From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 19:30:59 -0600
Most general IT staff at universities have no familiarity with
publishing, and thus their usefulness to presses is limited. At Penn
State we were fortunate to have a full-time dedicated IT staff person
from the early 2000s on, but we were the exception rather than the
rule for small and medium-sized presses. Before that time our IT work
was done by other people on the staff who had other responsibilities,
such as designers or marketing staff. I believe that is still the norm
today for smaller presses.
> From: Ken Masters <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 11:34:21 +0400
>
> Hi All
>
> Sandy, when I refer to the IT Staff, I'm talking about the
> institution's IT Staff - in other words, the university or college's
> IT support staff who may have an impact on all servers that fall under
> the university IP address. But, whoever it is, there must be
> _someone_ who is dedicated to the setting up, maintenance and support
> of the publisher's servers (even if out-sourced) - or are you saying
> that that type of work is taken on in an ad hoc fashion by regular
> publishing staff?
>
> Regards
>
> Ken
>
> ------
>
> On 17 February 2014 04:36, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 20:53:42 -0600
>>
>> IT staff? When you're talking about university presses, as Joe was, I
>> daresay with few exceptions only the larger presses have anyone on
>> their staff dedicated to IT issues.
>>
>> Sandy Thatcher
>>
>>
>> At 8:48 PM +0100 2/13/14, LIBLICENSE wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> From: Ken Masters <[log in to unmask]>
>>> Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 07:50:51 +0100
>>>
>>> Hi All
>>>
>>> I think Joe is correct. And I think part of the reason is that, in
>>> huge organisations, so much responsibility has been handed over to IT
>>> staff, that very little of what they do is known to senior management
>>> (apart from the IT staff who serve in senior management, of course).
>>>
>>> This is a very real problem, because senior management tends to
>>> classify everything to do with computers as "IT stuff," and fails to
>>> see that what their IT staff does reflects directly on the
>>> institution, especially when institutional ethics are involved. In
>>> this case, the IT staff will know that they are collecting data, but
>>> it is likely that the senior management don't know about it. (For
>>> example, how many librarians on this list have ever asked their IT
>>> staff about what information they are gathering on their users, how,
>>> where and for how long the data are stored, and discussed the ethics
>>> of that?).
>>>
>>> To answer your question regarding instances of tracking by
>>> organisations: I don't know of any, but the study of such tracking by
>>> medical organisations that I mentioned in my previous mail can be
>>> found at http://ispub.com/IJMI/6/2/14386
>>>
>>> I attempted to follow up on that study by surveying the medical
>>> organisations, trying to get their opinion on how much they knew about
>>> the data gathering, and how this fitted in with medical ethics (given
>>> that there was almost no informed consent on the data gathering). I
>>> received a 1% responses rate, so, obviously, could not publish
>>> anything. Apart from normal low response rates to surveys, I would
>>> think that the non-response rate probably had to do with
>>> organisations' closing ranks, or, because it would have been seen as
>>> "IT stuff," would have been forwarded to the IT dept, and they
>>> certainly would not have responded.
>>>
>>> Regards
>>>
>>> Ken
>>>
>>> ------
>>>
>>> Dr. Ken Masters
>>> Asst. Professor: Medical Informatics
>>> Medical Education Unit
>>> College of Medicine & Health Sciences
>>> Sultan Qaboos University
>>> Sultanate of Oman
>>> E-i-C: The Internet Journal of Medical Education
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