one of the areas where we're putting a lot of focus. Again, this is disciplinary and cross-formats. So the variety of content is one important piece here. But that would not make much sense if we don't prepare that content using specialized, disciplinary-based tools to make the links, for example, that are necessary. And I'll give you a few examples momentarily.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So we have a special index here, again, built with a community. We have a knowledge base that helps us both define what's in that scope, but also make the connections between those elements. So let me give you just a quick example of the literature just to try to point out what I mean by those discipline-specific tools. If you're in literary studies, typically what you're interested is author's work and movements.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So we're creating in this framework of disciplinary products pages like an author page. This is Langston Hughes, the poet, the American poet, the social activist, and the leader of the Harlem Renaissance movement. So you can find that person-- this author, in this case. You see primary work, like "The Weary Blues." You can see criticism.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: You can see timelines. You can see videos. This is all connected. This is actually a beautiful video, but we won't stay on this one. But then you can also go and navigate, traverse that environment through the literary movement. Oh, he is part of the Harlem Renaissance. You see the timeline.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: You see other authors. You see other works. You see featured dissertation, another type of format that existed somewhere else brought into that environment as part of that disciplinary framework. And then you see other videos of other people. You get transcripts. This is about disintegrating and integrating content and making the connections at scale.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Another quick comment that I have, if I have-- I have a couple of minutes, I think. OK. Thanks. So I talked about what we do with content. Let me just jump to the other part of, what are the use case of content? Is it really just reading? And this is really moving from content to analytic.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Again, we heard quite a bit about this. This is really interesting. I went back to read If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino. I don't know how many of you read that. This is about texts and data mining all over the place. What is the reading of a text, in fact, except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain systems of forms and meaning?
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And electronic reading supplies me with a list of frequencies which I have only to glance at to form an idea of the problems the books suggest to my critical study. This is really published in 1979. So we're focusing here on social sciences and humanities, obviously, with this approach. There's certainly a rise in the demand for or the appearance of digital humanities in general.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: There are predictions that in every digital humanities department-- I don't know how many of them there will be in 10 years-- everyone will be a digital humanist. Interestingly enough, I went on indeed.com, the job site. There is a lot of jobs for digital humanists. I had no idea, but this is true. Go check it out. There are some fantastic examples of what TDM can do.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: This is a research question around Shakespeare's solo authorship versus partnership. And the result when applied to a large body of work is that some of the theorems suggested already that The Two Noble Kinsmen, for example, was coauthored by Shakespeare and Fletcher. This is applying stylometric modeling that helps identify that.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: This is an example. There really are a range of examples looking at sentiment analysis in the US-China trade wars, institutional classification in academic publishing, mapping police brutality-- another project that we saw, mapping police brutality and racial profiling at the global scale-- tying innovation and academic or scientific progress in dissertations to innovation patents, and those sorts of things.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So there is a range of use cases in research. What I would like to add here is that this is also an important part of the classroom. The job market is expecting them. And if we don't have enough time to read, we'd better teach our students how to do to perform those texts and data mining maybe the same way that Will talked about in sciences of being able to program in order to be able to actually conduct research over data.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So we're seeing use cases for that in the classroom as well. There are lots of methods in which you can deploy feature analysis, geolocation analysis, topic modeling. I won't bore you with the details. But the point is that if we think that this is important-- and I think we certainly believe it is important both for research and for teaching and learning-- we have to create an environment that will enable that to happen.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So we're working on and launching what we call TDM Studio. What I would like to point out is not what we are doing so much in terms of our offering, but what it takes in order to be successful. You need to be able to upload and have access to a lot of data. And we obviously offer that through data that we have license to do that for.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: This is a place where I think-- and I think that Lauren yesterday mentioned that, if I'm not mistaken-- it's important to have the right licenses so that we can start supporting new use cases. We obviously will allow open access and researcher-uploaded content. But there's a lot of work to make that content available for TDM. Then you have the analysis phase.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And that's where we provide out-of-the-box modeling, but also enabling the researchers to use either-- Amazon AWS has a lot of things that are available-- or scripting. Let the researchers do their thing. And lastly and not least importantly, be able to share that information. Visualize it. Revise it.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Share it within the community. So this is a direction that we think is very important. This is built on top of a platform that is very large. So there's a lot of information and content that is made available into this. And I think that what's really important is to make it to work at scale so that content that you perhaps allow us to use in this environment could reach out to those very, very large audiences and growing number of use cases.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So with that, they're driving safely on the right-hand side, more or less, as far as I know. But they are getting ready. This is the city of-- the home of the inspiring Greta Thunberg. So you must expect for them to go beyond that. Moving to a car-free city is the next big change. Maybe we'll talk about it some other time. With that, I'd like to thank you.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: [APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 1: So Oren, if you could hang on for just a moment, I think we have time for two questions. There's one that's come in via the app already. And then we'll take one from the room. So before the app question, does anybody have a question in the room for Oren? Oren, the question we got via the app was, how is open access changing your business?
