up2date

"CRL, CRKN, and JISC Form Partnership to Explore Challenges in Acquisition and Preservation of E-Resources"

Good news from INFOdocket :

From the Centers for Research Libraries (CRL):

Recently CRL collection development staff met with the senior leadership of two major national site licensing organizations: the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) and Joint Information Steering Committee of the Higher Education Funding Council, UK (JISC Collections). The meeting was to explore the special challenges of licensing and acquiring primary source electronic resources, and preserving those resources for the long term. The conversation focused on major databases of government information and archives, news, financial, demographic and geospatial information, and humanities and social science materials in non-English languages. The participants discussed the respective priorities and unmet needs of the three organizations with regard to acquiring vital but costly research databases.

CRL, CRKN, and JISC Collections have agreed to combine expertise and resources to improve access to these kinds of materials, and to work together to better support their respective national and regional research priorities and strategies.

Read the Complete Announcement

“STM eBooks: Librarian Perspectives on the First 5 Years”

From INFOdocket :

"Via a Springer News Release:

Springer celebrates its 50,000th eBook, available on its online platform SpringerLink.

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In addition, as announced in October 2011, Springer will digitize nearly all books it has published since 1842. By adding the Springer Book Archives to SpringerLink by the end of 2012, the total number of titles will increase to well over 100,000 eBooks, including valuable historic research dating back to the 1840s.

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Springer launched its eBook collection in 2006. For the fifth anniversary, the publishing house consulted leading librarians across the academic, corporate and government sectors to gain their perspective on the past, present and future of the eBook revolution. Springer collected the best practices about library implementation, business models and the paper-to-electronic transition, and included these insights in a far-reaching white paper. This paper — written for librarian, publisher and aggregator audiences — explores the shared challenges and opportunities that eBooks present to key stakeholders. The white paper is now available and can also be picked up at the Springer booth at the ALA 2012 Midwinter Meeting in Dallas.

Read the Complete Announcement"

Alison Head "on Modeling the Information-Seeking Process of College Students in the Digital Age"

From INFOdocket :

Dr. Alison Head from Project Information Literacy recently spoke at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.  An audio file of her presentation is now available online.

Here’s the Blurb:

What is it like to be a college student in the digital age? Alison Head — lead researcher for the national study, Project Information Literacy, Berkman Fellow, and Research Scientist in University of Washington’s Information School — presents a working typology of the undergraduate information-seeking process, including students’ reliance on and use of Web sources.

Learn More About Dr. Head, the Presentation, and Project Information Literacy (with Link to a Recent Report) in this January 4, 2012 post.

"What's In Store for the Library Automation Industry in 2012?"

From ALA TechSource :

"This article appears in the January 2012 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter. To read more from Marshall Breeding on mobile library technology and other facets of the library automation industry, you can purchase this issue or subscribe to Smart Libraries Newsletter at our metapress site.

As we enter a new year, I’d like to pause and consider some of the trends and events that I anticipate playing out in 2012.  The predictions I made for 2011 largely held (see Smart Libraries Newsletter, February 2011).  Given the momentum of developments and the issues currently in play, 2012 may turn out to be a very interesting year in the realm of library technologies.

The year will mark the beginning of a new cycle of transitions in automation platforms that will run to completion over the next decade.   2012 will be a watershed year in the roll out of a new generation of library automation platforms, especially in the academic library arena.  Several major new automation systems will see their debut, including Ex Libris’ Alma, Sierra from Innovative Interfaces, and Serials Solutions’ Web-scale Management Solution.

..."

Preprint: “Deal or No Deal? : Evaluating Big Deals and Their Journals”

From INFOdocket (note the preprint, accepted for College and Research Libraries in Dec 2011, will be pbd in 2013 -- what a date spread!) :

Abstract

This paper presents methods to develop metrics that compare Big Deal journal packages and the journals within those packages. Deal-level metrics guide selection of a Big Deal for termination. Journal-level metrics guide selection of individual subscriptions from journals previously provided by a terminated deal. The paper argues that while the proposed metrics provide helpful quantitative data for comparative analysis, selection of individual subscriptions must also involve informed judgment about a library’s subject coverage needs and alternative sources of access. The paper also discusses how replacing a Big Deal with a reduced number of individual subscriptions may affect the collections.

