lfa

I attended the RLG Collections Summit last week. Before the meeting, they sent out some background reading (we each had to read at least 2 of the articles/reports). Thought there would be some interest here. Every attendee was asked to read at least 2 of these background articles/reports.

1. Ensure retention of last copies
• Connaway, Lynn Silipigni, Edward T. O’Neill, and Chandra Prabha. 2006. “Last Copies: What’s at Risk?” College and Research Libraries, 67, 4 (July): 370-379.
• Schonfeld, Roger C. and Brian Lavoie “Books without Boundaries: A Brief Tour of the System-Wide Print Book Collection” The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 9(2) Summer 2006.
2. Ensure back-up to online access
• Schonfeld, Roger. “Ithaka’s 2006 Librarian and Faculty Studies: Overview of Key Findings.”
• Kenney, Anne R. et al. “E-Journal Archiving Metes and Bounds…” CLIR Report, Sept. 2006. Conclusions — pages 71-75.
3. Expanding coverage, reducing duplication
• Jackson, Mary E., Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Edward T. O’Neill, and Eudora Loh. (2006) “Changing Global Book Collection Patterns in ARL Libraries“. Report issued by the Association of Research Libraries.
4. Overall context setters
• Grafton, Anthony. “Future Reading: Digitization and Its Discontents.” New Yorker, November 5, 2007
• The Really Modern Library blog

From Library Journal http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6468839.html?nid=2673#news1 rnrnThe Yale University Library has cancelled its institutional support of pioneering commercial open access (OA) publisher BioMed Central (BMC), citing skyrocketing costs. In an announcement posted the Cushing/Whitney Medical and Kline Science Libraries blog, Yale librarians said the BMC “experiment in Open Access publishing has proved unsustainable.” Yale’s support ended with articles in submission to BMC as of July 27.

Well probably not an ode, but certainly an interesting discussion of the merits of print journals, particularly for some fields. Written by Karen Schneider (diva of Librarians’ Index to the Internet) she suggests faculty create their own mini-libraries if their librarians won’t keep the journals… also some interesting comments about journals as a mechanism of community.
Her commentary is on the National Book Critics Circle board blog.

Great article in Library Journal on the positive response from students, faculty and librarians from putting librarians in the departments where they become active members of the faculty involved in teaching and research.

A good short (2-page) summary of E-Book issues from Educause.

The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. 7 Things You Should Know About E-Books. 2006

Abstract: E-books offer new ways for readers to interact with content. An e-book that abandons the notion of reading from front to back, for example, encourages readers to take an active, self-directed role in how they learn. E-books incorporating audio, movies, and simulations facilitate deeper understanding of subject matter, while annotation features let users customize a text. The “7 Things You Should Know About…” series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning practices and technologies. Each brief focuses on a single practice or technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use “7 Things You Should Know About…” briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

Worldcat Collection Analysis (WCA) is a tool that subject librarians and collection development staff can use for collection assessment.

OCLC is creating a set of Effective Use Scenarios for WCA. The first is now up, Analyze Collection Gaps is a set of Powerpoint slides that shows how to set up an analysis of a library collection for gaps (you need to use Internet Explorer to access the slides). The next scenario is to be on ways of using WCA for a digitization project.

Per the Library Journal’s news item, 800 of 1000 reference titles they looked at are still print only! Obviously they haven’t seen our strategic plan which indicates we want to move to electronic formats…