Library in Transition

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.

"The World Collections Programme (WCP) aims to establish two-way partnerships with institutions in Asia and Africa, and increase their access to the UK collections and expertise."

Predictions that etextbooks on the way--studies of student uses of e-textbooks

This author proposes and innovative method of pricing e-textbooks so that the publisher still maintains an adequate revenue stream and the individual cost per student is far lower than purchasing a printed textbook.

Note in particular Palmer, Carole L., Lauren C. Teffeau and Carrie M. Pirmann. Scholarly Information Practices in the Online Environment: Themes from the Literature and Implications for Library Service Development.

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.

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 prospect of ubiquitous digitization will not change the fundamental relationships among scholarship, academic libraries, and publication. Collaboration across time and space, which is a principal mechanism of scholarship, ought to be enhanced. Reforms in copyright law will be required if the promise of digitization is to be realized; absent such reform, there is a serious risk that much academically valuable material will become invisible and unused. Ubiquitous digitization will change radically the economics that have supported university-based collections of published material. Scholars and scholarly institutions (including libraries and university presses) must assert vigorously claims of fair use and openness."

Abstract\n\nUniversity administrators are asking library directors to demonstrate their library's value to the institution in easily articulated quantitative terms that focus on outputs rather than on traditionally reported input measures. This paper reports on a study undertaken at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that sought to measure the return on the university's investment in its library. The study sought to develop a quantitative measure that recognizes the library's value in supporting the university's strategic goals, using grant income generated by faculty using library materials. It also sought to confirm the benefits of using electronic resources and the resulting impact on productivity over a 10-year period. The results of this study, which is believed to be the first of its kind, represent only one piece of the answer to the challenge of representing the university's total return from its investment in its library.\n

2005 Australian perspective on role of research library in digital environment

can be deleted - this article refers to public libraries

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.

Each year one of the biggest debates in higher education seems to be: Is this the year that electronic textbooks take off? Many of the barriers are falling. E-reader devices are getting better. The inventory of digital content is expanding. Business models are emerging to support the needs of students, faculty members, and publishers. People are getting more comfortable with new modes of information delivery and the pervasiveness of technology in our lives. Discussions of the future of digital course materials are now more often about "when" than "if."

This can be deleted, there isn't much data, just speculation about what will ultimately bring about the print-to-digital change in college textbooks.

"Project objectives:\n\nThe project's major objective is enriching the toolkit used for the assessment of the impact of scholarly communication items, and hence of scholars, with metrics that derive from usage data. The project has created a semantic model of the scholarly communication process, and an associated large-scale semantic store that relates a range of bibliographic, citation and usage data obtained from a variety of sources. After mapping the structure of the scholarly community on the basis of the established reference data set, MESUR will conduct an investigation into the definition and validation of a range of usage-based metrics. The defined metrics will be cross-validated, resulting in the formulation of guidelines and recommendations." Van De Sompel, et al

This summary paragraph is quoted directly from the article: "This Review is structured as follows (see also Figure 1): the section Digital Libraries, DOIs, and URIs starts by looking at the range of information in digital libraries, and how resources are identified using URIs on the Web. In the section Problems with Digital Libraries, we consider a fairly standard workflow that serves to highlight some problems with using these libraries. The following section, Some Tools for Defrosting Libraries, examines what Web-based tools are currently available to defrost the digital library and how they are making libraries more personal, sociable, and integrated places. Finally, the section A Future with Warmer Libraries looks at the obstacles to future progress, recommends some best practices for digital publishing, and draws conclusions."

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.

Stanza, iPhone's free e-book reader application, has been downloaded more than 395,000 times and is installed at an average rate of about 5,000 copies a day, according to the app's creator Lexcycle.

This article describes the features of the PRS-700 Reader, but does not have a consumer review.

We don't know how soon it will happen, but it is happening and it will be consummated soon. The commodity of the book, as we have known it for the last few decades, is vanishing and being replaced by new electronic media. Paper-and-binding books have irrevocably begun to fade away as products of mass consumption and will soon transform themselves into curios like vinyl records.

This bookmark can be deleted. This is a nice personal essay about the impact of the cost vs. benefits of textbooks, but of no value to our study.

I can't review this for tagging, this article must be purchased.