Group items tagged

Knovel is an online technical resource used by applied scientists and practicing engineers around the world to quickly locate relevant and reliable technical information.

Elsevier, a leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical (STM) information, today announced the availability of more than 4,000 eBooks on ScienceDirect. eBooks on ScienceDirect comprise high-quality selected titles published from 1995 to the present. These include scientific and technical books spanning 18 subject areas, as well as books from renowned imprints including Pergamon and Academic Press. The launch is a major expansion to the reference works, handbooks and book series already available on ScienceDirect.

print on demand Espresso machine

This is an interesting twist on providing access to books: allowing patrons to print their own copy. This article describes a machine that prints and binds books on demand, allowing students and professors to make their own textbooks or study materials for far less than traditional textbooks. Texts must with within copyright regulations and must be in pdf format. While not technically a print-to-digital issue, the texts must be digitized before printing.

"The digitization of millions of books under programs such as Google Book Search and Microsoft Live Search Books is dramatically expanding our ability to search and find information. The aim of these large-scale projects-to make content accessible-is interwoven with the question of how one keeps that content, whether digital or print, fit for use over time. This report by Oya Y. Rieger examines large-scale digital initiatives (LSDIs) to identify issues that will influence the availability and usability, over time, of the digital books these projects create. Ms. Rieger is interim assistant university librarian for digital library and information technologies at the Cornell University Library." The paper describes four large-scale projects-Google Book Search, Microsoft Live Search Books, Open Content Alliance, and the Million Book Project-and their digitization strategies. It then discusses a range of issues affecting the stewardship of the digital collections they create: selection, quality in content creation, technical infrastructure, and organizational infrastructure. The paper also attempts to foresee the likely impacts of large-scale digitization on book collections.

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.

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.

Scholarly Publishing The Electronic Frontier Robin P. Peek and Gregory B. Newby Scholarly publishing is changing and the changes will have an impact on all members of the academic community and on how they will go about creating and maintaining scholarship. Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier examines the critical issues facing universities, academics, libraries, and scholarly presses in the turbulent time when publishing is likely moving from a print to an electronic paradigm. The essays by all of the major participants in this "electronic revolution" explore the technical, social, and organizational impact of computer-mediated communication. They examine both ends of the continuum and everything in between-from how the system might be completely overhauled to a gradual retrenching where much remains the same but paper is no longer the communication medium. Some of the subjects, implicit in the various possible futures for scholarly publishing and covered here, include the role of the library with respect to electronic publications, protection of intellectual and economic property, and plagiarism.

"And Now for Something Completely Different: Our Future from Outside the Box an ALCTS Symposium at ALA Midwinter 2010 Friday, January 15, 2010 from 8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Boston, Mass. Event Code: ALC2 Several cutting-edge thinkers will prepare short opinion pieces on future trends/issues/developments that are likely to impact research, instruction, and scholarly communication. These essays will serve as the foundation for panel discussions between some of these thinkers, selected respondents, and attendees on emerging roles for libraries and librarians, particularly collections and technical services librarians. This symposium will build upon the themes developed in the ALCTS Symposium, "Living Digital.""

This article mostly covers the process of mass digitization. One of the recommendations at the end of the article states, " A "digital lending right" should be created to provide universal access to all out-of-print works, through collaboration between national governments and creative communities. This would remove a barrier to the mass democratization of information access and make a contribution to the survival of some threatened languages."

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.

How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright. For the last four years, Google has been digitizing millions of books, including many covered by copyright, from the collections of major research libraries, and making the texts searchable online. The authors and publishers objected that digitizing constituted a violation of their copyrights. After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers for the foreseeable future. What will that future be?

"Against the Grain (ISSN: 1043-2094) is your key to the latest news about libraries, publishers, book jobbers, and subscription agents. It is a unique collection of reports on the issues, literature, and people that impact the world of books and journals"

This is an article discussing how the University of Hong Kong Library manages their collections budget to get the best electronic and print resources on the same budget.

Reports on pilot to use ebooks (Sony Readers) at Northwest Missouri State U. Students found it frustrating that they couldn't "highlight passages, cut and paste text, or participate in interactive quizzes."

This article was written in 1992, well before electronic journals and resources were common. This study examines the economic pressures on libraries, and embraces the possibility that new methods of electronic distribution of resources will help reduce these cost pressures.

This is an in-depth study conducted by the Library of Congress over a period of years to discover and address the issues raised by conversion to digital media. Interestingly, this study is published as an e-book that is freely readable on the web, but must be purchased for download. I just tagged this with each of the main headers because there are chapters in this book that discuss all aspects of our project.

A paragraph about the availability of new titles on iPhones ScrollMotion.

This lengthy New York Times Magazine article discusses mass scanning projects and their impacts in many areas: linking, tagging, and accessibility, among others. Ultimately, author Kevin Kelly imagines that all digitized books will be linked together as on universal book. He discusses the impact of copyright law on existing works and the inevitable out of print "orphans," and Google's plan to scan all the orphans and allow snippets to be accessed under the fair use doctrine. This assumption by Google that it can scan first and find copyright owners later results in a lawsuit that the author describes as a "clash of business models." Business models based on copies are obsolete as business models based on value and searchability take their places.

This is a lengthy 2005 article on Google's digital book preservation initiative. Google has undertaken an ambitious project, and the author details how exactly the books digitally preserved, how they are cataloged, and how ancient handwritten books are transformed into searchable text. At the time this article was written, it was still unknown as to what Google planned on doing with all the books it digitized and various options are discussed. Policy issues are touched on very lightly, other than the books added to the digital collection are largely those which are not protected by copyright law.

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.