Bibliometric and usage-based analyses and tools highlight the value of information about scholarship contained within the network of authors, articles and usage data. Less progress has been made on populating and using the author side of this network than the article side, in part because of the difficulty of unambiguously identifying authors. I briefly review a sample of author identifier schemes, and consider use in scholarly repositories. I then describe preliminary work at arXiv to implement public author identifiers, services based on them, and plans to make this information

Big publisher offers software to track performance in 80,000 areas

Excerpt: similarities and emerging differences between Generation Y and older students in six broad areas: * constraints on research; * ways of searching for research information; * research resources used; * using library collections and services; * using technology in research; * training and support to research. ...

A Pew presentation documents the ubiquity of mobile technology and social networking and how libraries can use it to their advantage and even rethink their focus (thanks to Garrett Eastman). Useful charts showing the penetration of mobile and broadband internationally, together with any data on teens and adults information behavior.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published Tuesday a landmark paper entitled "Network architecture of the long-distance pathways in the macaque brain" (an open-access paper) by Dharmendra S. Modha (IBM Almaden) and Raghavendra Singh (IBM Research-India) with major implications for reverse-engineering the brain and developing a network of cognitive-computing chips. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman)

The workshop centered on projects investigating or proposing new metrics, including the MESUR project, Eigenfactor, h-bar index, and PLoS ONE's article-level metrics.

A collection of accepted papers, some contributed slidedecks, and supplementary documents presented at IATUL 2010 are available at http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/iatul2010/.

Digitization of text corpora can impede the progress of scholarship if done without proper focus on reflecting the methodologies and intellectual practices of actual scholarship practices...

A timely, well-researched and balanced account of the future of research libraries and their collections. Spiro and Henry's "Can a new research library be all-digital" lays out all the important considerations for any library considering the digital path.

Are you a researcher, asking yourself "What is the difference between grid computing, supercomputing, cloud computing, volunteer computing and everything else? How do I know what is the right tool to use for my work?" If so, then attend the upcoming online discussion hosted by iSGTW - the weekly online computing magazine sponsored by Open Science Grid and the European Grid Initiative - called "Roundtable Q&A: Choose and use the right computing tool for your research, with feedback from the experts."