Library in Transition

As anyone who has worked in optimization recently knows, stripping the randomness out of a computing system is a bad idea. Harnessing randomness is what optimization is all about today. (Even algorithms designed for convergence make extensive use of randomness, and it is clear that library research in particular thrives on it.) But it is evident that much of the technologization of libraries is destroying huge swaths of randomness. First, the reduction of access to a relatively small number of search engines, with fairly simple-minded indexing systems -- most typically concordance indexing (not keywords, which are assigned by humans) -- has meant a vast decrease in the randomness of retrieval. Everybody who asks the same questions of the same sources gets the same answers. The centralization and simplification of access tools thus has major and dangerous consequences. This comes even through reduction of temporal randomness. In major indexes without cumulations - the Readers Guide, for example - substantial randomness was introduced by the fact that researchers in different periods tended to see different references. With complete cumulations, that variation is gone.

Subject search of Academic libraries Automation yields many relevant books about transition from print to digital

"A study of academic libraries finds that going from print to electronic journals can save money, if it's done right, but challenges remain\nBy Roger C. Schonfeld & Eileen Gifford Fenton -- Library Journal, 3/1/2005"

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

a self-publishing platform for ebooks

This is a fairly extensive study detailing "E-science". There is a section devoted to managing e-science resources in the library, including the architecture of the "Fedora" system, and "E-Curator: 3D colour scans for remote object identification and assessment."

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.

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.

Planets, Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services, is a four-year project co-funded by the European Union under the Sixth Framework Programme to address core digital preservation challenges. The primary goal for Planets is to build practical services and tools to help ensure long-term access to our digital cultural and scientific assets. Planets started on 1st June 2006. This website makes available project documentations and deliverables as Planets progresses so that these can be shared with the libraries, archives and digital preservation community.

Available to students in residential and online studies, the Learning Resource Center (LRC) focuses on developing an extensive, integrated online collection of Evidence-Based resources. Accessed via this Web site the LRC's online full text collections include over 2400 journals, over 550 reference and textbooks, and point of care products. The LRC is also an active participant in the National Network of Libraries of Medicine.

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.

Caricatures media transition, but has some good quotations from O'Reilly, etc.

The JISC/CNI Meeting: Transforming the User Experience

It seems that Amazon.com's Kindle is not the flop that many predicted when the e-book reader debuted last year. Citibank's Mark Mahaney has just doubled his forecast of Kindle sales for the year to 380,000. He figures that Amazon's sales of Kindle hardware and software will hit $1 billion by 2010.

FULLTEXT SOURCES ONLINE (FSO) (ISSN 1040-8258) is a directory of publications that are accessible online in full text, from 29 major aggregator products. FSO lists 40,231 periodicals, newspapers, newsletters, newswires, and TV or radio transcripts. It covers topics in science, technology, medicine, law, finance, business, industry, the popular press and more. FSO also lists the URLs of publications with Internet archives, noting whether access to them is free or not.

Royal University for Women