International Association of Technological University Libraries

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

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:44 GMT

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

Semantically enhancing collections of library and non-library content

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:41 GMT

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

JISC Inform issue 28 Summer 2010

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:40 GMT

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

Quality assurance and assessment of scholarly research

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:39 GMT

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

Emerging findings from Researchers of Tomorrow study

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:37 GMT

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

Use and relevance of web 2.0 for researchers

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:35 GMT

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

Special issue on digital libraries in China

Fri, 28 May 2010 00:36 GMT

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/

Model language for author rights in library content licenses

Fri, 28 May 2010 00:34 GMT

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

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

Fri, 28 May 2010 00:32 GMT

“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

Mobilising the Internet Detective

Fri, 28 May 2010 00:29 GMT

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/

Looking forward to a good read

Fri, 28 May 2010 00:24 GMT

Disabled readers are already benefiting from using e-books - but according to a new report, publishers can do even more with the technology to improve access.

Disabled users can for example benefit from a statement by the publisher setting out the accessibility options available to them, from how to magnify the screen to fully personalising the e-book.

Go to source:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2010/05/ebooks.aspx

The myth of browsing

Fri, 28 May 2010 00:21 GMT

A headline in the November 12, 2009, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education tells what is becoming a familiar story: “In Face of Professors’ ‘Fury,’ Syracuse U. Library Will Keep Books on Shelves.” Pressed by economic realities, hurting for space, and seeing the opportunities offered by existing and emerging information technologies, the director of an academic library announces plans to move some percentage of the library collection—specifically low-use books and bound journals—offsite. The space gained from the move will be used to create areas in which students can study and collaborate. The reaction from faculty and, in some cases, alumni and students? Fury!

Go to source:
http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/features/05192010/myth-browsing

Aligning Investments with the Digital Evolution

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:19 GMT

Ithaka S+R has released results from its fourth faculty survey in the last decade examining changes in faculty attitudes towards the academic library, information resources, and the scholarly communications system as a whole.
In a published report, Faculty Survey 2009: Strategic Insights for Librarians, Publishers, and Societies, Ithaka S+R analyzes responses from over 3,000 faculty members based at US four-year colleges or universities and offers a unique comparative look at 2009 against previous surveys from 2000, 2003, and 2006 on a variety of key questions facing information service organizations and their parent institutions.

Trends in faculty attitudes and behaviors on issues ranging from the library as information gateway and the need for preservation of scholarly material, to their engagement with institutional and disciplinary repositories and thoughts about open access are addressed. For the first time, Ithaka S+R also looked at the role that scholarly societies play and their value to faculty.

“Faculty views are moving in clear directions. Libraries, publishers, and societies need to be attuned to this and, in some cases, to dramatically shift gears or even to catch up.” said Roger C. Schonfeld, Ithaka S+R Manager of Research. “Based on our findings, for example, libraries could consider moving even more rapidly away from print-based holdings, and they should be very cautious in making costly investments in local finding aids for online information as their role as gateway continues to wane. They should also be aware that the value of institutional repositories remains tenuous in the eyes of faculty.”

In addition to possible areas for strategic re-thinking, the report also reveals some new opportunities on the horizon. One of the bigger questions raised is whether faculty will require tailored information solutions to meet their needs over time. Google and Google Scholar play increasingly important roles in their research, but specialized disciplinary sources for scholarship do as well. This is an area where the need for new services deeply knowledgeable about and able to serve particular research interests – whether provided by libraries, publishers, societies or others – may be on the rise.

Among the most valuable aspects of the work done by Ithaka S+R and utilized in the report, is the analysis of trend data and the study of faculty by discipline. “Faculty attitudes are changing, but it is evolutionary” said Laura Brown, Ithaka S+R Managing Director, “After ten years, we are now seeing clear trajectories emerge and the places where all faculty are aligned and where they diverge. We hope the work we have done helps organizations in the higher education community to position themselves for success in the future, armed with the knowledge of what changes can be made that will serve faculty as a whole.”

Go to source: http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/faculty-surveys-2000-2009/faculty-survey-2009

Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:17 GMT

Since 2005, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has been conducting research to understand the needs and practices of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. The complete results of our work can be found at the Future of Scholarly Communication’s project website. This report brings together the responses of 160 interviewees across 45, mostly elite, research institutions to closely examine scholarly needs and values in seven selected academic fields: archaeology, astrophysics, biology, economics, history, music, and political science.

Go to source: http://escholarship.org/uc/cshe_fsc

Inform: Beyond the campus

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:16 GMT

The new issue looks at how relationships with students, businesses and the public can be changed through digital tools.

Go to source:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/jiscinform/2010/inform27.aspx

Periodicals Price Survey 2010: Seeking the New Normal

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:13 GMT

Budget strains force radical change
The year 2009 will be remembered as one of angst, with the economy dominating news around the world. Few libraries were immune to the extraordinary financial pressures. The library marketplace by year's end was in a weakened position, with prospects of a long recovery at best. Concern persists that even deeper budget cuts will come when federal stimulus money expires in the 2012 budget cycle. Even when the economy improves, increased funds for libraries are not likely to be at the top of the list for new spending priorities.

