Cross
Currents No 18 December 2003
A
digest of cross sectoral information management events, issues and ideas in
organisations, libraries, archives and museums, with special emphasis on
arts and the humanities.
|
ARTS
& HUMANITIES Arlis.Net | Art Images Union Catalogue | Artifact
| Asia Pacific Journal of Arts & Cultural Management | Backstage |
Creative Industries Precinct | Cultural Statistics Seminar | Dance
Collection Guide | Education and the Arts | JSTOR Arts and Sciences
Collection | Media and Communications Literature | National Art
Library Changes | Regional Cultural Alliance | Visual Arts Network |
Visual Resource Library and Museum Digital Reference Services DIGITISATION
Digital Licences } Digital Opportunity Investment Trust | Email |
Industry sector case studies | Learning Objects | What's New in
Digital Preservation
|
GATEWAYS
& PORTALS Gabriel | Library Portal Architecture | Portal
Definitions | Vascoda
INTERNET
& ONLINE SOURCES Amazon | Google
LIBRARIES
Special Collections | Strategies to Compete with the Internet | US
Corporate Library Employment | US Spends to Offset Librarian Retirements
UNIVERSITY
INFORMATION Australian University Information | Changing Research
Practices | Guide to Institutional Repository Software | Services to
Graduates | US Research Libraries and University Presses
USERS
& USAGE Cultural Content | Electronic Resources | Universities
and Colleges
|
Gabriel
Gabriel,
the gateway to Europe's national libraries, provides access to the
periodicals, catalogues, exhibits, bibliographies and other services in 41
national libraries from 39 member states of the Council of Europe. Free
registration is required to access some resources. Web:
http://www.bl.uk/gabriel/
Library Portal Architecture
Lorcan
Dempsey, in Recombitant Library: Portals and People, examines how
libraries can be expected to reconfigure their digital portal architecture to
support research and learning in an increasingly networked information
environment. Dempsey says that, at the moment, the major portal issue facing
libraries is developing a web environment which: ‘enriches learning and
research by providing timely, convenient access to relevant and appropriate
resources; surfaces potentially valuable resources which otherwise might be
overlooked; and enables users and the library to focus on fruitful use of
collections rather than on the messy mechanics of interaction.’ Such
environments, he says, need to interact with other environments such as the
learning management system, institutional portal frameworks, and the other
'hubs' of network presence. This
means that the portal issue to be addressed is not the current concern with
integrating library resources with each other, but bringing library services
in line with the learning and research behaviours of users. Up to this point
in the short history of network information systems, library portals have
focused on becoming a single hub in network space, but now it is likely that
they will move to an architecture that enables them to function in a
recombinant role, linking users seamlessly to whatever other hubs will serve
their specific information needs. [Source: ShelfLife] Web:
http://www.oclc.org
(research section, staff papers)
Portal
definitions
Paul
Miller, in Towards a Typology for Portals (Ariadne issue 37), looks at
a variety of portals and argues for better words to describe them. Web: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/
[Source: Diglib]
Vascoda
Frontline
German libraries, research centers and academic information providers have
established a science information portal, Vascoda, supported by the Federal
Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and German Research Foundation (GRF)
. The vast majority of the information offered is free of charge, but
fee-based information is also available on a pay-per-view basis. There are 23
subject-based areas being developed under four main headings including the
humanities. Web: http://www.vascoda.de
[Source: Goethe Institute]
Amazon
Amazon.com
has announced a new feature called Search Inside the Book, making the text of
120,000 books (more than 33 million pages) fully searchable at no charge. The
feature will make it possible to scan a database for the word or phrase
entered by a visitor to Amazon's site for each relevant portion of a
searchable book. [Source: ShelfLife]
Google
Meanwhile,
Google has been courting publishers to convince them to turn over book content
that could be used in Google's database. The details of these negotiations are
unclear at this stage although it is rumoured that Google has reached
agreements to allow it to include as many as 60,000 titles in its database.
[Source: SOAF]
Special Collections
Libraries
have been unable to keep up with the backlog of special materials awaiting
processing. Finding a method to catalogue these items in a meaningful way is a
significant challenge. A study by the Association of Research Libraries, Hidden
Collections, Scholarly Barriers: Creating Access to Unprocessed Special
Collections Materials in North America's Research Libraries, looks at ways
libraries can bring hidden collections of rare books, manuscripts and archival
materials to light. One
answer lies in the use of ‘flexible, case-specific cataloguing’ (ie
cataloguing at collection level, rather than individual items). Web: http://www.arl.org/collect/spcoll/ehc/HiddenCollsWhitePaperJun6.pdf
[Source: ShelfLife]
Strategies to Compete with the Internet
Marylaine
Block, in Net Effects: How Librarians Can Manage the Unintended
Consequences of the Internet, reviews a variety of creative ways
librarians are adapting their traditional role. Web: http://marylaine.com/book/index.html
US Corporate Library Employment
US
recruiters are seeing a boost in job opportunities for librarian in the
corporate sector, compared with 2002, when layoffs were more common. According
to Outsell, the average number of corporate library FTEs is now 9.18, up from
8.77 in 2002, but that's still down from the 13.09 full-timers reported in
2001. However, the situation may be rosier than those numbers indicate. Some
librarians have lost their libraries, but they haven't lost their jobs. The
most active areas of hiring are in the pharmaceutical, legal and medical
sectors. [Source ShelfLife abstract from Career Journal 22 Oct 2003]
US Spends to Offset Librarian Retirements
The
Institute of Museum and Library Services has allocated US$9,898,338 in 27
inaugural grants to offset a national shortage of professional librarians due
to retirement, expected to reduce current ranks by 58% by 2019. The program
will target tuition assistance, service expectations, job placement,
recruitment of non-traditional library students, and research aimed at
increasing the number of library science students at the paraprofessional,
masters' and doctorate levels. Web: http://www.imls.gov/whatsnew/current/102803.htm
[Source: ShelfLife]
Australian University Information
The
Australian government, through the Department of Education, Science and
Training, has made available $12 million for managing university information.
