Group items tagged

Digital Books and the Impact on Libraries Peter Brantley, Editor

Each year one of the biggest debates in higher education seems to be: Is this the year that electronic textbooks take off? Many of the barriers are falling. E-reader devices are getting better. The inventory of digital content is expanding. Business models are emerging to support the needs of students, faculty members, and publishers. People are getting more comfortable with new modes of information delivery and the pervasiveness of technology in our lives. Discussions of the future of digital course materials are now more often about "when" than "if."

This can be deleted, there isn't much data, just speculation about what will ultimately bring about the print-to-digital change in college textbooks.

"Project objectives:\n\nThe project's major objective is enriching the toolkit used for the assessment of the impact of scholarly communication items, and hence of scholars, with metrics that derive from usage data. The project has created a semantic model of the scholarly communication process, and an associated large-scale semantic store that relates a range of bibliographic, citation and usage data obtained from a variety of sources. After mapping the structure of the scholarly community on the basis of the established reference data set, MESUR will conduct an investigation into the definition and validation of a range of usage-based metrics. The defined metrics will be cross-validated, resulting in the formulation of guidelines and recommendations." Van De Sompel, et al

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."

bob stein

This is not a scholarly article, it is one person trying to relay his thoughts and predictions about the future of publishing. He welcomes comments, and there are several. He discusses a little bit the history of the print to digital transition, like the added interaction between books and authors via author webpages, or a scholars ability to easily access source materials if they are linked to the original article. This may be useful as a historical guide to discuss where book publishing started and how the publishing model is changing.

This is a study that is available for purchase for $90. The link contains some tables with the study's survey results.

This is the Table of Contents page of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing website. This Website is an index of citations to articles about various topics related to electronic publishing. For example, Publisher's Rights Issues: Digital Rights Management contains an index of probably 50 relevant articles, print & digital, related to that topic. Do we really need any other source? I'm just going to tag this with our four main categories and we can probably find all the sub-categories within these articles.

Europeana

This can be deleted. At least one more thorough article is bookmarked and tagged.

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This is a 2002 article regarding the gradual transformation of the Princeton library from print to digital. It is interesting to note that this article was published before e-readers became widely available, as he does not predict much for the future of e-books. The article covers which branches of study prefer electronic and which do not, and the adaptation of electronic resources in the library.

This article is slightly dated: 2002. It discusses a study of the impact of electronic journals on the staffing needs of academic librarie, specifically, the decreased need of ILL staff. Some other cost issues are touched upon as well.

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Royal University for Women