Celia's

This video presentation was used to introduce the two-day workshop, "The Squeezed Middle: Exploring the Future of Library Systems," sponsored by JISC and SCONUL on 19-20 January at the University of Warwick. In the video, Lorcan Dempsey talks about how libraries are changing in the network environment, how they are organizing their services and how they are relating to other services in a Webscale world. He focuses on changes in how libraries are using their resources to create value: space, systems, collections and services/expertise. What should libraries specialize in and what things should they do collaboratively or externalize to other parties? Watch this video to learn how libraries are dealing with these and other important issues now as well as how they may do so in the future.

 says new report

"...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..."

University libraries are saving academics time by helping them find quality material more quickly, says a new report.

Academics are choosing the library as their first choice for getting hold of scholarly material because access is quick, it helps them make new connections to related information and the library may be the only place they can access that material.

Academics are then using their reading to inspire new thinking and improve their research results.

This picture of the library at the heart of university life has emerged as part of a new JISC Collections¹ report which canvassed over 1000 academic and associate staff at six UK universities in 2011.

Lorraine Estelle is chief executive of JISC Collections which is responsible for negotiating journal and database deals for the higher and further education communities as a whole.  She said: "This report provides further evidence about the value and impact of the resources and discovery systems which UK academic libraries make available. This makes it even more important for JISC Collections to continue to work with publishers and libraries to secure affordable and sustainable journal deals for the future."

Although the survey focuses on academics, reading articles also helps them teach, so staff and students alike are benefiting from access to these resources.

Dr Hazel Woodward, chair of the electronic information resources working group and librarian at Cranfield University said: "At this time of economic constraint, it is important for policy makers and Library directors to provide additional evidence of the value of library-provided resources. Whilst in the past these resources have been regarded as implicitly valuable, this research goes some way to making that value more explicit by focusing on specific benefits and outcomes for academics."

The research is part of a wider international Lib-Value project ²being coordinated by the Center for Information and Communication Studies at the University of Tennessee.  

JISC News

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge, who won the Fields Medal for his research, has organized a boycott of Elsevier because, he says, its pricing and policies restrict access to work that should be much more easily available. He asked for a boycott in a blog post on January 21, and as of Monday evening, on the boycott’s Web site The Cost of Knowledge, nearly 1,900  scientists have signed up, pledging not to publish, referee, or do editorial work for any Elsevier journal.

The company has sinned in three areas, according to the boycotters: It charges too much for its journals; it bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing libraries to spend money to buy things they don’t want in order to get a few things they do want; and, most recently, it has supported a proposed federal law (called the Research Works Act) that would prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by its grant recipients freely available.

Read the Complete COHE Article by Josh Fischman

 

From INFOdocket

the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing, and informing scholarship.

altmetrics.org/
   Our vision is summarized in:J. Priem, D. Taraborelli, P. Groth, C. Neylon (2010), Alt-metrics: A manifesto, (v.1.0), 26 October 2010. http://altmetrics.org/manifesto.You can follow the ongoing discussion on Twitter via the #altmetrics tag or via the respective groups on Mendeley or FriendFeed. [See also: Scholars Seek Better Ways to Track Impact Online, Chronicle of Higher Education.

Resources
altmetrics on Mendeley
altmetrics on FriendFeed
altmetrics on LinkedIn

Tools

Total-Impact
ReaderMeter
Altmetric.com
Altmetrics crawler
CitedIn
ScienceCard
PeerEvaluation.org

Does the durability of ebooks pose a digital danger to libraries?

... the uncertainty about ownership of ebook content. What is ownership, after all? Perpetual access under certain conditions defined in the contract? True ownership, where the library can sell or discard its digital copy?

[More]

CARRIE RUSSELL is the director of the Program on Public Access to Information of the Office for Information Policy at ALA’s Washington Office.

From American Libraries magazine...

The Think Tanks and Civil Society Program (TTCSP) produces the annual Global Go-To Think Tank Index that ranks world’s leading think tanks with the help of a panel of over 1500 peer institutions and experts from the print and electronic media, academia, public and private donor institutions and policymakers. From Docubase

+ Link to full report (PDF; 2.19 MB)

So what happened with the Internet in 2011? How many email accounts were there in the world in 2011? How many websites? How much did the most expensive domain name cost? How many photos were hosted on Facebook? How many videos were viewed to YouTube?

We’ve got answers to these questions and many more. A veritable smorgasbord of numbers, statistics and data lies in front of you. Using a variety of sources we’ve compiled what we think are some of the more interesting numbers that describe the Internet in 2011. From Royal Pingdom

From Celia: a few figures that caught my attention

Email

 19% – Percentage of spam emails delivered to corporate email inboxes despite spam filters.

 71% – Percentage of worldwide email traffic that was spam (November 2011).

 40 – Years since the first email was sent, in 1971.

Internet users

  

  2.1 billion – Internet users worldwide.

 118.6 million – Internet users in Africa.

