Group items tagged

The Penn Library is currently testing out various e-book products, both publisher specific as well as aggregate platforms, and it looking for input from graduate and professional students. Most of the these trials expire in mid to late October, so you would need to take a look at these within the next few weeks. The Library is interested in receiving feedback regarding both interface functionality as well as the quality/scope of the content offered. Are the publishers represented significant to you? Are there noticeably absent ones (from the aggregated collections)?

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.

All of this isn't to say I'm pessimistic about the future of libraries. It really doesn't matter if we stop providing content in the same way. It might be the best thing to happen to public libraries. Yes, there will be some access equality issues that need sorting, but if we don't have to concern ourselves with making sure people have access to content we'll have more time to create excellent programs and experiences based around content and conversation.

"When CSUMB was founded in 1994, the initial intent articulated by then-CSU Chancellor Barry Munitz was to create a virtual library, full of electronic content, that students could access from anywhere. While that 1994 view of information delivery assumed that traditional information resources would disappear or significantly diminish, print publications and other physical media such as DVDs have, in fact, increased annually over the past decade. Thus, ten years later, the CSUMB Library effectively delivers both electronic information and a significant component of traditional print and multimedia from inadequate space in half of a small former military building located off the main campus quad."

"Box by box, decades of past scholarship are being packed up and emptied from two old libraries, Physics and Engineering, to make way for the future: a smaller but more efficient and largely electronic library that can accommodate the vast, expanding and interrelated literature of Physics, Computer Science and Engineering."

"The idea behind the symposium was to begin shaping a strategy for the future of academic research libraries. We invited some of the best minds in the field and representatives from leading institutions to explore the future of the research library and new developments in scholarly communication." Cliff Lynhch, Lorcan Dempsey, Kevin Guthrie, etc

Blog about 21st century medical libraries

Blog about 21st century medical libraries, with handy list of resources and of newly founded med school libraries

"As many librarians responsible for collections know all too well, licensing agreements often are complex, lengthy documents filled with arcane and unfamiliar terms such as indemnity, severability and force majeure. In an effort to assist librarians (and information providers as well) to understand the issues raised by these licensing agreements, we have prepared an Analysis of Licensing Agreements for Digital Information. The pages that follow include a collection of common terms usually found in licensing agreements, along with a discussion of the pros and cons of specific language in such agreements. We have tried to present language that we believe to be fair and workable for libraries and information providers as well. We have also included examples of provisions that we believe are unduly burdensome or otherwise do not adequately reflect the needs of libraries in providing digital information to their users."

This is a summary of a presentation given 2008 American Library Association Preconference was sponsored by the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) Continuing Resources Section Education Committee and was moderated by Susan Davis (University at Buffalo, State University of New York). The panel discussion includes many different electronic resource topics, including pricing, cataloging and management of electronic resources.

Subject search of Academic libraries Automation yields many relevant books about transition from print to digital

Brantley on rationale for libraries in digital age. Key question: "What issues would cause this institution - the Library - to be created today?" Innovative thinkers weigh in. Role of IT, avoiding replication.

As anyone who has worked in optimization recently knows, stripping the randomness out of a computing system is a bad idea. Harnessing randomness is what optimization is all about today. (Even algorithms designed for convergence make extensive use of randomness, and it is clear that library research in particular thrives on it.) But it is evident that much of the technologization of libraries is destroying huge swaths of randomness. First, the reduction of access to a relatively small number of search engines, with fairly simple-minded indexing systems -- most typically concordance indexing (not keywords, which are assigned by humans) -- has meant a vast decrease in the randomness of retrieval. Everybody who asks the same questions of the same sources gets the same answers. The centralization and simplification of access tools thus has major and dangerous consequences. This comes even through reduction of temporal randomness. In major indexes without cumulations - the Readers Guide, for example - substantial randomness was introduced by the fact that researchers in different periods tended to see different references. With complete cumulations, that variation is gone.

Head of NY PL explains value of libraries in future: "brilliant research collections such as ours will always be relevant to students, writers, and scholars who need to exploit all of our unique collections - manuscripts, archives, and so on - that will not be on the World Wide Web."

access vs ownership

Volume 64 of the Encyclopedia of Library and information Science: Access Versus Ownership discussion. There are articles in this volume that touch upon all aspects of our project.

This bookmark can be deleted. This article is a broad summary of the issues facing academic libraries.

This article describes exactly how to measure a sample size for any given library. However, it involves a lot of hands on counting which may not be feasible for our study.

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.

Rich presentations on ebooks and library collections. User studies, preservation, rights, future role of library, etc.

2005 Australian perspective on role of research library in digital environment

can be deleted - this article refers to public libraries