Librarians are more relevant than ever. We have no good reason to be on the
defense and every reason to take the offensive. Conversation in our
field is fraught with too much navel gazing and not enough looking at
external evidence that many things are going well. We share too many
stories about the bad stuff and too rarely share the successes. Yet we
are an adaptive profession. Positive change is our tradition; let’s talk
about that!....
An Industrial Revolution for libraries
I love following the folks who are involved in the Startup Library
mentality: the ability to grasp and engage in an emerging culture for
librarianship focused on change, innovation, experimentation and finding
the future. While some worry about a continuing malaise in our field
where the stories are all bad and we’re all doomed, I choose to focus on
indications of positive, transformational change.
From: Lucidea Think Clearly Blog, author Stephen Abram http://blog.lucidea.com/watching-the-future-tracking-library-trends 9/5/2017
"Unsurprisingly, the Activist perspective caught fire in libraries, where open access was seen as a means to offset the growing market dominance of a handful of scholarly publishers. Unacknowledged then and now in library circles is that a fully OA universe is one without libraries..."
"Thus we have the cascading model: articles rejected by the editors of the big brand-name journal are directed to other publications in the same family. This cascade can be to toll-access publications (the shining example is the line extension of the Nature Publishing Group) or to OA venues that exist to soak up the funding from OA mandates. The toll-access variant is challenged, however, by the limitations of library budgets. It just may be that no one is going to be able to emulate Nature, as Nature got there first (the value of strategic vision) before libraries were sidelined as publishing growth markets. Thus practitioners of the cascading model are likely to move to the Gold OA model..."
"Libraries will continue to purchase large aggregations, though from fewer and fewer publishers; and funding bodies will continue to build the market for mandated OA publication with attendant APCs (simultaneously and causally reducing the amount of money that goes toward research). Library publishing will suffer as more authors migrate to the branded OA services. The publishing market for scholarly material will grow.."
5 companies publish more than 50 per cent of research papers, study finds
(53 per cent of scientific papers, 70 per cent of papers in the social sciences)
Larivière says the cost of the University of Montreal's journal
subscriptions is now more than $7 million a year – ultimately paid for
by the taxpayers and students who fund most of the university's budget.
Unable to afford the annual increases, the university has started
cutting subscriptions, angering researchers.
"The big problem is that libraries or institutions that produce
knowledge don't have the budget anymore to pay for [access to] what they
produce," Larivière said.
Vincent Larivière, University of Montreal From: CBC News June 15th 2015
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/
The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era
Essentially, they've become an oligarchy, Larivière and co-authors Stefanie Haustein and Philippe Mongeon say in a paper published last week in the open access, non-profit journal PLOS ONE.
The Australia-Africa Universities Network, which has been running for going on three years with 10 institutions from each of the two regions, already has 16 collaborative research programmes underway in areas such as food security, mining and minerals, public sector reform, public health and education.
Interestingly, research at Murdoch University in Australia has shown that citations per paper with African co-authors is far higher than the university’s average citation per paper.
Article from University World News Karen MacGregor 29 May 2015Issue No:369
Connecticut library has acquired two fully-automated, walking, talking robots to provide independent assistance to its patrons. The robots, set to begin their duties at the Westport, Conn., library Oct. 11, will teach computer programming skills, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The robots, Vincent and Nancy, stand just shy of 2 feet tall. They walk, grasp, move around walls, talk, listen and have facial-recognition software. They speak 19 languages.
But library robots Nancy and Vincent will not be shelving books or explaining the Dewey Decimal System -- at least, not at first.
Information
literacy for faculty, doctoral students and other research-based
graduate students, post-docs, and other original researchers is complex.
There are fundamental differences between the processes of inquiry used
by original researchers as compared to students or even faculty who are
synthesizing information to find answers. Original research is
different from information synthesis for discovery. Therefore, the
information literacy processes to train and support those researchers
are different. Analysis of the inquiry-oriented parts of the current and
emerging information literacy Standards and Framework shows significant
differences in the approach needed for teaching research information
literacy. Promising instructional outcomes for information literacy
training based around original research include gap analysis,
theoretical and methodological discovery, and practical skills like
funding search and analysis.
Librarians working in scholarly communications need to understand how
to calculate and explain how including work in a repository affects its
impact. This presentation describes the current state of research and practice into metrics for repositories including traditional metrics and newer alternative metrics, and some preliminary results of a research study assessing the usage and impact of a Digital Commons repository. Heller, Margaret, "What Does Your Repository Do?: Understanding and Calculating Impact" (2014). University Libraries: Faculty Publications & Other Works. Paper 28.
From Musings about Librarianship blog: "The trend I am increasingly convinced that is going to have a great
impact on how academic libraries will function is the rise of Open
Access. As Open Access takes hold and eventually becomes the norm in
the next 10-15 years, it will disrupt many aspects of academic library
operations and libraries will need to rethink the value-add they need to
provide to universities....."
"The diploma that hangs in the wall of our offices is a reminder that we
were given the foundation we need to achieve the things we have dreamt
about, but it is up to all of us to develop new skills and learn new
processes if we want to survive."
An interesting article by Natasha Johnson from Purdue University looks at three common themes which characterize innovators, viz., play, purpose, and passion and wonders how academic librarians can foster creativity in "library as space", in information literacy (allow failures!), in stimulating students' interests (displays, social media, etc.??) and in encouraging their development.
(I have ordered a copy of the book which Johnson used as the basis of her article for the Rhodes Library - Wagner, T. 2012. Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World. New York: Simon and Schuster.)
the university’s new admissions policy is a hybrid procedure using three mechanisms for selection: one part of the class selected just on marks; a second component selected based on performance and ability, which takes account of school and home background; and a third component driven by achieving demographic targets based on an applicant's race and performance.
High numbers of new HIV infections are being recorded in tertiary institutions in Zimbabwe. It has become commonplace at graduation ceremonies for students to be awarded degrees or diplomas posthumously, after having succumbed to HIV-Aids.