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Yeah. Thank you for asking this question. So a couple of things that I had gone a little bit, perhaps, too fast-- when we think about the aggregation, the aggregation includes open access. So what we're talking about is that when we talk about the variety of information and content types, the business model in which that content was created and the license term is also diverse.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And it includes that we have active curation of open access information available in our platform. And it changes the way that we look at what information is relevant and bring it into the platform. It also changes the way that we're thinking in terms of enabling access to the open access for anybody. So you don't have to have, necessarily, a subscription to content.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And you can still go and get as deep as you can until you get a license-- so opening up a little bit more the discoverability of all content, primarily, especially open-access content. So hopefully, if we'll have more time, I can tell you a little bit more about what we're doing. I would only add one more piece here that we're also working at an institutional level with institutions.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: One of the things that-- we heard, I think, late last session from Allison about the complexities of managing things like ABCs, totally decentralized in institutions. So one of the things that we're doing to help institutions manage with it a little bit better is to give them tools to manage their ABCs. We believe that open access is an important part of our ecosystem.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And not only that we would like to support it, we think that we can actually use open access in more ways that we could, perhaps, licensed content and offer some new services. So there's a lot more to talk about, but yeah.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: That would be it.
SPEAKER 1: Let's thank Oren again for an excellent presentation. [APPLAUSE]
Segment:0 .
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Thanks very much, Silverchair, for inviting me to talk. I know I'm at the end of the program. And everybody needs to catch a plane or a boat or a unicycle and go back home. So I'll try to be as brief as I can. And I need-- that's where it is. So yeah, I'm with ProQuest. And just for those of you who don't know ProQuest, let me just spend a half a minute to tell you what we do.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: We have a number of thrusts of work. We're an information services provider, in which we provide aggregation services. We license content from folks like you and many, many others. And we curate information, open information and other types of information. We digitize information. We help create primary sources, special collections. We have a book platform.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: We have a lot of work in that area. And then, as Susan mentioned, I was originally part of the Ex Libris Group. Ex Libris is now part of ProQuest. And as such, ProQuest is also in education technology. So we provide technologies at an institutional level, working primarily with libraries, but not only, to providing things like workflow tools for library management, discovery, reading, curriculum tools, reading lists, and those sorts of things-- research management tools as well.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And I say this because I'm coming here to share with you some thoughts and some things that we do at ProQuest recently and plan to release in the future, but really coming from a little bit different perspective than, I think, that we heard in the last two days, both in terms of our role as an information services provider-- perhaps a little bit different-- but also the way that we're integrated into institutional and particularly library workflow.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So with such background, I would like to talk to you today about a couple of new approaches that we're taking in our business. I don't know if you're familiar. And I'm sorry it's a little grainy. But this is a photo took in Stockholm about 50 years ago almost to the date. Anybody recognizes what this is? This is a day that is called H Day.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Do we have Swedish people here, by the way? I don't want to embarrass myself. Well, close enough. Yeah, exactly. I won't attempt to say it in Swedish. But this is the day that Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side to the right-hand side. One day, you wake up in the morning, and you have to go on the other side.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: I love this photo. Interestingly enough, though, it actually went quite well. Now, I would love to say that I wasn't born at that time. That would be a lie. But I don't remember what happened. But I did hear that it went pretty well. And it went well because of planning, because of collaboration, because stakeholders understood what they had to do, some compromise.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Even if you love driving on the left-hand side, you may need to switch. So that's a little bit of an inspiration. So I want to talk about change a little bit and how we react to change and what we offer as part of that. And there's a lot to talk about. I think in the last two days, we talked a lot about-- we heard a lot about change, open signs, changing business models, affordability.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: We didn't talk much about that. But we see that a lot both at the level of the students and also at the level of the institution, budgets, libraries. You hear that a lot, I'm sure. I also want to just add that point of the increasingly complex networks, technology networks, both at the web scale level all around us, but also at an institutional level.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: When we go and work in context of an institution, you deal-- and every institution-- either they think or they do act as a snowflake. They have their customized version of the student information system and ERP and research management system and a bunch of other things, authentication, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And there's a lot of change there. So this is the context in which I would like to talk about changes today.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And then there is, of course, content. And whether to call it "content" or to call it "data"-- pick and choose your term. That's fine. But there is a lot of it. And there is both a lot and a lot of it. In other words, more types of content are becoming relevant to the discourse. So we talked a lot about the growth, the exponential, in some areas, growth-- certainly growth of content, the wide variety of content.