The Idea of Order: Transforming research collections for 21st century scholarship

Wednesday, 28 July 2010 9:44:17 a.m.

The Idea of Order explores the transition from an analog to a digital environment for knowledge access, preservation, and reconstitution, and the implications of this transition for managing research collections. The volume comprises three reports. The first, "Can a New Research Library be All-Digital?" by Lisa Spiro and Geneva Henry, explores the degree to which a new research library can eschew print. The second, "On the Cost of Keeping a Book," by Paul Courant and Matthew "Buzzy" Nielsen argues that from the perspective of long-term storage, digital surrogates offer a considerable cost savings over print-based libraries. The final report, "Ghostlier Demarcations," examines how well large text databases being created by Google Books and other mass-digitization efforts meet the needs of scholars, and the larger implications of these projects for research, teaching, and publishing.

Go to source:
http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub147abst.html

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Semantically enhancing collections of library and non-library content

Wednesday, 28 July 2010 9:41:57 a.m.

Many digital libraries have not made the transition to semantic digital libraries, and often with good reason. Librarians and information technologists may not yet grasp the value of semantic mappings of bibliographic metadata, they may not have the resources to make the transition and, even if they do, semantic web tools and standards have varied in terms of maturity and performance. Selecting appropriate or reasonable classes and properties from ontologies, linking and augmenting bibliographic metadata as it is mapped to triples, data fusion and re-use, and considerations about what it means to represent this data as a graph, are all challenges librarians and information technologists face as they transition their various collections to the semantic web. This paper presents some lessons we have learned building small, focused semantic digital library collections that combine bibliographic and non-bibliographic data, based on specific topics. The tools map and augment the metadata to produce a collection of triples. We have also developed some prototype tools atop these collections which allow users to explore the content in ways that were either not possible or not easy to do with other library systems.

Go to source:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july10/powell/07powell.html

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JISC Inform issue 28 Summer 2010

Wednesday, 28 July 2010 9:40:18 a.m.

This edition is all about discovery – of data and knowledge, like-minded teachers, researchers and organisations.

New learners can discover rich educational materials online, published under open licences, as shown in our feature on Open Educational Resources. We also bring you examples of how colleges and universities are discovering new partnerships with business, ways of working together and how to share vital services and knowledge.

With the research environment in flux due to the economic climate and rapid digital developments, researchers are having to do more with less, and so it makes sense to urge them to discover new digital technologies that allow them to tap into global resources. We report on the research behaviour of ‘Generation Y’ and the increasing usefulness of virtual research environments.
While twenty years ago a group of scholars working on a common problem would have had to spend considerable amounts of money and time to enable their collaboration, new virtual environments allow online, real-time collaboration and speed up vital processes of innovation – as seen in the case studies about African sleeping sickness and the Roman tablet.
Today’s big problems such as climate change and global financial turmoil require new combinations of knowledge, helped by innovative digital technologies. This is why JISC is an indispensable resource for both individual institutions and the sector as a whole.

Go to source:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/jiscinform/2010/inform28.aspx

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Quality assurance and assessment of scholarly research

Wednesday, 28 July 2010 9:39:06 a.m.

A new guide has been produced to provide researchers, academic administrators and librarians with an understanding of quality assurance processes and some of the current issues surrounding the debate about quality assurance.

It provides an overview of some of the key issues surrounding quality assurance and assessment of scholarly research. It is intended for academic administrators, researchers and librarians who deal with elements of quality assurance and quality assessment as part of their daily work, but who wish to understand more about the broader context of that work.

Go to source:
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/quality-assurance-and-assessment-scholarly-researc

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Emerging findings from Researchers of Tomorrow study

Wednesday, 28 July 2010 9:37:42 a.m.

Emerging findings from the first annual report of a major three-year study into the information seeking behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students show that there are striking similarities between students born between 1982 and 1994 and older age groups.

Researchers of Tomorrow was commissioned by JISC and the British Library to establish a benchmark for research behaviour, against which future generations can be measured – and also to provide guidance for librarians, information specialists and policy makers on how best to meet the research needs of Generation Y scholars.

The first annual report of this longitudinal study has just been completed and includes evidence-gathering from three groups of doctoral students in the UK, including: a cohort of 60 Generation Y doctoral students from 36 universities; responses to a national context-setting survey returned by over 2,000 Generation Y scholars and responses to the same national context-setting survey returned by 3,000 older doctoral students.

Generation Y students and older students concur on a number of areas.

Go to Source:
http://explorationforchange.net/attachments/056_RoT%20Year%201%20report%20final%20100622.pdf

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Use and relevance of web 2.0 for researchers

Wednesday, 28 July 2010 9:35:04 a.m.

