Library in Transition

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.

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

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

Stephen R. Lawrence

The abstract for this article reads, "This exploratory study asked eleven Association of Research Libraries (ARL) librarians to identify the resources needed for the transition of an all-paper library to the all-digital library. Although the results cannot be generalized, the study identifies functions and resources associated with the provision of paper and electronic materials that can be used for further investigation of library resource allocations." Connaway, L., Lawrence, S.

Europeana

This can be deleted. At least one more thorough article is bookmarked and tagged.

Quoted directly from the introductory paragraphs of the article, "This article offers some perspectives on GPLP in light of what is known about library print book collections in general, and those of the Google 5 in particular, from information in OCLC's WorldCat bibliographic database and holdings file. Questions addressed include: * Coverage: What proportion of the system-wide print book collection will GPLP potentially cover? What is the degree of holdings overlap across the print book collections of the five participating libraries? * Language: What is the distribution of languages associated with the print books held by the GPLP libraries? Which languages are predominant? * Copyright: What proportion of the GPLP libraries' print book holdings are out of copyright? * Works: How many distinct works are represented in the holdings of the GPLP libraries? How does a focus on works impact coverage and holdings overlap? * Convergence: What are the effects on coverage of using a different set of five libraries? What are the effects of adding the holdings of additional libraries to those of the GPLP libraries, and how do these effects vary by library type?"

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."

bob stein

This is not a scholarly article, it is one person trying to relay his thoughts and predictions about the future of publishing. He welcomes comments, and there are several. He discusses a little bit the history of the print to digital transition, like the added interaction between books and authors via author webpages, or a scholars ability to easily access source materials if they are linked to the original article. This may be useful as a historical guide to discuss where book publishing started and how the publishing model is changing.

Key idea: "The historical narratives that future historians write may not actually look much different from those that are crafted today, but the methodologies they use may need to change radically. If we have, for example, a complete record of everything

This is a great article that looks at the preservation of the cultural and historical record from a historian's perspective. He tackles such questions as how do we establish trust in intangible "documents?" How do we preserve the historical record in such a way that future people can access the materials?

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.

Size of LC collection: 138,313,427 items

"Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles."

2002 Amy Friedlander study of users attitudes toward libraries

2004 Dan Greenstein article; "Data collected recently by UC libraries suggest that where information is available in both print and digital formats, faculty and students prefer digital by an order of magnitude" Move to digital: savings in storage. Shared print collections.

Arizona Health Services library: "In Phoenix you will notice a focus on the use of electronic materials, except in the case of books not yet available in digital format. "

"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."

"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."

overview of print to digital transition

Report on ebook experiment at Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH Details needed services: preservation, cataloging, rights, etc

This article discusses the cost-benefit analysis of journal subscriptions in research libraries. It also discusses the methodology used to determine whether or not journal articles are actually read and used by researchers. There is some discussion regarding the cost of digital vs. print resources, but the discussion is minimal.