Direct to Full Text (38 pages; PDF)

 

TOC services

I've been using and recommending ticTOCs, but I think I've found an equally good and quite different Tables of Contents aggregator, again brought to us by the UK. Another recommendation from INFOdocket, written up by Gary Price in Search Engine Land, JournalTOCs covers "17,000 journals published by more than 900 publishers and organizations."

It's very easy to get an RSS feed to the publications you want (an important different to me from ticTOCs). However, the subject classification is even less granular, which makes it much harder to narrow down to a particular area of interest.

Transmedia

A very interesting article in (on?) Publishing Perspectives looking at Transmedia and publishing, a subject that intrigues me at the same time as I struggle to deal with it as a librarian and selector. I can't help but noticing that in the entire article preservation is never mentioned : Transmedia: A New World of Opportunity for Authors and Publishers.

Transmedia: A New World of Opportunity for Authors and Publishers

Harvard's Library Lab projects

From INFOdocket (I'm picking out the ones that intrigue me most -- see the full list on INFOdocket) :

Awesome Box
Interact with an amazing or useful item from the library and return it to the Awesome Box instead of the normal drop box. ... 

Connecting the Dots: Using EAC-CPF to Reunite Samuel Johnson and His Circle
A project between Harvard and Yale universities to demonstrate the benefits of using Encoded Archival Context ... to describe creators of manuscript collections and encode meaningful semantic links between those creators themselves and the primary sources that document their lives and work.

...

Enhance Catalog Searching with Geospatial Technology
A project to explore the opportunities that geo-referencing catalog data can provide to enhancing catalog searching.

...

 

http://infodocket.com/2011/12/08/cool-harvards-library-lab-adds-13-new-projects-to-roster/

Highlighting in GoogleBooks

Hope this comes to the Hathi trust soon. From INFOdocket (subsequently also saw post on the Google Books blog) :

INFOdocket

Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy

Colorful! Highlighting Comes to Google Books

Posted on December 8, 2011 by Gary D. Price

 

 

 

From the Inside Google Books Blog:

Starting today, you’ll also be able to break out the colored highlighters and pens with Google eBooks in the Web Reader.

To start adding notes, first open your web browser and find your Google eBooks in your My eBooks bookshelf (make sure you are signed into your account at the top right hand corner of your screen). If you don’t have any ebooks yet, you can start your collection with a free classic from Best of the Free bookshelf, or purchase an ebook from our eBookstore. Then, click on the book to open it in the Web Reader.

You should be able to select the text you want to comment on by dragging or double-clicking with your mouse. A context menu will appear, and you can then click on “Add Note”.

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These new features are currently only enabled for ebooks available in “flowing text mode“, and highlights or notes can’t be added to ebook samples. We are also working hard on bringing these features to your mobile devices and eReaders, so stay tuned!

"A Literature Review: What Exactly Should We Preserve?..."

From INFOdocket :

New online via arXiv.

Title: A Literature Review: What Exactly Should We Preserve? How Scholars Address This Question and Where is the Gap

by Jyue Tyan Low

This review addresses the question of what exactly should we preserve, and how the digital preservation community and scholars address this question. The paper first introduces the much-abused-term “significant properties,” before revealing how some scholars are of the opinion that characteristics of digital objects to be preserved (i.e., significant properties) can be identified and should be expressed formally, while others are not of that opinion. The digital preservation community’s attempt to expound on the general characteristics of digital objects and significant properties will then be discussed. Finally, the review shows that while there may be ways to identify the technical makeup or general characteristics of a digital object, there is currently no formal and objective methodology to help stakeholders identify and decide what the significant properties of the objects are. This review thus helps open questions and generates a formative recommendation based on expert opinion that expressing an object’s functions in an explicit and formal way (using didactic guides from the archives community) could be the solution to help stakeholders decide what characteristics/ elements exactly we should preserve.

Direct to Full Text (15 pages; PDF)