Library in Transition

"The University of Michigan Press will be restructured as an academic unit under the aegis of Paul N. Courant, the university's dean of libraries. The idea, according to statement released by Michigan on Friday, is to position the press "to become a pioneer" in digital publishing-to make it a more direct collaborator in the central mission of spreading research "as widely and freely as possible.""

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.

This is an e-book by Wendy Pradt Lougee. The Table of Contents on this Website lists the following discussion topics: Collection Development, Federation, Library as Publisher, Information Access, Communities and Collaboratories, Access and the Semantic Web, User Services, Virtual Reference Systems, Information Literacy, Organizational Models, Library as Place

2005 Australian perspective on role of research library in digital environment

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2006-2007 statistics of the Association of Research Libraries. Graphs and tables detail trends in expenditures and collections development.

Findings and Recommendations portion of a study of the Library of Congress's role in the digital transition. An outline of links for the entire study is on the right side of the page.

Link to PLANETS "Report of Usage models for Libraries, Archives, and Data Centres." This report is a .pdf document that discusses the results of a study or user requirements for digital documents. The study discusses the following topics as they relate to digital documents: access, trustworthiness, retrieval, and flexibility.

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

This is a nice homepage for the A.T. Still University Learning Resource Center. Online Tutorials for electronic resources are prominently listed on the home page

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.

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Now, most of the attention on changes in scholarly publishing has been focused on e-journals. We wish to expand that circle of light so that it takes in the indexing of serials. The index, as every scholar knows, is critical to the quality of the research. The value of a library's serial collection is only as good as its indexing. What scholar has not wondered about the impact of overlapping, inconsistent, and incomplete indexing services on their work? When the weaknesses of the current indexing services are matched against the potential of open-access systems, we may have a tipping point in convincing scholars that the profession would be far better served by open-access publishing systems. We argue that a primary candidate for scholarly publishing's tipping point is the coherence, integration, and precision that these open-access systems can bring to the scholarly exchange and enhancement of knowledge, especially when compared to the current state of the serial index and the hit-and-miss of full-text Web searches.

There is a chart of costs of some electronic indexes, although it may be outdates (2000-01). This article examines the degree of overlap between different academic databases.

"What about the books, you say? In addition to an array of flat screens, Fresno State librarian Peter McDonald said the library includes the largest single floor public-access compact shelving unit in the world (according to Space Saver), capable of holding over 1.3 million volumes on one floor. The library currently has about 915,000 there, so there's room to grow. Periodicals are housed on the library's second floor."

Newspapers are closing left and right, as the model for sharing news and information has changed. This blog entry discusses the publishing revolution in terms of what is happening in the newspaper industry.

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."

All of this isn't to say I'm pessimistic about the future of libraries. It really doesn't matter if we stop providing content in the same way. It might be the best thing to happen to public libraries. Yes, there will be some access equality issues that need sorting, but if we don't have to concern ourselves with making sure people have access to content we'll have more time to create excellent programs and experiences based around content and conversation.