Library in Transition

References cited in C. Palmer, L. Teffeau and C. Pirmann, Disciplinary Research Practies and Library Services in the Online Environment (OCLC, 2009). This list excludes 21 resources (mostly conference proceedings, grant reports and older periodical literature) that could not be identified in WorldCat. Original bibliography includes 145 references in total.

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

significant growth in ebook sales

"Jason Price and John McDonald, from Claremont Colleges, have completed a study profiling various ebook aggregator collections to their print collection. Their goal, to find out if eBooks can supersede the print collection, or just supplement the collection. They presented this in Charleston last November, but have now finalized their stats and have posted the presentation and results. The study, To supersede or supplement: profiling aggregator e-book collections vs. our print collections, found that they cannot supersede the print collection with ebooks as 70% of their print collection is not available in ebook format. So, eBooks will have to supplement the collection."

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.

Evaluating e-books nationwide - JISC national e-books observatory project In this ground-breaking project over 120 UK universities will receive two years free access to reading materials in e-book form to support students studying in Business and Management, Medicine, Media Studies and Engineering. Titles will be licensed from a variety of publishers / aggregator in order to create mulit-publisher subject collections that are based on demand. During September to December 2007 these titles will be embedded in host institutions and their existence promoted. Then for a period of 12 months from January 2008 the use and impact of these titles in universities will be monitored by CIBER UCL employing deep log analysis (DLA) and follow-up qualitative work will be undertaken by University of Wales (Aberystwyth). Altogether it is expected that the National E-books Observatory will monitor and evaluate the behaviour of tens of thousands of UK students and faculty.

The programs at two recent conferences (the Charleston Conference and London Online) confirm that ebooks have established themselves in libraries. While the trade and consumer book markets still struggle to find an affordable and compelling ebook reader, library users have embraced the ebooks connected to the library e-collection and accessible via the PC or laptop they typically use.

Of course, the key questions are: What is the reality with respect to e-books? Does print really have an anticipated life span of five more years? Will e-books finally take off? After nearly two decades of talking about how e-books are right around the corner, have we finally reached the corner? This research bulletin looks at some of the hype and the reality of e-books in higher education.

Issued recent report on collaborative mgt of print collections

Problem Statement: As the availability of online scholarly resources grows, research institutions face increasing pressure to optimize management of their print collections. Consolidation and rationalization of holdings within and across institutions creates economies of scale that benefit individual institutions and the community as a whole by reducing costs and eliminating redundancies in system-wide holdings. While there is broad interest in achieving such economies, essential infrastructure for enabling inter-institutional cooperation in print management is lacking.

This is just a news announcement with speculation as to the new features.

The book is modernity's quintessential technology-"a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page," as the poet Joseph Brodsky put it. But now that the rustle of the book's turning page competes with the flicker of the screen's twitching pixel, we must consider the possibility that the book may not be around much longer. If it isn't-if we choose to replace the book-what will become of reading and the print culture it fostered? And what does it tell us about ourselves that we may soon retire this most remarkable, five-hundred-year-old technology?

BROWSING VIRTUALLY

"Organizing the OCA: Learning faceted subjects from a library of digital books. David Mimno and Andrew McCallum. Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2007, Vancouver, BC, Canada. PDF The Open Content Alliance is one of several large-scale digitization projects currently producing huge numbers of digital books. Statistical topic models are a natural choice for organizing and describing such large text corpora, but scalability becomes a problem when we are dealing with multi-billion word corpora. This paper presents a new method for topic modeling, DCM-LDA. In this model, we train an independent topic model for every book, using pages as "documents". We then gather the topics discovered, cluster them, and then fit a Dirichlet prior for each topic cluster. Finally, we retrain the individual book topic models using these new shared topics. " via Dan Cohen working on virtual shelves project, using information within texts (OCA) as organizing principle instead of LCSH; former Perseus programmer

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