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: What counts as scholarly discourse, part of the academic conversation? All that stuff is-- when thinking about this from the library perspective and from the user perspective, this is becoming really a challenge. Now, I should say that when we talk about us, we're working-- so our customers are libraries. Their customers are users.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: But we provide solutions both to libraries, like administrative tools, workflow tools, and also end-user solutions. So from now on, I'm going to talk about users, but capturing both librarians, library administration, research administration, et cetera, researchers, and users, such as researchers and students, as well. So all this is going on. I don't need to talk much about that.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: You know all about this. Is it possible, though, that it takes us more time to do less? That would be a problem because there's a lot more to do, apparently. There's a lot more data. This is a quote from an Elsevier-- we don't see the source here. But this is the Elsevier study that was research that was just published.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And really quite obscurely, it seems as if we are now spending more time-- there's a problem in the slide. So you don't see, actually, the complete slide here. But we're spending more time doing research. So researchers spend more time to do search and less time to do reading. And as a result, which you don't see on the slide-- I apologize-- is that they actually read less articles per week.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And this is measured over time between 2011 and 2019. Now, of course, during that time, time didn't change much. Where's Daniel? He's the theoretical physicist. I should test that assumption. But what's the problem here? What's going on here? This is something that I would like to focus in the remainder of this talk.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: We think that-- there's a lot to unpack here. And I'm not going to do it. And I don't know a lot of the reasons for why this is happening. But we think that it relates to two areas I would like to point out. One is that part of the content. What's it that we're searching, we're finding, we're dealing with as part of the academic discourse?
OREN BEIT-ARIE: At least this is the domain that we're looking at. So there's a lot of conversation about the change of the scholarly record, also discussed today, mentioned by many speakers, not just the final output, not just textual, et cetera, et cetera. So that's part of that. And I'd like to spend some time talking about that. But we would argue that there is also changing use cases and more use cases to what you actually do with that content.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And reading is not necessarily the only thing. And perhaps we're seeing some shift there in terms of what is done with the content. And all that matters because when we develop systems both at an institutional level and at the aggregation level, we want to be able to address the needs of the users, what they're looking for, and how they're using it. So we're working very closely with a lot of institutions. We have, at the ProQuest level, more than 25,000 universities-- institutions, I should say-- around the world, 170 countries.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And the way that-- we talked about software. And I think Stewart mentioned it in one of his pieces there-- that what defines agile is also the collaboration and getting the customer feedback as directly and as iteratively as you can. So we do a lot of that. We have lots of channels, user groups, focus groups, and development partnership.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: We work very, very closely with libraries and, in some cases, also with end users. But we also go out and ask them questions about this because we're really interested to understand where we need to focus. Now, one of the things that were talked about as well is I'm going to talk about two things that we do. We can spend another hour talking about, what are the things that we don't do?
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And some of those things we decide not to do because it's just lower priority. So it's important for us to get that feedback. I don't think that we are doing-- we're using a lot of the studies that folks at Ithaca and other organizations are doing. But we also like to go out and ask our users more directly. I just want to share with you a few of those insights. I'm going to run through this really quickly.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: But we try to do those type of interactions and studies quite frequently every year. These are three examples of studies, the latest one we did with Library Journal. And it's published. So we publish it. We use it internally, obviously. But we publish this information. It's all available on the web.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: The latest one was a librarian study. The previous ones before that were more end users, graduates to faculty in some cases, and one on students. And because we operate globally, we would like to have those studies happen on a global level, of course, segmented into regions because there are differences. So let me just share with you some things that led us to do work in the area, some of the findings.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Well, not surprisingly, but I think that the rate of growth here did surprise some of us-- is the inclusion of information types such as video and-- sorry you can't see the caption here. But this is video. These are nonpublishing platforms, like blogs. How relevant this information-- they were asked, how relevant was that to your study? This is study of graduate level through faculty researchers globally.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And we see a growth. We see a market growth in the relevancy of those types of contents over the year. So that definitely didn't surprise us. But the growth rate did, in a way. How important are open access? It's certainly growing. And again, it shouldn't surprise none of us.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: It is certainly depending on the domain and the discipline, but very much growing. The other one here, 60%, is with regard to non-English language. You can't see that. But that's interesting because that is also coming from an English-speaking environment. This is also growing. Some more specific questions that we've asked faculty is, what is the impact?