Why Google Search Plus is a disaster for search...  Google explains it like this: "We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships." So the idea here is clear - Google is going to become a search engine that is about social, not about the web. This is an absolute change in the way that Google works; it is going to pay less attention to web pages and web sites, and more attention to the people that you know and follow. This is something that I've been talking about for some time now, so it's unsurprising to see Google doing it, but what is surprising, although it shouldn't be, is the inept way that they have done it... see Phil Bradley's weblog for full post

 

The new Search Plus Your World feature will cause Google a lot of pain

This week Google started rolling outGoogle Search Plus Your World, which — besides being the worst case of bad branding in a long time — will cause Google a lot of problems. Searchers will go elsewhere and governments will complain. Here is why.

Google has presented personalized search results for a long time, using data from your Google GMail account (if you have one) and your web history. Google has been using these data to build you a kind of personality or interest profile, making it easier for them to deliver search results that are of interest to you personally...

Google has also tried to enrich search results with real time data frome the social web. For at time it did, for instance, include twitter messages (tweets), which devlivered information about what is happening right now. This was definitely a good idea.

+World is an attempt to combine the two and add personalized social data to the search engine results. That should be a recipe for success. Instead we believe Google is facing a PR disaster. You see, the implementation of +World is bad, very bad... see Pandia Search and Social for full post

 

Alison J. Head on Modeling the Information-Seeking Process of College Students in the Digital Age [AUDIO]

What is it like to be a college student in the digital age? Alison Head — lead researcher for the national study, Project Information Literacy, Berkman Fellow, and Research Scientist in University of Washington’s Information School — presents a working typology of the undergraduate information-seeking process, including students’ reliance on and use of Web sources.

MP3

OGG audio format!

More info on this event here (includes video clip)

Harvard University. Berkman Center for Internet & Society Podcast

Wikipedia will shut down for 24 hours Wednesday to protest the [US] Stop Online Piracy Act, founder Jimmy Wales announced on Monday.

In doing so, Wikipedia joins a long list of web companies such as Reddit and Mozilla that are taking similar measures against the proposed legislation...BTW. comScore estimates the English Wikipedia’s web traffic at 25 million daily visitors worldwide.

...Thomas Pettitt makes the deliberately provocative case for a Gutenberg “Parenthesis” -- a period marked by the reign of the printing press and isolated from the largely oral culture that came before, and the digitally shaped culture emerging today. Pettitt, who finds an upside in society’s return to “something that resembles the past...

He finds “fundamental similarities between human kind’s oldest and pervasive media condition” (that of oral tradition), and the post-Gutenberg phenomenon of digital texts (not to mention sound and image). The entire history of media, Pettitt suggests, has been merely “interrupted by the age of print.”...

Responses from: Peter Donaldson and James Paradis

Link to video:  http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/775  Run time: 1 hour 55 minutes and 10 seconds

...Infographics (information graphics) and data visualisation are current communications buzzwords that apply to using pictures to convey, quickly and effectively, the facts and ideas in a report. Others have different definitions or preferred terminology, but I tend to think of infographics as using common illustrations or graphic metaphors to tell a story that may involve data. I think of data visualisation as encompassing more analytical techniques that enable the viewer to understand rich data from multiple perspectives. Neither replaces tables-and-text analytical reports; rather, they can serve as introductions to a report’s content...

Flowing Data, a website about data visualisation, provides a sampler of visualisations in its Best of 2011 list. Owni.eu has its own list, 20 Great Visualizations of 2011. If you are intrigued and want to delve a bit deeper, check out some of these web posts:

• How to Make Information Graphics and Data Visualizations and 25 Must-Follow Information, Data and Visualization Blogs and RSS Feeds for the Data Professional, both by Joshua Kitlas of Syracuse University School of Information Studies.
• Visual.ly Meetup: the Skills Needed to Design Great Data Visualizations by Aleksandra Todorova of Visual.ly.
• Infographic of Infographics from Ivan Cash.
• A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods from Visual-Literacy.Org.

Still sceptical? See the recent blog post 2012: The Year for Visual Content? from the Australian company Curated Content:

Once people view data through one of these [visualisation] prisms, they’ll never want to look at a table of data again, which is another reason why we’re expecting impressive growth throughout 2012 in this space …

We don’t think for a New York Minute that the growth of visual content comes at the expense of written content, but what we are seeing increasingly is the need for a content strategy that incorporates a number of different formats. Some formats do the job better than others, and the trick is knowing which format will best tell the story you want told...

FreePint post by Peggy Garvin, Senior Contributing Editor, DocuTicker

The World in 2011: ICT Facts and Figures

 

The latest edition of Measuring the Information Society * features ITU's two key benchmarking tools to measure the Information Society: the ICT Development Index (IDI) and the ICT Price Basket (IPB). The IDI captures the level of ICT developments in 152 economies worldwide and compares progress made during the past two years. The IPB combines fixed telephone, mobile cellular and fixed broadband Internet tariffs for 165 economies into one measure and compares these across countries, and over time. The report also presents the latest global market trends, takes a closer look at broadband and analyses the digital divide among Internet users. The analytical report is complemented by a series of statistical tables providing country-level data for the indicators included in the two indices.

*This excludes Annex 5

Annex 5 features the statistical tables of tariffs used to compute the ICT Price Basket. It includes detailed tariff data for 165 countries broken down by cost of fixed telephone services, the cost of mobile cellular services and the cost of fixed broadband Internet services, for the year 2010.

 

Executive summary: English