Library in Transition

Innovation: The Christian Science Monitor\'s innovation section.

Our Interlibrary Loan Office was recently approved to officially start a pilot loaning Amazon Kindles to our university faculty.

Stanford

Now, before I describe what I think will be the world of content and publishing in 20 years, I want to make the point that a lot happens in 20 years, because I'm going to describe a world that is pretty different from the one that we're in, and that would raise a lot of skepticism.

eIFL.net is a not for profit organisation that supports and advocates for the wide availability of electronic resources by library users in transitional and developing countries. Its core activities are negotiating affordable subscriptions on a multi-country consortial basis, supporting national library consortia and maintaining a global knowledge sharing and capacity building network in related areas, such as open access publishing, intellectual property rights, open s

Welcome to the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources. This toolkit, first assembled in 2009, is an effort to give a variety of people interested in understanding ways of measuring the impacts that their online scholarly resources are having. This website is meant to be a growing resource, with additional contributions from experts expanding and modifying it over time. If you have a contribution you would like to make, we encourage your participation!

Traditional journals, even those available electronically, are changing slowly. However, there is rapid evolution in scholarly communication. Usage is moving to electronic formats. In some areas, it appears that electronic versions of papers are being read about as often as the printed journal versions. Although there are serious difficulties in comparing figures from different media, the growth rates in usage of electronic scholarly information are sufficiently high that if they continue for a few years, there will be no doubt that print versions will be eclipsed. Further, much of the electronic information that is accessed is outside the formal scholarly publication process. There is also vigorous growth in forms of electronic communication that take advantage of the unique capabilities of the Web, and which simply do not fit into the traditional journal publishing format.

Karen Coyle