Group items tagged

An outsider view of how Overdrive presents itself as a corporate entity to those not in the library profession, and apparent plans to expand into the school library market.

A major victory for Google where the scanning of books has been justified as fair use, however it curious much of the case hinged on the scanning being "transformative" in the sense of the scanned material being used as a finding aid rather than a tool to read books, even though many books are entirely available to be read online.

"A wide range of academic research across the country, from sophisticated biomedical experiments at the National Institutes of Health to undergraduate political science essays, was being interrupted Wednesday as the federal government shutdown continued for a second day -- with no clear path to a resolution. In addition to forcing the closure of government buildings where research is conducted -- such as the Library of Congress and presidential libraries -- the shutdown was also cutting off access to myriad electronic resources on which many researchers depend."

A little out of date, but an examination of how the recent partial government shut down affected research, both in physical libraries and online research.

An interesting approach about how much of today's material is filtered by likes and preferences so users tend to see only what they want to. What stands out is the approach is to use keywords of material the user agrees with to show the opposing viewpoints.

A somewhat whimsical article looking at how similar e-resource offerings are to traditional books and how books are still part of our mindset.

An interesting idea, as much of the third world is skipping traditional infrastructure for things like wireless, and material produced by by and targeted to local interests and history would sell well.

An interesting if short article about the process and challenges a library in digitizing a largely unique collection most on their own.

Initially I thought this would be an informative article but it was essentially a long complaint about trying to get scholarly communication working, and I kept thinking if the author is aware of the problems beforehand then why not anticipate solutions?

An interesting article showing the progress of open-access despite DRM and publisher control. However, my next question remains unanswered: Are these the papers that people want to read?

This is very cool! I imagine some libraries in MO are watching this to see if it is successful.

An interesting article about a World War Two Veteran who his his life long illiteracy and didn't read his first book until age 89.

An ambitious plan for Norway to scan all printed material in Norwegian in about 15 years, based on how copies of any new book are to be deposited in the national library and therefore by scanning the entire national library all materials will be digitized.

An examination of how "luxury" journals that supposedly promote the best in research can sometimes have the opposite effect but attracting articles meant to gain attention or show current novelty topics.

An interesting about the unique environment in Iceland where writing is very popular and 1 our of 10 people will publish a book.

An author recounts a success story and what had to be done to self publish a casebook. Unlike fiction or repackaged public domain material this was a large book, 870 pages and nearly 40 megabytes in size. The author also did not used Amazon but Scribd and Gumroad as publishers.

The San Diego library is opening a new library; the article laments how half the books have not been used in the last year, and taxpayers still had to pay to move them, but considering some recent research numbers these statistics are actually fairly high.

A plausible explanation on how the Great Library collapsed not in one fell swoop as is often believed but decayed gradually from budget cuts and mission creep until at the end it was a shadow of what it was.

An interesting project that intends to combine Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine (STEM) with Art to make STEAM and thus make these programs accessible to more students. While it has practical use at the pre-school and elementary level I can't see much use it would be for higher levels of education.

The program is up for the ALA Virtual Conference! Take a peek and find which sessions you plan to attend.

As we get more and more databases/ebooks/whatnot this is an interesting read. Esp. since the person complaining about too many clicks is a historian! Its their job to research and they hate clicking too much-what do our average users think? I had an interesting conversation with a faculty member last week that went something like this: "Brian, I want you to know that it's getting harder for me to get students to use the library- especially the databases- anything beyond three clicks is just too many."