This new RIN report looks at the extent of adoption of different web 2.0 tools in different subject fields and disciplines, and the different types of researchers who are using them.

The project enquired into the factors that influence researchers to adopt and use Web 2.0 tools, and conversely the factors that prevent, constrain or discourage usage.

This work was undertaken by team from the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS), University of Manchester, and the Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation (ISSTI), University of Edinburgh.

Go to source:
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/use-and-relevance-web-20-researchers

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Special issue on digital libraries in China

Friday, 28 May 2010 12:36:20 p.m.

The current issue is devoted to the topic of digital library efforts in China. With the help of Sam Sun, long-time CNRI employee and Beijing native, we have gathered a group of authors who speak authoritatively on current projects in China. Four of those articles, primarily describing current and past projects from a non-technical perspective, appear in this issue while some of the more technical articles will appear in issues later this year.

Many D-Lib readers will be unaware of the activities in China, which are extensive and growing. If you read only one article in this issue, it should be the Overview article by Xihui Zhen, which I think most readers will find of great interest. Just as China is assuming a larger and more important role on the world stage, so too it seems to me will they assume a larger and more important role in the digital library world as time goes on. The size of the various projects, the number of universities and research groups in China addressing the issues, and the vast sweep of Chinese history and culture that remains to be digitized and integrated into the world of digital libraries would seem to guarantee that.

Significant language, culture, and political gaps between China and the more established digital library players in Western countries remain, of course, and will present challenges on all sides for years to come. The language gap will even be evident in the current issue of D-Lib, as all of the articles started out in Chinese or in English written by native Chinese speakers. But as the connections between China and the other countries of the world deepen, these gaps will narrow and, in our small slice of the world's intellectual activity, D-Lib will do its best to help that process.

Go to source:  http://www.dlib.org/

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Model language for author rights in library content licenses

Friday, 28 May 2010 12:34:05 p.m.

Academic and research libraries today are increasingly charged with facilitating the management and dissemination of the scholarly output of their parent institutions. This activity frequently takes the form of organizing the deposit of scholarly work such as research articles and working papers in institutional, national, or subject-based repositories in order to make these works broadly available to other interested scholars and the wider public. Authors of scholarly work also increasingly wish to retain significant rights in the work that they produce rather than transferring all such rights to an external publisher.

Go to source: http://publications.arl.org/pdfdownload/s691h/view

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Gutenberg 2.0: Harvard’s libraries deal with disruptive change.

Friday, 28 May 2010 12:32:03 p.m.

“THROW IT IN THE CHARLES,” one scientist recently suggested as a fitting end for Widener Library’s collection. The remark was outrageous—especially at an institution whose very name honours a gift of books—but it was pointed. Increasingly, in the scientific disciplines, information ranging from online journals to databases must be recent to be relevant, so Widener’s collection of books, its miles of stacks, can appear museum-like. Likewise, Google’s massive project to digitize all the books in the world will, by some accounts, cause research libraries to fade to irrelevance as mere warehouses for printed material. The skills that librarians have traditionally possessed seem devalued by the power of online search, and less sexy than a Google query launched from a mobile platform. “People want information ‘anytime, anyplace, anywhere,’” says Helen Shenton, the former head of collection care for the British Library who is now deputy director of the Harvard University Library. Users are changing—but so, too, are libraries. The future is clearly digital.

Go to source: http://harvardmagazine.com/2010/05/gutenberg-2-0

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Mobilising the Internet Detective

Friday, 28 May 2010 12:29:49 p.m.

The move towards mobile technologies in libraries and in the wider educational environment is gathering increasing momentum as we enter a new decade. This is reflected in the huge amount of Web content, research reports and innovative projects devoted to mobile learning and mobile applications in libraries which can be found via a quick search on Google. This article describes our own foray at Intute into the world of mobilisation, via a JISC Rapid Innovations project in 2009.

The aim of the Mobile Internet Detective Project was to adapt Intute’s well respected and popular online Internet Detective tutorial to develop a prototype application suitable for access on a mobile device. As well as investigating the provision of more flexible access for end-users, the project was also intended to act as a test bed to inform the potential re-development of other JISC services based at Mimas (the home of Intute) and build on existing expertise in mobile technologies within the organisation.

The foundation stone for this work was a qualitative market research programme commissioned specifically for the project. This enabled us to find out directly about the needs of students in Higher Education in the UK and their own views on the use of mobile technologies for learning. The research provided invaluable insights and also sounded some notes of caution which informed our subsequent work on standards and content for mobile applications.

Go to source: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue63/massam-et-al/

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