Group items tagged

"Overview A survey of nearly 900 Internet stakeholders reveals fascinating new perspectives on the way the Internet is affecting human intelligence and the ways that information is being shared and rendered. The web-based survey gathered opinions from prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers. It is the fourth in a series of Internet expert studies conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University and the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. In this report, we cover experts' thoughts on the following issues: * Will Google make us stupid? * Will the internet enhance or detract from reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge? "

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."

"Frankfurt, 13/10/2008 - The organisers of the Frankfurt Book Fair - the global meeting place for the book world - have conducted a major survey to find out how digitisation will influence the future of the publishing industry, and who will be the driving force behind it. Over 1,000 industry professionals from over 30 countries responded to the survey, issued via the Frankfurt Book Fair Newsletter. The most interesting results: * China's digital influence in international publishing predicted to increase threefold in next five years * consumers, Amazon, Google believed to drive the digitisation process * e-content will overtake traditional books in sales by 2018"

This recent survey completed by 6500 students at over 400 universities shows that digital textbooks are gaining ground on paper. 51% of students often use electronic textbooks over print.

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

The internet, cell phones, and other digital technologies have allowed people to have larger social networks, to participate in and learn from larger numbers of groups, to act in new ways to shape their world, and to gather, asses and act on information of all kinds from all kinds of "media." This marks a major shift in the social and civic lives of Americans that has big implications for libraries as they think about serving their communities. Lee will explore all these changes through the lens of the surveys and research of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.\n

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."

"Measuring the Impact of Networked Electronic Services (MINES) is an online, transaction-based survey that collects data on the purpose of use of electronic resources and the demographics of users. As libraries implement access to electronic resources through portals, collaborations, and consortial arrangements, the MINES for Libraries™ protocol offers a convenient way to collect information from users in an environment where they no longer need to physically enter the library in order to access resources."

Center for the Digital Future, Annenberg School for Communication, USC Annual Internet Survey by the Center for the Digital Future Finds Shifting Trends Among Adults About the Benefits and Consequences of Children Going Online Seventh Annual Study Finds Significant Concerns About Online Predators and Children's Participation in Online Communities

Drexel University's W. W. Hagerty Library received funding [1] in the Fall of 2000 from the U.S. Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to study the impact of a library's shift to electronic journals on staff and costs. The goals were to perform a comparative analysis for Drexel's library (a case study) and to develop a model for use by other libraries. The results suggest that, when all costs are considered, electronic journals are more cost effective on a per use basis. Storage space for low use bound journals is a major expense. A readership survey shows that the library's electronic collection is widely accepted and extensively used. Since there are methodological difficulties with the data available to make the analyses, this study should be viewed as a single first step to address an issue of critical importance to academic libraries.

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."

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.

2007 Digital Future Report Source: Center for the Digital Future, Annenberg School, University of Southern California The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School is pleased to present the results of the sixth year of our project, "Surveying the Digital Future." The six years of longitudinal research comprise an absolutely unique data base that completely captures broadband at home, the wireless Internet, on-line media, user-generated content and, now, social networking.

"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."

"The goal of the Collection Management Initiative was to explore issues associated with integrating and managing research library journal collections comprising print and digital formats. The study sought to explore ways that the University of California could leverage its investment in digital library collections by providing campuses with new approaches for managing their print collections with greater flexibility, given the constraints imposed by existing facilities and limited capital funding. The Collection Management Initiative encompassed three complementary research components. The first component, the Journal Use Study, concentrated on assessing the impact on the user community when print materials are removed from campus library collections and users must rely on digital equivalents. The second component focused on user behaviors and preferences gleaned through surveys and structured interviews. The third component was designed to gather data on the costs and benefits of removing print materials from library collections and relying on digital equivalents."

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.