More than half the faculty, postdocs, and other research and academic staff told us that they use library databases to search for e-journal articles, and almost the same number of faculty told us that they use Vera, the library’s gateway to electronic subscriptions.

Why would experienced researchers like faculty include Vera in their searching repertoire? Library databases—all of which can be accessed through Vera—generally offer information that is more consistently relevant and reliable (and may also be peer-reviewed). Google is quite fast with a single search box, is well embedded in many browsers, and can do a general search across all disciplines at the same time. Often, however, the information found in library databases is not, or cannot be, indexed in Google. Library databases on a subject are likely more in-depth, although they may not be quite as fast to search, and a single database generally does not cover all academic disciplines.

I recently conducted a focus group with local authors, and put this proposition to them: * Would you consider DONATING a single copy of your ebook file to the library if we agree to... * Preserve, review, recommend, and digitally display it; * Buy an extra copy for every four people who are waiting for it; * Put a "click here to buy" button in our catalog, with the understanding that you'll share in the revenue of the sale (say, we take 10% AND YOU GET 90%). Guess what? They said, "Yes." Are we talking to the right people?

He signed two bills, one to create the textbooks and the other to establish a California Digital Open Source Library to host them, at a meeting with students in Sacramento.

The law specifies that the textbooks must be placed under a Creative Commons license, allowing professors at universities outside of California to use the textbooks in their own classrooms.

The Walters is a museum that’s free to the public, and to be public these days is to be on the Internet. Therefore to be a public museum your digital data should be free. And the great thing about digital data, particularly of historic collections, is that they’re the greatest advert that these collections have. So: Why on Earth would you limit how people can use them? The digital data is not a threat to the real data, it’s just an advertisement that only increases the aura of the original, so there just doesn’t seem to be any point in putting restrictions on the data.

Institutions with special collections, particularly museums — libraries perhaps less so — want to improve their brand and raise visitorship. One way in which they can do that is through advertising. And what better way to advertise than by making instantly available, or as available as possible, images of their collections? Because that’s how they get known.

So why is the FCC putting so much money toward a Digital Literacy Corps without enough involvement from the library community? Because we don’t have the tradition of being engaged in a philosophical praxis of librarianship. Having a habit of thinking deeply and critically about what it is that we do and why we do it, on a large scale, would enable and empower us to create good language and hopefully, in turn, to influence on a large scale the perception and understanding of librarians’ value to and impact on society.

The time in which the AAP can speak authoritatively for publishing is over. Formulating policy over intellectual property issues that heretofore was considered the domain of a few specific industry and interest groups is instead the domain of all internet users, including readers and authors, as well as a wide range of new publisher entrants.

I have proposed that the university library could function as a re-invented university press. However, this guide is intended, over the course of as many parts as I need to be able to write this in manageable chunks, to signpost a third way. This guide is for academics who want to establish their own journals that are:Peer reviewed, in a traditional pre-review modelOpen Access and free in monetary terms for authors and readersPreserved, safe and archived in the event of catastrophe or foldReputable: run by consensus of leaders in a field

The board is absolutely crucial. Academic journals work on a system of academic capital; you need respected individuals who are willing to sit on your board, even if they are only lending their name and you end up doing most of the legwork. It should only be a matter of time before academics realise that journal brand isn’t (or shouldn’t be) affiliated to publishers, but rather to the academics who choose to endow a journal with their support.

When the first articles start flooding in, you’ll need all the help you can get. These have to be people you can trust to understand the challenges you’re facing. They need to set the bar high for the first issue while also appreciating the difficulties of attracting the big names to start-up journals. Contact people early so that you’re ready to go.

The European Court of Justice has ruled that customers have a right to resell software they purchase regardless of whether the software was originally distributed on a physical medium or downloaded over the Internet.

But the court did place some important limits on customers' rights to resell used software licenses. First, if a customer purchases a multiseat license, it is not allowed to split the license up into parts and sell them separately.

The court also held that after reselling the software, the previous owner must render his own copy of the software inoperable.

Says one curator, "I wish there were more articles headlined 'Thorough, Accurate Cataloging Pays Off!' "

So where was this document found? Was it in a suitcase in the attic of Dr. Leale's great-great-great-great granddaughter? Well, no, it was at the National Archives. Was it in a warped metal filing cabinet down a neglected set of stairs labeled "Beware of the Leopard"? No, it was in a box of other incoming correspondence to the Surgeon General, filed alphabetically under "L" for Leale. In short, this document that had been excavated from the depths of the earth with great physical effort was right where it was supposed to be.

In the case of the recent press on the Leale report, the report had not yet been catalogued, cutting off discovery for ordinary researchers searching with finding aids and online catalogues.

The cloud computing models [1] of leading library systems vendors will not only change the way data is stored, but will also affect the way we catalog.

global and local

more content, less standard