Creative Librarian » 2004

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Monday, May 24, 2004

Libraries and Learning

Open Access News (Formerly: FOS News): Interoperability between Library Information Services and Learning Environments � Bridging the Gaps

The primary purpose of this paper is to explore potential interactions between information environments and learning environments, with emphasis on work that needs to be done involving standards, architectural modelling or interfaces (as opposed to cultural, organizational or practice questions) in order to permit these two worlds to co-exist and co-evolve more productively.

Education — laura

Something for Nothing

Chocolate and Vodka :: Something for Nothing: The Free Culture AudioBook Project is a coherent retelling of what happened when 2 authors published their books online for free at the same time they were published in hardcopy.

Friday, May 14, 2004

RIAA Cooks

Boing Boing: RIAA’s funny bookkeeping turns gains into losses

This very good, short article shows the way that the RIAA cooks its books to create losses due to file-sharing when there’s no indication that file-sharing is costing them money.

Monday, May 10, 2004

Cheap Tech Solutions

Tame the Web: Technology and Libraries: 10 Things A Library Can Do to Boost their Techie Stuff*

(*without breaking the bank)

Well worth a quick look for some great pointers. My library ranked surprisingly high.

Library Links — laura

Thursday, May 6, 2004

LJ

A couple of interesting articles from the May Library Journal

Born with the Chip: Given that the average librarian is a Boomer and over 50, there is a gap of one to two generations between most of the profession and a growing group of our primary users, whom we all need to understand in order to serve well. The generation in question, which some call Millennials but we’ll refer to as NextGens, is made up of people born between 1982 and 2002. At 81 million they form the largest population group since the Boomers at 87 million. The expectations and behaviors of this group will have a significant impact on the nature of the services that public and academic libraries need to plan and provide.
Capture Usage with E-Metrics: The E-Metrics Instructional System will help librarians collect and use data about networked environments

Besides giving funders an accurate picture of library usage, good data help in decision-making. Good data can help library managers determine whether they want to continue to develop and/or support services and resources. For example, a library manager could use e-metrics to examine numbers of Internet sessions and searches, full-content units examined, turnaways, and electronic materials expenditures.

Library Links — laura

Desktop Linux

There are a couple of articles about a version of Linux created by a library for their public PCs that apparently is pretty close to Windows.

There is also a Desktop Linux being put out by Red Hat at the end of the month. The pricing looks a little high.

(more…)

Computing News — laura

Help Free Old Works

Open Access News (Formerly: FOS News): How libraries would gain from success of Kahle v. Ashcroft

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On behalf of one of the lawyers pursuing the Kahle case, Minow asks librarians and archivists to identify works in their collections dating from 1964 to 1977 which could not be digitized under the current law, but which would enter the public domain if the lawsuit is successful. They also seek the total anumber of published print works from 1920-1950, to determine how many of these were not registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.

Early Career Survival

Library Journal - Early Career Survival is a great article which talks about job-hunting and early career survival tactics.

Career Info — laura

Monday, May 3, 2004

Institutional Repositories

ARL 226: Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age

Lynch, Clifford A. “Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age” ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7.

One of the biggest problems in academic and research libraries is the increasing cost of professional journals. All subscription formats are going up but the movement to electronic makes it worse by requiring the library essentially pay twice for the same content.

At the same time, while digital versions are much more convenient presently, archiving is problematic, to say the least. Often, when a journal is canceled, the institution also loses electronic access to the content it has paid for. If they don’t have paper copies, they lose the content completely.

Institutional publication and archiving is an idea gaining support as an alternative to the current commercial process.

Open Access — laura

Musicians & Copyright

Boing Boing: Musicians don’t understand copyright, but they don’t like the RIAA suing their fans

Musicians don’t understand copyright, but they don’t like the RIAA suing their fans
The Pew Internet and American Life project has just concluded a survey of 2,700+ musicians, measuring their attitude to the lawsuits the record labels have brought against their fans in their name…