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he RIN guide, Ensuring a bright future for research libraries: a guide for vice-chancellors and senior institutional managers which aims to inform this audience on how to ensure library and information services keep pace with the evolving needs of researchers.The guidance was written by the working group set up to consider the findings and conclusions from the RIN and RLUK report on Researchers' use of academic libraries and their services (April 2007).

Copied from the summary: "Digital technologies and online information resources have brought fundamental changes in how research is done, and also in what researchers expect from library and information services. The services that librarians and information professionals provide have also changed fundamentally over the past decade, and they now offer much more in providing leadership that brings improvements in research performance and effectiveness. New resources, services and technologies continue to create new opportunities, new challenges and new expectations. Librarians and information services need the resources and the continuing top-level support within their institutions to ensure that they can fulfil their potential and meet these challenges. " This article looks excellent and will merit a blog entry.

"The aim of this project is to discover: a) whether or not as a result of the digital transition and resources being created digitally, young people, the "google generation", are searching for and researching content in new ways and if so, how this will shape the way they research and search in the future; b) whether or not new ways of searching and researching for content will prove to be any different from the way that existing researchers/scholars work. "

The UC Merced Library motto, "Not what other research libraries are . . . what they will be," sums up an ambitious, if not outright audacious goal: to create the template for the research library of the Twenty-First Century. As envisioned by Founding University Librarian Bruce Miller and the staff of the Library, being a Twenty-First Century research library does not mean jumping on the latest technology bandwagon or simply branding UC Merced Library as "the virtual library." Instead, the vision requires going back to the basic principles of librarianship-connecting readers with books, information seekers with information-and then making these connections in the most efficient and cost-effective way, whether this means using the technology of online information, purchasing a printed book, or borrowing a printed book from among the 34 million volumes owned by the combined libraries of the ten University of California campuses which comprise, in the aggregate, the largest research library in the Western Hemisphere and, by some measures, the entire world.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting (May 30, 2008) the following: Research Libraries Embrace E-Books "Sixty-nine percent of university research libraries plan to increase spending on e-books over the next two years, according to a recent study published by Primary Research Group Inc. This finding and others were based on a survey of 45 research libraries in countries around the world, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Japan."

CIBER projects Live projects Digital Lives for the Arts & Humanities Research Council (September 2007 to April 2009). Evaluating the Usage and Impact of E-Journals in the UK for the Research Information Network (January to November 2008). UK National E-Books Observatory for JISC Collections (January 2008 to April 2009). Recently completed projects MaxData for the US Institute of Museum & Library Studies. Completed December 2007. SuperBook for a consortium of publishers. Completed December 2007. The Impact of Open Access Journal Publishing II for Oxford University Press. Completed November 2007. The Researcher of the Future for the British Library and JISC. Completed November 2007.

"Sixty-nine percent of university research libraries plan to increase spending on e-books over the next two years, according to a recent study published by Primary Research Group Inc. This finding and others were based on a survey of 45 research libraries in countries around the world, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Japan."

Abstract from the Website: "This paper is the second in a series of studies (see Gadd, E., C. Oppenheim, and S. Probets. RoMEO Studies 1: The impact of copyright ownership on author-self-archiving. Journal of Documentation. 59(3) 243-277) emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers the protection for research papers afforded by UK copyright law, and by e-journal licences. It compares this with the protection required by academic authors for open-access research papers as discovered by the RoMEO academic author survey. The survey used the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) as a framework for collecting views from 542 academics as to the permissions, restrictions, and conditions they wanted to assert over their works. Responses from self-archivers and non-archivers are compared. Concludes that most academic authors are primarily interested in preserving their moral rights, and that the protection offered research papers by copyright law is way in excess of that required by most academics. It also raises concerns about the level of protection enforced by e-journal licence agreements"

Abstract from the Website: "This paper is the third in a series of studies emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers previous studies of the usage of electronic journal articles through a literature survey. It then reports on the results of a survey of 542 academic authors as to how they expected to use open-access research papers. This data is compared with results from the second of the RoMEO Studies series as to how academics wished to protect their open-access research papers. The ways in which academics expect to use open-access works (including activities, restrictions and conditions) are described. It concludes that academics-as-users do not expect to perform all the activities with open-access research papers that academics-as-authors would allow. Thus the rights metadata proposed by the RoMEO Project would appear to meet the usage requirements of most academics."