OREN BEIT-ARIE: How do you see? How do you value varied content types beyond the journal articles, beyond perhaps the books or the chapters? What's the importance of those varied types of information to your teaching? And I have to say that the responses were quite clear. They think it is very important. They think that students are getting better grades, developing better insights, developing better critical thinking, becoming better students.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: This is faculty. Librarians also point out the difficulty in dealing with those, again, growing number and wider spreads of variety of content types because they recognize the importance of those contents. But they're also seeing the challenges. And the challenges are challenges around discovery and challenges around contextualizing your work with masses of content, especially when it's varied.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And there are challenges in making those links between those different content types. So I'll talk a little bit more about that. But again, just kind of to summarize, there are really two areas focusing on the content where we're seeing change and where we're seeing challenges and opportunities. One is the multiformat aspect-- so that varied content, the videos, the VRs, and the ARs that are becoming more and more popular, certainly in research and teaching, et cetera.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So for that, what we're hearing is that ideally-- and this is the librarian perspective, not the end user, the librarian perspective. Ideally, they would like to see an opportunity to access the database that contains all that variety of content types. But they want to be able to, very finely in a very granular way, go down to specific types when necessary.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So they kind of want both worlds, both everything together, but the ability to go in a more siloed approach. The same applies to disciplinary and multidisciplinary. So the need that is expressed by many librarians is that they want to have those multidisciplinary. And again, I think that we heard voices around that need across the conference as well. The definition of what's disciplinary is changing.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: The cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary is obviously super important. But there is also a need to drill down into a specific discipline. And we'll get through that as well. So putting together this, this really created for us both a challenge, but also an opportunity. There's a lot of things going on here. But I would like just to emphasize why I wanted to share with you our approach to this because I think that we're coming to this a set of ingredients that might be interesting for some of you to hear about.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: We work at great scale. We're serving 25,000 institutions. We're working with billions of items, large variety, very, very diverse types of content. We're doing this not just by crawling the web, but with working with a lot of partners, including some of you here, hopefully, in bringing that content into a platform and being able to do something useful for this because you're trusting a company like ProQuest to do that for you.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: You want to be able for that material to be discoverable, accessed, used, and so forth. So in order to do that well, especially in that scale in that context, you have to apply methods-- curatorial methods. It's not just bringing stuff over. You need to enhance the metadata. I think some of you talked about that. It was mentioned around how important it is.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: You have to pull some information into the records from other records, for example, to create a link. There's a lot of enrichment, an enhancement process that happens when you bring it into such a big pool. Now, we have a lot of people that do a lot of manual work. But of course, there's also a lot of technology that is involved in that.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And again, when we talk about technology, I want to again emphasize the fact that the scale of the audiences is also enormous. A piece of information that you bring into the platform can be viewed by millions of people, and this happens. So technology is a big play here. It's a big play here for us. It's a play not just to create efficiency so that we can do things faster, but also to create better quality.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And the two other ingredients that I think are very important is the fact that we work at an institutional level providing workflow solutions, providing library discovery, et cetera. We work with local communities. And integrating those solutions, the content discovery and content access solution-- integrating it into institutional workflows is really the holy grail for users and for librarians, not to go to somewhere and do it in a disconnect fashion.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: They want it to be more integrated. Why? Because it helps them to be more efficient. It helps them to produce better quality, whether it's studying or research. So these are the components that we play with when we come to create new products or think about how we can solve matters. So let me just very briefly go through a couple of areas.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: This is only a couple of areas. There are other things that we are doing that, obviously, I won't have time to talk about. I'm primarily focusing here more on the end user and less on the administrative side, the workflow side of librarians, is very important. The first one has to do with that gigantic pool of content that keep growing, keep being more diverse. People are spending-- we saw that, and we know that.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: People are spending a lot of time trying to search those growing amounts of contents just to find the right piece of content that matters to them or an area that they want to explore. And therefore it's extremely important to optimize the way that we treat that content so that they can find it so that the content that you produce or enable through platforms like this is actually discoverable and accessed.