Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Digital Preservation Service Provider Models for Institutional Repositories

How are institutional repositories (IRs) to preserve the digital content for which they accept responsibility? Until now, much emphasis has been placed on the role of repository software. Two of these software applications, notably DSpace [2] and Fedora [3], have promoted support for preservation as a key feature. In contrast, the first software designed for IRs, EPrints [4], has until now offered less explicit support for preservation. In truth, reliance on repository software alone will not be sufficient: "it seems obvious that no existing software application could serve on its own as a trustworthy preservation system. Preservation is the act of physically and intellectually protecting and technically stabilizing the transmission of the content and context of electronic records across space and time, in order to produce copies of those records that people can reasonably judge to be authentic. To accomplish this, the preservation system requires natural and juridical people, institutions, applications, infrastructure, and procedures." (Wilczek and Glick 2006)

Go to Source
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Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Search for Tomorrow: preparing for a new age in information gathering

Ten years ago, a small Mountain View, California company rolled out a plain search box and a new computer algorithm to help people find information. In the month of January 2007, more than 3.9 billion searches were performed on Google, which held a commanding 72 percent of the global search market, according to Nielsen//NetRatings and Enquisite Software.

In addition, more than 255 million people worldwide used a search engine—81 percent of the global Internet population—and the audience for search grew more than 10 percent, outpacing the growth of the Internet itself.

Clearly, it’s fair to say that Google, along with a host of other Internet search engines, have fundamentally changed the relationship between humanity and knowledge, says John Battelle, entrepreneur, journalist, professor and author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. “Search is the new interface to knowledge,” he says. “All of a sudden, the world is quite literally at your feet—or rather your fingertips.”

So powerful is Google’s impact that in 2006, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary...

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Friday, May 11, 2007

New Zealand Library & Information Management Journal

NZLIMJ Vol. 50 Issue 2, April 2007

New Zealand Library & Information Management Journal - Nga Pūrongo

The NZ Library & Information Management Journal is published by LIANZA with support from Victoria University of Wellington and is intended as a national forum on library and information management issues in New Zealand. It is not limited to a specific information sector or to articles of a particular type; rather, the content seeks to reflect the wide-ranging interests and needs of information professionals in New Zealand.

NZLIMJ is published in an online format biannually and hosted on the LIANZA website. Print editions of the Journal are distributed to all current LIANZA members. 

NZLIMJ Vol. 50 Issue 2, April 2007

Friday, May 11, 2007

OPEN ACCESS

The Research Impact of Open Access Journal Articles

The availability of scientific and intellectual works freely through scientists’ personal web sites, digital university archives or through the electronic print (eprint) archives of major scientific institutions has radically changed the process of scientific communication within the last decade. The “Open Access” (OA) initiative is having a tremendous impact upon the scientific communication process, which is largely based on publishing in scientific periodicals. This exploratory paper investigates the research impact of OA articles across the subject disciplines. The research impact of OA articles as measured by the number of citations varies from discipline to discipline. OA articles in Biology and Economics had the highest research impact. OA articles in hard, urban, and convergent fields such as Physics, Mathematics, and Chemical Engineering did not necessarily get cited most often.
http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00009619/...

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Friday, May 4, 2007

The State of America’s Libraries

In this report on the State of America’s Libraries in 2006, the American Library Association found that: 

Public, school and university libraries are flourishing, both in traditional ways and in the still-exploding universe of the Internet.

Library use is up nationwide among all types of library users, continuing a decade-long trend.

Almost 1.8 billion visitors checked out more than 2 billion items last year at everything from one-room rural outposts to spectacular facilities such as Seattle’s new Central Library, which attracts thousands of patrons - and tourists - daily. Also of note:

● Investment in e-books at academic and research libraries rose an astonishing 68 percent from 2002 to 2004, the most recent year for which federal data are available

● Public libraries remain on the forefront in delivering new programmes to their customers while still providing the “nuts-and-bolts” services that people need to lead full lives - for example, the tools to conduct a job search, write a résumé or learn new work skills. Even with the rapid growth of all of these services, people are going to...

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Friday, May 4, 2007

Researchers' Use of Academic Libraries and their Services

Researchers’ Use of Academic Libraries and their Services: A report commissioned by the Research Information Network and the Consortium of Research Libraries Academic libraries have for centuries played critically-important roles in supporting research in all subjects and disciplines within their host universities and colleges. But the last decade has brought a sea-change in relationships between researchers and libraries. Technological developments and the availability of information resources online have changed how research is done, and also the services that academic libraries provide to their research communities. Both researchers and librarians have welcomed the benefits these changes have brought, adapting rapidly to them and seeking to exploit their potential to the full. And they both look forward to further change in the coming years.

With new technological developments and innovations come new challenges and new expectations. In commissioning this study, the RIN and CURL have sought to establish a solid base of evidence on how libraries have been developing their services and strategies, and how researchers have been making use of those services. But we have...

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