Group items tagged

" Off the Shelf: E-book Aggregators. Polanka, Sue (author). FEATURE. First published May 15, 2008 (Booklist). Like many librarians, you're beginning to purchase e-books from a variety of publishers, and you're confused by all the different licensing agreements, platforms, and pricing models. A solution to this madness? Use an e-book aggregator. Aggregators partner with multiple publishers to supply content (e-books, audio books, other media) and provide a platform for libraries and end users to search, order, access, and download the content on the Web. We'll focus here on three of the larger academic aggregators-EBL, ebrary, and MyiLibrary. Ebooks Corporation's EBL (Ebook Library) partners with 250 academic and trade publishers, offering more than 85,000 titles. Ebrary partners with 285 publishers to offer more than 120,000 e-books and content databases. The newest platform, Ingram Digital Group's MyiLibrary, partners with 250 publishers and offers more than 110,000 titles. "

"The market for e-books has taken off, particularly in the world of education. Aggregators provide easy access to large collections of titles from many publishers, through a single interface. Consultants Ray Lonsdale and Chris Armstrong compare the offerings of the largest providers, and point to emerging trends."

"Clearly something important and fundamental is happening to books and reading. Libraries need to be part of this reading revolution, supporting and defending the rights of digital readers, experimenting with new reader services, collecting new genres and media formats, and providing access for all readers to the devices, networks, content, and online communities that will continue to emerge."

The e-Depot is a digital archiving environment that ensures long-term access to digital objects which would otherwise be threatened by rapidly evolving software and hardware platforms as well as media decay. It is the dedicated archiving environment for the KB's national electronic deposit collection. In addition, it will include the Dutch web archive and digitised master images. In line with the international nature of information provision, the KB has extended its e-Depot services to publishers worldwide. The e-Depot is supported by sustained research and development efforts geared towards maintaining the integrity of stored digital objects.

GoogleBooks: the Settlement A conference report, with comment : "The Google Books Settlement & the Future of Information Access", a conference held at UC Berkeley, August 28, 2009

"During the last several years CUL's online collections have grown considerably. Not only has the number of titles available online increased dramatically, but there has been a significant shift among many researchers in how those collections are being used. In her March 2006 memorandum to Cornell's Deans, Directors, and Department Heads, Sarah Thomas explained the rationale for reviewing part of CUL's journal collection for electronic-only access:"

Traditional journals, even those available electronically, are changing slowly. However, there is rapid evolution in scholarly communication. Usage is moving to electronic formats. In some areas, it appears that electronic versions of papers are being read about as often as the printed journal versions. Although there are serious difficulties in comparing figures from different media, the growth rates in usage of electronic scholarly information are sufficiently high that if they continue for a few years, there will be no doubt that print versions will be eclipsed. Further, much of the electronic information that is accessed is outside the formal scholarly publication process. There is also vigorous growth in forms of electronic communication that take advantage of the unique capabilities of the Web, and which simply do not fit into the traditional journal publishing format.

"'E-journals: their use, value and impact' takes an in-depth look at how researchers in the UK use electronic journals, the value they bring to universities and research institutions and the contribution they make to research productivity, quality and outcomes. Journal publishers began to provide online access to full-text scholarly articles in the late 1990s, triggering a revolution in the scholarly communications process. A very high proportion of journal articles are now available online - 96 per cent of journal titles in science, technology and medicine, and 86 per cent of titles in the arts, humanities and social sciences. "

Libraries already act like Google in many ways. Or I should say instead, Google acts like libraries. It is the mission of both to organize the world's information, to make it openly accessible, to find and present the most authoritative (by many definitions) sources, to instill an ethic of information use in the public, to act as a platform for communities of information, to encourage creation. So how could libraries, in turn, think like Google? Some libraries act as platforms for community content creation (one of my first efforts in hyperlocal community journalism, GoSkokie.net, made with the Medill School of Journalism, is now run by the library). In how many ways could a library act as a platform for the community to inform itself by providing tools and training for content creation? How can libraries collect the wisdom of the crowd that is their communities (e.g., creating collaborative town wikis and maps made by the community)? Librarians and their expert patrons could curate the web and create topic pages that would rise in Google search as valuable resources for the world (if your library is in Florida, it could maintain the best collections of sources for information on manatees or sunburns). What I'd really like to do is brainstorm this question with your readers on my blog: How could they be Googlier?

Another article that can be accessed in full through Science Direct. This article outlines discussions from the 2008 presentation at the NETSL conference. Not an article per se, but perhaps a source for topics to explore and people to interview.

2006 San Jose State University study discussing the preferences of print vs. electronic resources in the university's library. Different disciplines prefer different formats. Access the full article through ScienceDirect.

Historical perspective on research library--access vs ownership.

This is just the conclusion chapter of the book, "The Academic Library in the American University" bu Stephen Atkins and Charles Lowry. The recommend librarians become better advocates of the library in order to increase the stature of the library on campus.

"The prospect of ubiquitous digitization will not change the fundamental relationships among scholarship, academic libraries, and publication. Collaboration across time and space, which is a principal mechanism of scholarship, ought to be enhanced. Reforms in copyright law will be required if the promise of digitization is to be realized; absent such reform, there is a serious risk that much academically valuable material will become invisible and unused. Ubiquitous digitization will change radically the economics that have supported university-based collections of published material. Scholars and scholarly institutions (including libraries and university presses) must assert vigorously claims of fair use and openness."

The programs at two recent conferences (the Charleston Conference and London Online) confirm that ebooks have established themselves in libraries. While the trade and consumer book markets still struggle to find an affordable and compelling ebook reader, library users have embraced the ebooks connected to the library e-collection and accessible via the PC or laptop they typically use.

In this article we present the methodology and initial results from qualitative research into the usage and communication of digital information. It considers the motivation for the research and the methodologies adopted, including Contextual Design and Cultural Probes. The article describes the preliminary studies conducted to test the approach, highlighting the strengths and limitations of the techniques applied. Finally, it outlines proposals for refinement in subsequent iterations and the future research activities planned. The research is carried out as part of the Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services) project.

I don't think this paper points to the feasibility of a digital library. It details the methodology of how to study users of digital libraries.

The scholarly monograph has been compared to the Hapsburg monarchy in that it seems to have been in decline forever! Many publishers, university administrators and academic researchers are still largely wedded to historical and Balkanized Web 1.0 monograph settings. While the ramifications of the fall of the Hapsburg empire are still being felt today in geopolitical terms, university presses can rise phoenix-like through 21st century digital environments and the reworking of scholarly communication frameworks. New e-press developments will provide greater accessibility to scholarly monographic content. Peer-reviewed, digitally constructed monographs, available within open scholarship institutional frameworks, will increasingly be the 2.0 and 3.0 models for scholarly publishing.

An examination of the literature published about electronic books (e-books) between 2000-2007 helps to determine the factors that may have influenced academic e-book offerings and the adoption of e-books in academic libraries. The literature reflects e-book concepts and offerings dating back to 1945, as well as studies and perceptions of opportunities and challenges related to e-books. In an attempt to explain why the integration of e-books into academic library collections has been very gradual during this period, this article presents a summary of the literature that addresses issues related to electronic versions of books that are made accessible online. This includes both books that are digitized and born digital.