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: This is the challenge that we have on a large scale. And when it comes to disciplinary and multidisciplinary, as I stated before in showing some quotes, librarians want both. This is not surprising. Somebody said earlier that we have more views than members in libraries. That's probably true. But I think in this case, having both a disciplinarian and a multidisciplinary or cross-disciplinary approach is true.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So we spend a lot of time in collecting a lot of information, licensing information, and creating some of that information. This information used to stand in silos-- the books and their archival content and digitized content, historical content, journals, newspaper content, videos. Bringing it all together into a place where you can start offering unified environments for discovery, a place where you can have users search across that multiplicity of formats-- but do it in a way that makes sense.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Make the right connections. Link from a citation that can lead you to a book or to a video. See the transcript. And perhaps go from there to a research article, et cetera. This is quite a big effort. But this is what the users want. They want to be able to go into a big pool and not be divided by those different formats.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So we gather all those formats. We create a single unified environment to search in a multidisciplinary fashion, but also creating the infrastructure for a disciplinary drill. And that's where I just want to spend a couple of minutes telling you a little bit more about that because that's where a lot of the scale, the curation, and the technology effort is going towards.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So what we're talking here about is the ability to create a more disciplinary lens to the very large set of content. This is about the ability to create a more specific, contextualized knowledge discovery environment for researchers so that if they want to drill into, for example, literature studies, they can do that. And they can do that by using the right tools that are right for this discipline.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So this is about us taking a very big step in introducing a framework on our platform that enables us to start cutting those disciplinary, if you want, verticals. Now, the important thing about this is that you have to have your data being prepared to do that. You need to identify the data. You need to be able to link the data.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: There's a lot of work that is included in that. We're doing this work, though, not alone. We're doing this in partnership. There's an academic advisory group. There is a library development partner group that works with us. And this is going to go out in stages. The first stage for us is literature. We're creating that lens, the literature lens in which we do-- working in partnership with those folks that I mentioned, we create a literary study product that facilitates research and teaching and learning and enables the discovery of their richness and the diversity of a canon of both historical and contemporary work of literature from around the world.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So this is really one of the areas where we're putting a lot of focus. Again, this is disciplinary and cross-formats. So the variety of content is one important piece here. But that would not make much sense if we don't prepare that content using specialized, disciplinary-based tools to make the links, for example, that are necessary. And I'll give you a few examples momentarily.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So we have a special index here, again, built with a community. We have a knowledge base that helps us both define what's in that scope, but also make the connections between those elements. So let me give you just a quick example of the literature just to try to point out what I mean by those discipline-specific tools. If you're in literary studies, typically what you're interested is author's work and movements.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So we're creating in this framework of disciplinary products pages like an author page. This is Langston Hughes, the poet, the American poet, the social activist, and the leader of the Harlem Renaissance movement. So you can find that person-- this author, in this case. You see primary work, like "The Weary Blues." You can see criticism.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: You can see timelines. You can see videos. This is all connected. This is actually a beautiful video, but we won't stay on this one. But then you can also go and navigate, traverse that environment through the literary movement. Oh, he is part of the Harlem Renaissance. You see the timeline.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: You see other authors. You see other works. You see featured dissertation, another type of format that existed somewhere else brought into that environment as part of that disciplinary framework. And then you see other videos of other people. You get transcripts. This is about disintegrating and integrating content and making the connections at scale.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Another quick comment that I have, if I have-- I have a couple of minutes, I think. OK. Thanks. So I talked about what we do with content. Let me just jump to the other part of, what are the use case of content? Is it really just reading? And this is really moving from content to analytic.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Again, we heard quite a bit about this. This is really interesting. I went back to read If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino. I don't know how many of you read that. This is about texts and data mining all over the place. What is the reading of a text, in fact, except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain systems of forms and meaning?
