Group items tagged

It's clear that the recession is accelerating the shift to digital publishing. "With the economy shaping up as it seems to be," one astute observer of trends in the university press world told me last summer, "we're going to see a 15 year leap in publishing in the next two years." And that was well before trillions of dollars started vanishing into the ether.

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.

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.

American Chemistry Society is going to all digital for its journals

On Demand Wednesday, November 04, 2009, 2:15 PM MST 47 Minutes 52 Seconds "

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."

Welcome to the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources. This toolkit, first assembled in 2009, is an effort to give a variety of people interested in understanding ways of measuring the impacts that their online scholarly resources are having. This website is meant to be a growing resource, with additional contributions from experts expanding and modifying it over time. If you have a contribution you would like to make, we encourage your participation!

"The ARL has hired two consultants, October Ivins of Ivins eContent Solutions and Judy Luther of Informed Strategies, to study at-risk, peer-reviewed journals with no electronic incarnation or good e-subscription model. The team is assessing 4,000 such journals "to see if there isn't an opportunity for the libraries to help" them survive, Ms. Luther explained. She and Ms. Ivins described the study at a working session of the ARL's Scholarly Communication Steering Committee, chaired by James G. Neal, university librarian at Columbia University, and again at a briefing for the wider meeting."

INASP's work focuses on communication, knowledge and networks, with particular emphasis on the needs of developing and emerging countries. We respond to their national priorities for: * access to national and international scholarly information and knowledge * capacities to use, create, manage and communicate scholarly information and knowledge via appropriate ICTs * national, regional and international co-operation, networking and knowledge exchange We also advise and advocate for improved policy and practice in achieving sustainable and equitable development through effective communication, knowledge and networks.

"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

It was recognised that there was a need for a number of studies to be carried out to support the Electronic Libraries Programme in various areas. There are currently therefore three main strands of supporting studies activity funded by eLib: * Evaluative Studies, managed by the Tavistock Institute * Preservation Studies, managed by BLRIC * UKOLN-managed studies and workshops (resulting from MODELS and elsewhere)

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

"the main point of the conference was that electronic resources have become the most significant part of our work and our collections, but that we have yet to fully mainstream and normalize processes and procedures for these materials."

"The new report examines the "unbundling of content" from traditional containers (books, journals, CDs) and distribution methods (postal mail, resource sharing). As the boundaries blur between content, technology and the information consumer, the report shows how format now matters less than the information within the container."

"Five-Year Information Format Trends, released in early 2003, provides a snapshot look at how trends and innovation in information formats (e.g. Web pages, electronic books, MP3 audio) are creating new challenges and opportunities for librarians, who must integrate these with existing formats and build new information management processes all while balancing resource allocation."

eIFL.net is a not for profit organisation that supports and advocates for the wide availability of electronic resources by library users in transitional and developing countries. Its core activities are negotiating affordable subscriptions on a multi-country consortial basis, supporting national library consortia and maintaining a global knowledge sharing and capacity building network in related areas, such as open access publishing, intellectual property rights, open s