Group items tagged

"I asked Kahle how he sees the future of libraries. "Libraries as a physical place to go, I think will continue," he said. "But if this trend continues, if we let Google make a monopoly here, then what libraries are in terms of repositories of books, places that buy books, own them, be a guardian of them, will cease to exist. Libraries, going forward, may just be subscribers to a few monopoly corporations' databases." Kahle's version of the digital library, which he and others are building collaboratively, is open and shareable, without strings attached as with Google's deal."

This article mostly covers the process of mass digitization. One of the recommendations at the end of the article states, " A "digital lending right" should be created to provide universal access to all out-of-print works, through collaboration between national governments and creative communities. This would remove a barrier to the mass democratization of information access and make a contribution to the survival of some threatened languages."

"Measuring the Impact of Networked Electronic Services (MINES) is an online, transaction-based survey that collects data on the purpose of use of electronic resources and the demographics of users. As libraries implement access to electronic resources through portals, collaborations, and consortial arrangements, the MINES for Libraries™ protocol offers a convenient way to collect information from users in an environment where they no longer need to physically enter the library in order to access resources."

"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."

Issued recent report on collaborative mgt of print collections

Problem Statement: As the availability of online scholarly resources grows, research institutions face increasing pressure to optimize management of their print collections. Consolidation and rationalization of holdings within and across institutions creates economies of scale that benefit individual institutions and the community as a whole by reducing costs and eliminating redundancies in system-wide holdings. While there is broad interest in achieving such economies, essential infrastructure for enabling inter-institutional cooperation in print management is lacking.

This can be deleted. It discusses how publications in future libraries will be linked via hyperlinks, allowing for more in-depth scholarly research and collaborative research.

"The University of Michigan Press will be restructured as an academic unit under the aegis of Paul N. Courant, the university's dean of libraries. The idea, according to statement released by Michigan on Friday, is to position the press "to become a pioneer" in digital publishing-to make it a more direct collaborator in the central mission of spreading research "as widely and freely as possible.""

This well-researched article discusses several new paradigms for future libraries: collaborative content sharing, library as publisher/distributor, new cataloging schemes, virtual reference services and informationliteracy programs.

This page features the results of the collaboration between Google and the LOC to digitize Congressional hearings. I tried the Immigration collection, and found it easy to download and search the .pdf document. This is a great resource for researchers.

collaboration with Amazon & Google

U21 eBooks is a bold step in a new electronic publishing direction. The multi-media books that you will find on this site are written and designed specifically for electronic delivery, and go well beyond the simple digitizing of text. The on-going series is a collaboration between members of the Universitas 21 international network of leading universities and Melbourne University Publishing. Each book is edited by U21 academics working in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and consists of six to eight essays on international themes that lend themselves to innovative use of new technologies.

Princeton is partnering with Amazon.com, Inc. to pilot the use of an e-reader in a small number of classes during the Fall term of 2009. The project is sponsored by the Princeton University Library, the Office of Information Technology at Princeton, and the High Meadows Foundation, whose mission is "to support environmental sustainability; and to support a community of human interest through collaboration, inclusiveness and common values." A major aim of the pilot is to help determine if e-readers can cut down on the use of paper at Princeton, without adversely affecting the classroom experience.

Main point: the book needs to be re-engineered for the web, taking advantage of the network (cf IfBook) Interesting point: "As wikipedia has demonstrated, collaboration is easiest when documents are constructed using a modular architecture." Favorite comment: "(Incidentally, I hate the word "ebook". It's like calling a car a "gashorse".)"

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?

"The World Collections Programme (WCP) aims to establish two-way partnerships with institutions in Asia and Africa, and increase their access to the UK collections and expertise."

Robert Chavez, Gregory Crane, Anne Sauer, Alison Babeu, Adrian Packel and Gabriel Weaver Abstract This paper provides an overview of the collaboration between the Perseus Project and the Digital Collection and Archives (DCA) at Tufts University in moving the collections of the Perseus Project into the DCA's Fedora based repository as well as a listing of potential services necessary to support a successful institutional repository.

This article examines what it will take to make digital respositories successful in the future. The authors of this article predict that value-added services such as linking documents to related or source documents will popularize digital repositories. The authors imagine partnerships between different libraries and collections will also strengthen the future of digital repositories.

This summary paragraph is quoted directly from the article: "This Review is structured as follows (see also Figure 1): the section Digital Libraries, DOIs, and URIs starts by looking at the range of information in digital libraries, and how resources are identified using URIs on the Web. In the section Problems with Digital Libraries, we consider a fairly standard workflow that serves to highlight some problems with using these libraries. The following section, Some Tools for Defrosting Libraries, examines what Web-based tools are currently available to defrost the digital library and how they are making libraries more personal, sociable, and integrated places. Finally, the section A Future with Warmer Libraries looks at the obstacles to future progress, recommends some best practices for digital publishing, and draws conclusions."

his research will evaluate the potential of a new generation of electronic document readers that present information across multiple displays - a design that anticipates the future availability of fast, bi-stable, display technology. Despite the fact that e-book readers have been available to the general public for several years, paper remains far more popular as a medium for reading and annotating documents. Although electronic devices for reading can provide unique affordances such as a large storage capacity, keyword search, indexing, and some interactivity, they remain unpopular probably because they fail to offer several core affordances of paper such as efficient page-to-page navigation, quick access to multiple documents, and efficient handling of annotations. Starting from an existing proof of concept, this project will design a fully functional prototype that addresses a large spectrum of reading activities that include: reading a book or magazine, lateral reading, and active reading. A set of deployable prototypes will be used to evaluate the potential of the design through a series of longitudinal studies. In producing prototypes of a next generation electronic document reader, this project will systematically study the design parameters that might enhance the reading experience on such devices in a wide variety of scenarios encompassing a diversity of reading activities. It is possible that digital displays will become the predominant technology for consuming text information. However, digital reading devices will be used only if they combine physical design, software infrastructure, and interface features that support a wide variety of reading patterns. Increasing amounts of reading material (both classic and modern) are available through digital distribution. By making it convenient and enjoyable to access this wealth of digital content, this project will spur new interest in reading both for work and pleasure.

A study to design and evaluate e-book readers. May not be relevant to our study.