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And electronic reading supplies me with a list of frequencies which I have only to glance at to form an idea of the problems the books suggest to my critical study. This is really published in 1979. So we're focusing here on social sciences and humanities, obviously, with this approach. There's certainly a rise in the demand for or the appearance of digital humanities in general.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: There are predictions that in every digital humanities department-- I don't know how many of them there will be in 10 years-- everyone will be a digital humanist. Interestingly enough, I went on indeed.com, the job site. There is a lot of jobs for digital humanists. I had no idea, but this is true. Go check it out. There are some fantastic examples of what TDM can do.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: This is a research question around Shakespeare's solo authorship versus partnership. And the result when applied to a large body of work is that some of the theorems suggested already that The Two Noble Kinsmen, for example, was coauthored by Shakespeare and Fletcher. This is applying stylometric modeling that helps identify that.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: This is an example. There really are a range of examples looking at sentiment analysis in the US-China trade wars, institutional classification in academic publishing, mapping police brutality-- another project that we saw, mapping police brutality and racial profiling at the global scale-- tying innovation and academic or scientific progress in dissertations to innovation patents, and those sorts of things.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So there is a range of use cases in research. What I would like to add here is that this is also an important part of the classroom. The job market is expecting them. And if we don't have enough time to read, we'd better teach our students how to do to perform those texts and data mining maybe the same way that Will talked about in sciences of being able to program in order to be able to actually conduct research over data.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So we're seeing use cases for that in the classroom as well. There are lots of methods in which you can deploy feature analysis, geolocation analysis, topic modeling. I won't bore you with the details. But the point is that if we think that this is important-- and I think we certainly believe it is important both for research and for teaching and learning-- we have to create an environment that will enable that to happen.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So we're working on and launching what we call TDM Studio. What I would like to point out is not what we are doing so much in terms of our offering, but what it takes in order to be successful. You need to be able to upload and have access to a lot of data. And we obviously offer that through data that we have license to do that for.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: This is a place where I think-- and I think that Lauren yesterday mentioned that, if I'm not mistaken-- it's important to have the right licenses so that we can start supporting new use cases. We obviously will allow open access and researcher-uploaded content. But there's a lot of work to make that content available for TDM. Then you have the analysis phase.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And that's where we provide out-of-the-box modeling, but also enabling the researchers to use either-- Amazon AWS has a lot of things that are available-- or scripting. Let the researchers do their thing. And lastly and not least importantly, be able to share that information. Visualize it. Revise it.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Share it within the community. So this is a direction that we think is very important. This is built on top of a platform that is very large. So there's a lot of information and content that is made available into this. And I think that what's really important is to make it to work at scale so that content that you perhaps allow us to use in this environment could reach out to those very, very large audiences and growing number of use cases.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: So with that, they're driving safely on the right-hand side, more or less, as far as I know. But they are getting ready. This is the city of-- the home of the inspiring Greta Thunberg. So you must expect for them to go beyond that. Moving to a car-free city is the next big change. Maybe we'll talk about it some other time. With that, I'd like to thank you.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: [APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 1: So Oren, if you could hang on for just a moment, I think we have time for two questions. There's one that's come in via the app already. And then we'll take one from the room. So before the app question, does anybody have a question in the room for Oren? Oren, the question we got via the app was, how is open access changing your business?
OREN BEIT-ARIE: Yeah. Thank you for asking this question. So a couple of things that I had gone a little bit, perhaps, too fast-- when we think about the aggregation, the aggregation includes open access. So what we're talking about is that when we talk about the variety of information and content types, the business model in which that content was created and the license term is also diverse.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And it includes that we have active curation of open access information available in our platform. And it changes the way that we look at what information is relevant and bring it into the platform. It also changes the way that we're thinking in terms of enabling access to the open access for anybody. So you don't have to have, necessarily, a subscription to content.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And you can still go and get as deep as you can until you get a license-- so opening up a little bit more the discoverability of all content, primarily, especially open-access content. So hopefully, if we'll have more time, I can tell you a little bit more about what we're doing. I would only add one more piece here that we're also working at an institutional level with institutions.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: One of the things that-- we heard, I think, late last session from Allison about the complexities of managing things like ABCs, totally decentralized in institutions. So one of the things that we're doing to help institutions manage with it a little bit better is to give them tools to manage their ABCs. We believe that open access is an important part of our ecosystem.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: And not only that we would like to support it, we think that we can actually use open access in more ways that we could, perhaps, licensed content and offer some new services. So there's a lot more to talk about, but yeah.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you.
OREN BEIT-ARIE: That would be it.
SPEAKER 1: Let's thank Oren again for an excellent presentation. [APPLAUSE]
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