My Jessamyn corollary to this is “With enough libraries, all content is free.” That is to say… if the world was one big library and we all had interlibrary loan at that library, we could lend anything to anyone. The funding structures of libraries currently mean that in many cases we’re duplicating [and paying for] content that we could be sharing. This is at the heart of a lot of the copyright battles of today and, to my mind, what’s really behind the EBSCO/Gale/vendors. Time Magazine is losing money and not having a good plan for keeping their income level up, decides to offer exclusive contracts to vendors and allows them to bid. EBSCO wins, Gale loses. Any library not using EBSCO loses. Patrons lose and don’t even know they’ve lost. Read more at www.librarian.net |
Anyway, Bloglines, Google Reader, Newsgator, etc all embarked down the wrong path, the view that news is email But to see the market as stagnating you have to overlook the 800 pound gorilla running around the room throwing things all over the place. Twitter. We’re using it every day. If you follow more than a few dozen people you miss tweets all the time, and so what. Twitter doesn’t tell you how many you didn’t read because it doesn’t matter. If it’s important it will come back around again. If not, well no one can know everything. Read more at realtimerss.org |
Put the books back where they belong. If they are from the public domain, put the electronic versions into the public domain, equally available to all - including competitors. "Scanned and made available by Google" on the book is appropriate. Print on demand would be a useful and not-evil service. If they are in copyright, give them back to the copyright owners - the publishers and author. By all means, negotiate compensation such as a share of profits to recoup the monies spent on digitization. But the sooner Google is out of the licensing business, the better for trust in Google. If the works are orphan works, leave this matter with the legislators; join with the Open Contact Alliance to find a solution that will work for everyone. Read more at poeticeconomics.blogspot.com |
Consumers, though, have different ideas. In a new Forrester report, we find that most consumers (80%) say they wouldn't bother to access newspaper and magazine content online if it were no longer free (no surprise), and the rest are split about how they'd like to pay for content: Read more at blogs.forrester.com |
In fact, Americans who use such technologies have larger and more diverse "core discussion networks" than those who don't – and their networks also appear to be more diverse.
Read more at www.pewinternet.org |
Could be useful and cheap for end-users, but no printing?? DeepDyve is the largest online rental service for scientific, technical and medical research with over 30 million articles from thousands of authoritative journals. |
A DeepDyve user can rent an article and read its full-text for up to 24 hours for as little as $0.99! These articles can only be viewed at DeepDyve and cannot be downloaded, printed or shared. Read more at www.deepdyve.com |
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To me, it feels like they’re getting worse, not better. But I can’t document that. What I can do is demonstrate without much difficulty, for areas where I have subject expertise, how bad they can be. They get by because along with the bad, there’s enough good. But they should be better than this. Read more at searchengineland.com |
Een waar woord: een bibliotheek in een onderwijsinstelling heeft meer kans op het management te overleven dan een bedrijfsbibliotheek waar enkel naar bezuinigen wordt gekeken en een bibliotheek een gemakkelijke prooi is.
Ook na de opleiding is er behoefte aan instructie in informatievaardigheden, maar die mogelijkheden verdampen snel... Han Belt was het in het geheel niet met die laatste stelling eens en dat maakte hij zeer gepassioneerd duidelijk. Hij is er van overtuigd dat de informatiebemiddelaar niet zal verdwijnen omdat “wij” professionals zijn, net als artsen, die worden ook niet zo snel verdrongen. En ik denk dat hij gelijk heeft. Als het gaat om zijn eigen bibliotheek tenminste. Want de bibliotheek is een verplicht onderdeel binnen de opleiding aan het LUMC en literatuurstudie is een belangrijk element in de medische wetenschap. Het is een heel gespecialiseerd vakgebied waar een professional een hele belangrijke (wellicht onmisbare) bijdrage kan leveren. En het bestuur van het LUMC erkent nadrukkelijk het belang van de bibliotheek voor zowel artsen als studenten (” in het bestuur zitten godzijdank geen managers” vond ik wel de quote van de dag). Read more at tenaanval.wordpress.com |
The researchers do, but the managers don't always see it that way ... What’s more, surprisingly, Web 2.0 does not offer a real autonomy to researchers in terms of search quality. A recent survey by Akel & Associates showed how corporate end users rely on librarians: among researchers who work with librarians, 90 per cent believe that librarians make significant contributions to their R&D efforts. Studies tend to demonstrate that information professionals’ presence drives successful research efforts and helps companies to stay competitive. ‘The more info, the more important the info pro,’ said industry consultant Mary Ellen Bates. This reason and many others mean that librarians continue playing the role they have always played, as facilitators between information and end users. Read more at www.researchinformation.info |
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