Riding out the storm may not be an option in the face of a drastically changed landscape. A survey conducted in fall 2009 by CIBER research group at University College London, in conjunction with the Charleston Conference, YBP Library Services, and ebrary found that nearly one-third of libraries have seen their budgets reduced by five percent or more. Two-thirds of libraries expect budgets to remain flat over the next two years. The same libraries acknowledge that they could instead face more cuts. For institutions reporting budget reductions, materials budgets were the most likely to be slashed, with print journal subscriptions being one of the chief target areas.

In November 2009, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) identified one of the root sources of cuts to libraries when it released a report detailing the “Coping strategies of public universities during the economic recession of 2009.” Based on a survey of its 188 member institutions, the APLU report documents the scope and magnitude of state reductions in public education support, showing that 64 percent of statescut funding for higher education in 2009–10.

Libraries may not see a “return to normal” once the economy improves. Evidence suggests instead a search for a “new normal,” one that requires varied approaches to services and collections. For example, the shift from print to digital is likely to accelerate greatly. The delivery of information might become more important than ownership. Open access business models might become more attractive to avoid the costly venues of commercial publishers.
To fund new delivery service models and to manage harsh budget cuts, additional reductions may have to be made in subscriptions, and this will include packages. Libraries like the University of Arizona, University of North Carolina, and University of Washington have already eliminated hundreds of journal subscriptions, with the expectation that user demand would have to be met via interlibrary loan.

Much of the data reported in the Periodicals Price Survey 2010 outlines the issues that are shaping the journals marketplace. Data is primarily drawn from serial renewals of titles in three ISI databases—Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Science Citation Index. In addition, data is included on titles in EBSCO's Academic Search Premier. Data is limited to prepriced print titles (as opposed to standing-order or bill-later titles) that can be ordered through a vendor and are current as of January 27, 2010. Cost data for electronic versions of journals is still not uniform enough to include in the pricing survey.

Go to source: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6725256.html

Information Literacy: A Neglected Core Competency

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:11 GMT

Key Takeaways

• College students think of information seeking as a rote process and tend to use the same small set of information resources no matter their question.
• Information literacy is essential for lifelong learning and empowers individuals and societies.
• Our educational system should expose students to information literacy from elementary school through postsecondary education so that it is a habit of mind they can call upon throughout their lives.
• Collaborative efforts between faculty, librarians, technology professionals, and others can develop students who graduate with information literacy competency.

Go to source: http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE%2BQuarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/InformationLiteracyANeglectedC/199382

American Libraries Spring 2010 Digital Supplement

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:08 GMT

The 12 library buildings featured in the supplement are noted for their environmentally friendly design. This trend has grown dramatically in the recent years.

Go to source: http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/archives/digital-supplement/spring-2010

Communicating knowledge: how and why researchers publish and disseminate their findings

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 01:18 GMT

Researchers want to develop new knowledge and understanding of the world we live in and to communicate their ﬁndings to others. Increasingly, however, they are being pulled in different directions in deciding which channels of communication they should adopt, from professional society journals and conferences to less formal means such as social networking tools.
So just how do researchers decide when, where and how to communicate their work? Based on evidence gathered from an extensive literature review, bibliometric analysis, focus groups, interviews and an online survey, our report presents a comprehensive view of how researchers communicate their work across the range of disciplines in the UK.

The report examines the motivations, incentives and constraints that lead UK researchers in different subjects and disciplines to publish and disseminate their work in different ways. It explores how and why they cite other researchers’ work, as well as how their decisions on publication and citation are inﬂuenced by past and anticipated research assessment.

Go to source:
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/communicating-knowledge-how-and-why-researchers-pu

Realizing and Maintaining Aggregative Digital Library Systems: D-NET Software Toolkit and OAIster System

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 01:17 GMT

Aggregative Digital Library Systems (ADLSs) provide end users with web portals to operate over an information space of descriptive metadata records, collected and aggregated from a pool of possibly heterogeneous repositories. Due to the costs of software realization and system maintenance, existing "traditional" ADLS solutions are not easily sustainable over time for the supporting organizations. Recently, the DRIVER EC project proposed a new approach to ADLS construction, based on Service-Oriented Infrastructures. The resulting D-NET software toolkit enables a running, distributed system in which one or multiple organizations can collaboratively build and maintain their service-oriented ADLSs in a sustainable way. In this paper, we advocate that D-NET's "infrastructural" approach to ADLS realization and maintenance proves to be generally more sustainable than "traditional" ones. To demonstrate our thesis, we report on the sustainability of the "traditional" OAIster System ADLS, based on DLXS software (University of Michigan), and those of the "infrastructural" DRIVER ADLS, based on D-NET.

Go to source:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march10/manghi/03manghi.html