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Archive February 2012
UK Scholarly Reading and the Value of Library Resources
Wednesday, 29 February 2012 4:33:37 p.m.
JISC Collections, together with Professor Carol Tenopir from the Center for Information and Communication Studies at the University of Tennessee, has carried out research to measure the value and outcomes from access to scholarly publications by academics.
Presented in the UK Scholarly Reading and the Value of Library Resources report, the research examines how valuable scholarly reading has become for academics, especially in terms of access to journal articles. It surveyed academic and associate staff at 6 UK Higher Education institutions in 2011 exploring how academic library collections support research and teaching activities and how reading patterns of articles, books, and other materials differ.
The research also examined what academics would do if library resources were not available. The findings suggest that without the library, academics and their departments would not find articles of such quality, that they would find fewer related articles, and that it would be a significantly more costly and time-consuming process.
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Re-skilling for Research
Wednesday, 29 February 2012 4:33:37 p.m.
RLUK has published a major report by Mary Auckland on the changing needs of researchers and the effect on the subject/liaison role within libraries.
As research activities evolve, research support must evolve with them. RLUK has been keen to determine what the new requirements of researchers are, and how best these needs can be met by the library. We want to place the needs of researchers in the context of the libraries current offering, and look at how we must change to fulfil the new demands placed upon us.
This report, Re-skilling for Research, takes us a long way to mapping these requirements. It looks in detail at researchers’ information needs and begins to outline the skills and knowledge that are required to meet those needs. The Report offers a comparison of different models of library support for researchers, with valuable comparisons of current job descriptions. Finally, issues around the training opportunities for subject librarians to acquire the additional skills and knowledge they will need to fulfill their new roles are explored.
A report such as this does not provide a definite set of answers, but initiates a valuable process, highlighting a number of activities for individual institutions, associations such as RLUK, library schools, etc
Go to source: http://www.rluk.ac.uk/content/re-skilling-research
The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles — a Framework for Article Evaluation
Wednesday, 29 February 2012 4:14:36 p.m.
I propose five factors — peer review, open access, enriched content, available datasets and machine-readable metadata — as the Five Stars of Online Journal Articles, a constellation of five independent criteria within a multi-dimensional publishing universe against which online journal articles can be evaluated, to see how well they match up with current visions for enhanced research communications. Achievement along each of these publishing axes can vary, analogous to the different stars within the constellation shining with varying luminosities. I suggest a five-point scale for each, by which a journal article can be evaluated, and provide diagrammatic representations for such evaluations. While the criteria adopted for these scales are somewhat arbitrary, and while the rating of a particular article on each axis may involve elements of subjective judgment, these Five Stars of Online Journal Articles provide a conceptual framework by which to judge the degree to which any article achieves or falls short of the ideal, which should be useful to authors, editors and publishers. I exemplify such evaluations using my own recent publications of relevance to semantic publishing.
The Squeezed Middle? Exploring the future of library systems
Wednesday, 29 February 2012 4:14:36 p.m.
JISC and SCONUL recently held a two day workshop at Warwick (19 and 20 January) looking at the future of the library management system. It explored what a next generation LMS might look like (or even whether one would be needed).
Go to source: http://www.sconul.ac.uk/news/lmsworkshop
Journal of eScience Librarianship
Wednesday, 29 February 2012 4:14:36 p.m.
The Journal of eScience Librarianship is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that advances the theory and practice of librarianship with a special focus on services related to data-driven research in the physical, biological, and medical sciences.
Go to source: http://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/
Academic Libraries Should Give Up Book-by-Book Collecting
Wednesday, 29 February 2012 4:14:36 p.m.
To stay robust and relevant, academic libraries may need to abandon hands-on collection development and big deal subscription packages in favor of patron-driven acquisitions (PDA), open access, and curation of campus specialties.
College & Research Libraries released a pre-print of From stacks to the web: the transformation of academic library collecting by David W. Lewis, dean of the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) University Library.
Lewis predicts that the academic library world will radically restructure itself in the next eight years. He forecasts that by 2020, effectively all content delivery will have become digital (with print on demand for the few paper diehards). Academic libraries will pack up their open stacks into a few centralized print depositories for preservation and loans. Open access witll be the dominant model for journals, many university presses will have gone under, and the rest will have reorganized into broader units that include libraries.
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