Category: Libraries
September 24, 2010, 12:27 PM ET
Library Labs Turn to Their Patrons for Project Ideas
University librarians are turning to their patrons for ideas on how to improve library services.
This fall, the new Harvard University Library Lab invited students and faculty and staff members to help enhance the facility's offerings by proposing projects of their own. The lab will pool the proposals—submitted through an online portal—for review by a board of library officials. Once selections are made, the lab will develop the most promising projects with grant money from Arcadia, a London-based charitable fund to protect endangered natural and cultural resources, and with technical support from computer programmers and the library staff.
"The main goal has been to get some grassroots ideas generated and get people excited about contributing to their own efforts," said Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science and faculty director of the Office for Scholarly Communication,...
Read MoreSeptember 23, 2010, 10:00 AM ET
Bourbon, Thoroughbreds, and Digital Curation
If you're serious about thoroughbred racing, you know the Daily Racing Form, the newspaper that has been "America's turf authority" since 1894. With the help of the library staff at the University of Kentucky, 132,000 pages of the paper—some 531,000 articles—have been digitized and posted online. The articles date from the 1890s, when the paper was founded, up through the 1990s. The selection represents each decade's racing highlights, including Triple Crown coverage and reports on the careers of Seabiscuit, Secretariat, and the other great horses of the past hundred years.
The Daily Racing Form archive is a recent addition to the Kentuckiana Digital Library, a continuing project that provides access to digital archives of material particular to the state. "Nothing says Kentucky like thoroughbred racing, unless it's bourbon," says Mary Molinaro, associate dean for library...
Read MoreSeptember 18, 2010, 10:34 AM ET
Academic Libraries Add Netflix Subscriptions
A Netflix subscription seems like a no-brainer for an academic library with a limited budget to meet campus demand for audiovisual materials. But as more librarians sign up for its popular mail and streaming-video services, Netflix says library distribution of rented DVD's or streaming video violates its terms of use.
According to Steve Swasey, Netflix' vice president of corporate communications, Netflix does not offer institutional subscriptions. All of its media are meant only for personal consumption. Loaning DVD's out for faculty members to project onscreen in class or allowing students to watch streaming video from a library Netflix account is something the company "frowns upon," Mr. Swasey said.
The company knows that its service is being used by librarians, but so far it has not taken legal action to stop them. "We just don't want to be pursuing libraries," Mr. Swasey said. "We ...
Read MoreSeptember 14, 2010, 04:41 PM ET
Drexel Freshmen Get Help From 'Personal Librarians'
With students spending more research time in front of the screen and less in the stacks, librarians at Drexel University are trying a fresh approach to helping new freshmen navigate their resources: "personal librarians."
The Personal Librarian Program assigns each of the university's 2,750 entering freshmen to a librarian. The librarians get in touch with their students before they arrive via snail mail—sending a signed letter and business card—and later meet with students in person for a crash course on the library's offerings. Each of the approximately 20 librarians trained for the program will also work with their students throughout the semester to encourage them to use the resources and help them figure out how to do so.
"Our role is to help coach our students and help them learn the tools and skills needed to become very savvy," said Danuta A. Nitecki, Drexel's dean of libraries...
Read MoreSeptember 7, 2010, 10:00 AM ET
Monographs on Handheld Devices: Good, but Could Be Better
The ACLS Humanties E-Book project wanted to know how users liked reading its books on their handheld devices. So it selected three of its titles and asked users what it was like to read them on a Kindle, a Sony Reader, or other e-reader. Of the 142 people who responded, 88 percent "expressed overall satisfaction" with how the books looked and could be used on handhelds. But half found the search function frustrating, and only a quarter "felt they would have an easy time citing and referencing these editions," according to a white paper about the survey.
Librarians made up more than 60 pecent of those who took part in the survey. Eighteen respondents identified themselves as scholars or researchers; another 18 said they were in the faculty/instructor category.
Survey participants missed some aspects of working with print books and of browsing e-books online. Individual e-books made for ...