The funding will provide for four new projects as well as international
consultation and collaboration. The new projects will be guided and
coordinated by the newly established Australian Research Information
Infrastructure Committee (ARIIC) headed by Professor Wyatt R Hume, Vice
Chancellor of the University of New South Wales, building on the work of the
Higher Education Information Infrastructure Implementation Steering Committee,
which found there was a need to enhance the creation and management of
information, improve access to information resources, and facilitate the
discovery and dissemination of new information to researchers and
institutions. Agencies involved in the projects include 15 Australian
universities, Australian and international libraries, industry representatives
and international organisations, The funded projects are: Meta Access
Management System; Towards an Australian Partnership for Sustainable
Repositories; The Australian Research Repositories Online to the World
(ARROW); and Australian Digital Theses Program Expansion and Redevelopment.
[Source: SOAF] Web: http://www.dest.gov.au/ministers/mcg/main.asp
(see Media Centre 22 October 2003)
Changing Research Practices
The
Australian Department of Education, Science and Training, has published Changing
Research Practices in the Digital Information and Communication Environment
by John Houghton with Colin Steele and Margaret Henty (August 2003). Web: http://www.dest.gov.au/highered/respubs
[Source: SOAN]
Guide to Institutional Repository Software
The
Open Society Institute has published Guide to Institutional Repository
Software describing the five open source, OAI-compliant systems currently
available. [Source: SOAF] Web: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/software/
Services to Graduates
Clifford
Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information, says
today's college and university graduates are expecting, even demanding, to
have continued access to the kinds of information-rich facilities they grew
accustomed to during their student days. He argues that more must be done to
accommodate these expectations, that higher education institutions and their
faculty have an obligation to make their information services available beyond
their academies' walls. However, the transition from an information service
within higher education to one broadly available to the public, he says, will
not always simple or quick. Currently the demand for information services
focuses on content rather than computation and communication, creating a
market for the licensed, proprietary digital content that schools do not own
but pay licensing fees for under contract with the publishers and other
service providers who hold the rights to the content. Because many suppliers
are not set up to license to individuals or want to charge absurd prices,
libraries, both public and academic, represent a potential resource to serve
both their graduates and the public at large. Web: Educause Review Sep/Oct
2003 http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0356.pdf
[Source ShelfLife]
US Research Libraries and University Presses
The
Association of American University Presses and the Association of Research
Libraries have formulated a Joint Statement on Scholarly Communication,
setting out the complementary roles of press and library within higher
education and a new commitment to cooperation and joint action. A program is
under development and more information will be available soon. Web: http://www.arl.org/scomm/aauparlstatement.pdf
[Source: SOAF]
Cultural Content
The
Digital Cultural Content Forum, facilitated by Resource, CIMI and UKOLN, has
published a number of reports on users and usage including Evaluation
of Digital Cultural Content: Analysis of Evaluation Material (Nov 2003). Web:
http://www.culturalcontentforum.org/publications/
[Source: DigLib]
Electronic Resources
Carol
Tenopir, in Use and Users of Electronic Library Resources: An Overview and
Analysis of Recent Research Studies (The Council on Library and
Information Resources, August 2003), analyses more than 200 recent research
studies focusing on the use of electronic library resources. Several
consistent themes reoccur regularly. Both faculty and students like electronic
resources, particularly if the sources are perceived as convenient, relevant
and time-saving to their natural workflow, but most of these users still print
out their e-journals for reading. Electronic resources are especially handy
for browsing and for taking advantage of hyperlinks to related material,
although subject experts make much more use of the hyperlinks than students.
Different disciplines exhibit different usage patterns and preferences for
print or electronic, but print is used for reading assignments in almost every
discipline, and is considered important in some disciplines, especially in the
humanities. Print is definitely the most popular medium for books, with
electronic books still in the embryonic stage of usage. With rising prices in
academic publishing, many faculty are allowing their print subscriptions to
lapse, relying instead on electronic subscriptions subsidised by the library
or on the Internet. Internet-based resources have become the dominant medium
used by most college and high schools students, who often believe that they
are more expert at searching than their teachers, but their criteria for
judging the quality of those sources often differs from that of their
teachers. Web: http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub120/pub120.pdf.
[Source: ShelfLife]
Universities
and Colleges
Deanna
B. Marcum and Gerald George, in Who Uses What? Report on a National Survey
of Information Users in Colleges and Universities (DLib October 2003),
report on a
recent national survey commissioned by the Digital Library Federation and the
Council on Library and Information Resources. 93.9% of professors,
undergraduate and graduate students surveyed agreed that they are comfortable
retrieving and using information electronically. An equally high percentage
professed a high comfort level with their institution's Web sites. And while
more than a third report using the library significantly less than they did
two years ago, nearly two-thirds say that the bulk of the information they use
for research comes from their institution's physical or virtual libraries.
Conclusion: while the Internet enables academics to conduct more of their
research remotely, they are still dependent on the library to help structure
the resources at their disposal. The survey also indicates that physical
libraries still have a strong place in academic culture: More than half of
respondents say that browsing the stacks or journal shelves is an important
way for them to get information. Web: http://www.dlib.org/
[Source: ShelfLife]
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This
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