Group items tagged

Some of the findings that have proved to be of greatest interest have focused on these topics: * Attitudes towards the possibility of a transition away from print format, both for scholarly journals and monographs * Perceptions of libraries and their value, including specific library functions, and how these perceptions are changing * Preferences in research practices, including disciplinary differences and changes over time * Attitudes towards archiving of both print and electronic resources * Preferences that lead authors to choose among scholarly journals in which to publish their articles, as well as attitudes towards digital repositories

Follow the link on this page to the "in depth white paper" which is entitled, "Ithaka's 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education" dated August 18, 2008. The Table of Contents lists: INTRODUCTION; RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE LIBRARY AND THE FACULTY; DEPENDENCE ON ELECTRONIC RESOURCES; THE TRANSITION AWAY FROM PRINT FOR SCHOLARLY JOURNALS; FACULTY PUBLISHING PREFERENCES; E-BOOKS; DIGITAL REPOSITORIES; PRESERVATION OF SCHOLARLY JOURNALS; RECOMMENDATIONS; CONCLUSION. I have tagged this article, but it has some great research and will merit a blog entry.

Digital Content: Analyzing Demand in the Postsecondary Education Market Image of Noah Carp Author: Noah Carp, Affiliate Analyst A tectonic shift in content use is underway in postsecondary education. Both content adopters and suppliers are in the early phase of the continuum from 100% print content to a significant role for digital content. As postsecondary instructors and other content decisionmakers are increasingly interested in employing new digital formats to enhance teaching and learning, digital content providers, technology vendors, and other companies involved in bringing digital content to colleges and universities are simultaneously shaping a new higher education environment. The most pressing challenges for companies participating in this market are to assess the market opportunities, understand customer requirements, modify existing business strategies, and bring compelling offerings to the market. This report focuses on the demand-side of the market - faculty use and planned use of digital content. It uses primary research of faculty content adopters to identify perceptions and trends that will help shape supplier strategies for digital content. The report analyzes:

Inside Higher Ed offers free online news and job information for college and university faculty, adjuncts, graduate students, and administrators, higher education jobs, faculty jobs, college jobs and university jobs

Argues that scholars must shape development of tools. On Stanford Library plan: "The Stanford faculty recommendations are telling for several reasons, which is why I've bothered to begin my discussion there (or, here, as I enjoy the hospitality of the Stanford Humanities Center as a digital humanities fellow). The faculty committee has made a series of highly reasonable and well-argued proposals. Guiding them is a belief, correct in my opinion and that of most humanists, that books aren't going away, we need them and shall continue to do so for a long time to come, and we cannot pit digital tools against book culture. We must accept the hybrid world of scholarly work and earnestly endeavor to support it."

MIT is going to start publishing faculty papers in their own online repository, bypassing commercial publishers altogether.

Tenopir & King: "Abstract A recent article by James Evans in Science (Evans 2008) is being widely discussed in the science and publishing communities. Evans' in-depth research on citations in over 34 million articles and how online availability affects citing patterns, found that the more issues of a journal that are available online, the fewer numbers of articles in that journal are cited. If the journal is available for free online, it is cited even less. Evans attributes this phenomenon to more searching and less browsing (which he feels eliminates marginally relevant articles that may have been found by browsing) and the ability to follow links to see what other authors are citing. He concludes that electronic journals have resulted in a narrowing of scientific citation patterns. This brief article expands on the evidence cited by Evans (Boyce et al. 2004; Tenopir et al. 2004) based on the authors' ongoing surveys of academic readers of scholarly articles. Reading patterns and citation patterns differ, as faculty read many more articles than they ultimately cite and read for many purposes in addition to research and writing. The number of articles read has steadily increased over the last three decades, so the actual numbers of articles found by browsing has not decreased much, even though the percentage of readings found by searching has increased. Readings from library-provided electronic journals has increased substantially, while readings of older articles have recently increased somewhat. Ironically, reading patterns have broadened with electronic journals at the same time citing patterns have narrowed."

2004 Dan Greenstein article; "Data collected recently by UC libraries suggest that where information is available in both print and digital formats, faculty and students prefer digital by an order of magnitude" Move to digital: savings in storage. Shared print collections.

Abstract\n\nUniversity administrators are asking library directors to demonstrate their library's value to the institution in easily articulated quantitative terms that focus on outputs rather than on traditionally reported input measures. This paper reports on a study undertaken at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that sought to measure the return on the university's investment in its library. The study sought to develop a quantitative measure that recognizes the library's value in supporting the university's strategic goals, using grant income generated by faculty using library materials. It also sought to confirm the benefits of using electronic resources and the resulting impact on productivity over a 10-year period. The results of this study, which is believed to be the first of its kind, represent only one piece of the answer to the challenge of representing the university's total return from its investment in its library.\n

The university research library of the 21st century will be a physical place on campus intertwined with a digital presence on student and faculty computers.

I just want to point out that this is a link to an actual library, not an article about a future library. It is great to see a defined mission statement for what this library is becoming. It makes it clear to students and faculty (and just as important: donors) that the library is more than books and journals.

How should we be rethinking the research library in a swiftly changing information landscape?\n\nIn February 2008, CLIR convened 25 leading librarians, publishers, faculty members, and information technology specialists to consider this question. Participants discussed the challenges and opportunities that libraries are likely to face in the next five to ten years, and how changes in scholarly communication will affect the future library. Essays by eight of the participants-Paul Courant, Andrew Dillon, Rick Luce, Stephen Nichols, Daphnée Rentfrow, Abby Smith, Kate Wittenberg, and Lee Zia-were circulated to participants in advance and provided background for the conversation. This report contains these background essays as well as a summary of the meeting.

Evaluating e-books nationwide - JISC national e-books observatory project In this ground-breaking project over 120 UK universities will receive two years free access to reading materials in e-book form to support students studying in Business and Management, Medicine, Media Studies and Engineering. Titles will be licensed from a variety of publishers / aggregator in order to create mulit-publisher subject collections that are based on demand. During September to December 2007 these titles will be embedded in host institutions and their existence promoted. Then for a period of 12 months from January 2008 the use and impact of these titles in universities will be monitored by CIBER UCL employing deep log analysis (DLA) and follow-up qualitative work will be undertaken by University of Wales (Aberystwyth). Altogether it is expected that the National E-books Observatory will monitor and evaluate the behaviour of tens of thousands of UK students and faculty.

Our Interlibrary Loan Office was recently approved to officially start a pilot loaning Amazon Kindles to our university faculty.

This article points the way to a study for review: Ithaka's 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education, but the link doesn't work.

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.

Drexel University made a switch from mostly print to mostly digital electronic journal collection. A study was conducted to determine whether user patterns changed after the change from print to digital. The outcome of this study was favorable and further studies are planned.