Read MoreJuly 14, 2010, 05:09 PM ET
Latest Attempt to Hawk E-Textbooks: Make Them Easier for Professors to Use
It has been hard to get most professors excited about e-textbooks, but publishers continue to try new ways to sell them on the format. The latest strategy seems to make the e-textbooks even easier for professors to use, by integrating them more tightly into the course-management systems they are already familiar with.
Today Blackboard announced deals with a major textbook publisher— McGraw Hill—and two college bookstore chains—Barnes & Noble College Booksellers and Follett Higher Education Group—to sell textbooks through the tech company's course-management system and to tie online assignments from the e-texts directly into existing online gradebooks.
And earlier this week, CourseSmart, which distributes electronic editions of books by major textbook publishers, announced a new feature that better links its e-textbooks with the leading course-management systems.
CourseSmart calls...
Read MoreJuly 14, 2010, 03:50 PM ET
Typing to Tagging: 50 Years of Cataloging
Helen Lucas's career in cataloging began with an IBM Executive typewriter. Fairfield University's library had just acquired the machine in 1960 when Lucas, then a new high-school graduate, landed a job there. Because most of her job involved typing call numbers, access numbers, authors' names, and book titles, Ms. Lucas and the Executive spent a lot of time together back in the day.
"I had a long relationship with that typewriter, believe me," she recalls. "It had proportionate spacing on it. Every letter took up a certain amount of space, and they were all different."
By the time Ms. Lucas retired from the university library this summer, the Executive had long since been superseded by computers. The Chronicle asked her to describe some of the other technological shifts she encountered in a half-century's worth of cataloging.
When Ms. Lucas started work at the university, in...
Read MoreJuly 13, 2010, 11:00 AM ET
E-Books Will Make Up Majority of Saint Leo U.'s Library Come Fall
E-books will make up more than half of Saint Leo University’s library collection, starting this fall.
With the acquisition of a new e-book database, 53 percent of the library’s collection will consist of online material. Students are able to download e-books to their computers, smartphones, and iPads.
“To me, this is the way all universities will need to go,” said Brent Short, director of library services.
Mr. Short says the biggest benefit of e-books is that they are accessible anywhere and anytime. Expanding online material is particularly important at Saint Leo, where the majority of the student body is based off the campus, he said.
“We have people in the military that are on station in Iraq, so obviously, online resources are crucial for them,” he added.
Saint Leo’s library contains 116,000 e-books and 106,000 print titles. Although the library continues to add to its print...
Read MoreJune 28, 2010, 05:40 PM ET
Springer Announces New Open-Access Journals
The Springer publishing company today announced that it is setting up a new open-access journal program. Called SpringerOpen, the program will initially include 12 new online-only, peer-reviewed journals in science, technical, and medical fields.
The Chronicle sat down with Eric Merkel-Sobotta, Springer's executive vice president for corporate communications, and Bettina Goerner, the company's manager of open access, to talk about the program. (They were in town for the annual meeting of the American Library Association.) They emphasized that all SpringerOpen journals will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows reuse of articles as long as the authors are given credit. So if you're an instructor who wants to use a SpringerOpen article in a course you're teaching, "you can include it in course packages without e-mailing Springer's rights department," Mr. ...
Read MoreJune 3, 2010, 04:30 PM ET
21st-Century Research Collections: Mostly Digital, Ever Larger
Can a new research library be all digital? How much does it cost a library to preserve a codex? What do large-scale text-digitizing projects mean for scholarship in the humanities? Those are driving questions behind a new report, "The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship," released today by the Council on Library and Information Resources.
The report is presented as a trio of essays. In their contribution, Geneva Henry, executive director of Rice University's Center for Digital Scholarship, and Lisa Spiro, director of Rice's Digital Media Center, study the question "Can a New Research Library Be All Digital?" Ms. Henry and Ms. Spiro give an extended overview of experiments with going digital and obstacles that libraries have encountered, including technological shortfalls and librarian and faculty resistance.
They conclude that the all-digital...
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