Our work aims to foster the further understanding of the significance of digital and analog books and their role in humanities scholarship. We are very grateful that a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) research cluster award made possible the preliminary work presented on the website. Research questions Key questions to be addressed include: * What do we really know about the ways in which we interact with new texts that replace the print artifact and re-present to us the knowledge and experience of the past, as well as deliver the direct-to-digital record of the present? * How do we understand the ways in which we interact with these knowledge objects, and the information they contain? * How do we understand the impact that the confluence of media formats in these digital objects has on our use of them, such that we may best facilitate interaction with the new digital artifact?

This study discusses how research methods have changed. Hyperlinks may actually lead to less in-depth research as researchers jump around through articles, rather and read and digest the article as written.

As digital libraries move from demonstration projects to the real world of working libraries, it is critical to assess and to document the impact of the shift. This paper reports the methodology and initial results of an Institute for Library and Information Studies (IMLS) funded research study of the operational and economic impact of an academic library's migration to an all-electronic journal collection. Drexel Library's entire print and electronic journal collections and associated staff are the test bed to study three key research questions: (1) What is the impact on library staffing needs? (2) How have library costs been reduced, increased and/or re-allocated? (3) What other library resources have been affected? We are using quantitative and qualitative methods to answer the research questions operationalized in the following tasks: (1) Measure the staff time, subscriptions costs and other costs related to each activity required to acquire and maintain print and electronic journals. (2) Compute the per-volume, per-title, and per-use costs of acquiring and maintaining print and electronic subscriptions. (3) Study all impacted library services, including changes in reference service, document delivery, and instructional programs. Initial results of measuring staff time indicate Information Services and Systems Operation departments constitute the majority of personnel costs for electronic journals. Technical Services and Circulation account for the majority of staff costs for print journals. Per title subscription costs appear to be substantially lower for electronic titles obtained through aggregator collections.

"'E-journals: their use, value and impact' takes an in-depth look at how researchers in the UK use electronic journals, the value they bring to universities and research institutions and the contribution they make to research productivity, quality and outcomes. Journal publishers began to provide online access to full-text scholarly articles in the late 1990s, triggering a revolution in the scholarly communications process. A very high proportion of journal articles are now available online - 96 per cent of journal titles in science, technology and medicine, and 86 per cent of titles in the arts, humanities and social sciences. "

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."

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.

In this article we present the methodology and initial results from qualitative research into the usage and communication of digital information. It considers the motivation for the research and the methodologies adopted, including Contextual Design and Cultural Probes. The article describes the preliminary studies conducted to test the approach, highlighting the strengths and limitations of the techniques applied. Finally, it outlines proposals for refinement in subsequent iterations and the future research activities planned. The research is carried out as part of the Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services) project.

I don't think this paper points to the feasibility of a digital library. It details the methodology of how to study users of digital libraries.

James Evans on his Science article about impact of eresources on research

This author argues against the "long tail" theory of internet research. Interesting, but directly relevant to our study.

"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

This is the ICOLC Statement of Current Perspective and Preferred Practices for Selection and Purchase of Electronic Information. The statement says, "Preferred Pricing Practices - Reaffirmed A. Non-disclosure language should not be required for any licensing agreement, particularly language that would preclude library consortia from sharing pricing and other significant terms and conditions with other consortia. B. Providers should not expect libraries to pay the entire cost of their research and development to bring new electronic products to market. These costs should be shared by the company shareholders and amortized by the provider so current prices for electronic information are sufficiently affordable to encourage experimentation and ultimately widespread use. This strategy will offer providers a better long-term revenue stream from which to recover their research and development costs. C. Libraries should have the option to purchase the electronic product without the paper subscription, and the electronic product should cost substantially less than the printed subscription price. See Section A. below for more detail. D. Bundling electronic and print subscriptions in non-flexible multi-year packages must not be the sole pricing option for purchasing electronic information. For example, licenses and purchase agreements for electronic journals, after the initial pricing year, cannot remain on an unchangeable fixed economic course." (paragraphs 12 - 16 of the URL)

This is the final report of the JISC EI-ASPM Project, which was commissioned by JISC to explore whether there are new opportunities and new models for scholarly publishing that would better serve researchers and better communicate and disseminate research findings." />www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/economicpublishingmodelsfinalreport.aspx

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.