The Library Marketing Toolkit website!

The site is essentially designed to give you lots of practical advice on how to market your library – be that public, academic, special or archive. There are tools and resources, lots of useful links, new case studies which will be added to on an ongoing basis, and there’s info about the Library Marketing Toolkit book and its contributors.

Unpacking e-books

E-books have matured but questions remain about digital rights, access models and what a scholarly e-book really means today. Interviews by Sian Harris

Associate editor of Elsevier journal resigns in protest over profit-making

"I can no longer work for a system that puts profit over access to research"

New open access title: Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication

The Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication seeks to share useful innovations, both in thought and in practice, with the aim of encouraging scholarly exchange and the subsequent benefits that are borne of scrutiny, experimentation and debate. As modes of scholarly communication, the technologies and economics of publishing and the roles of libraries evolve, it is our hope that the work shared in the journal will inform practices that strengthen librarianship and that increase access to the "common Stock of Knowledge."

An interesting article in the first issue: The Movement to Change ScholarlyCommunication Has Come a Long Way – HowFar Might It Go? 

Free quality e-books (+textbooks!) to download - bookboon.com

“While traditional book publishers are still struggling to find a viable business model for eBooks, bookboon.com is taking a different approach. With its free digital books it offers an alternative for the often unfairly-priced eBooks.

In South Africa, 200,000 books were downloaded in the last 12 months.” (Businesstech report)

Download free ebooks + no catch + no registration

“……Bookboon.com offers a huge range of over 1500 free quality eBooks for university students, business professionals and globe trotters. Our books can be downloaded directly in PDF format, and are currently available in seven languages for everyone around the world.

Books for university students Bookboon textbooks are focused and to the point, and we have books which address students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Our main focus areas are business/economics, engineering/natural sciences and IT. We are also constantly expanding our range of subjects…”

“Over 800 textbooks written by professors   We currently offer over 800 textbooks. The books are in average around 200 pages long, and are being used as both primary and secondary literature.

All our books are written by highly respected professors from some of the best universities in the world and exclusively for bookboon.com”

Sabinet introduces a new Reference platform and interface – ‘Sabinet Reference

Sabinet new reference platform news

Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories

A video featuring Ricky Erway describing the report is available on YouTube.

Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories offers a quick environmental scan of the repository landscape and then focuses on disciplinary repositories—those subject-based, often researcher-initiated loci for research information. Seven of these repositories are profiled, with a focus on their varied business models. The report concludes with a discussion of sustainability, including funding models, factors that contribute to a repository's success, and ways to bring in additional revenue. It is intended to help librarians support researchers in accessing and disseminating research information. http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-03r.htm

Elsevier & IOP Still Fully Green & Angelic: Just Ignore Incoherent Distinctions

From the Open Access guru, Steve Harnad

Subject librarians' perceptions of institutional repositories as an information resource

Article  - While there has been much research in recent years about institutional repositories, the focus has been predominantly on issues related to motivating individuals to input content into them. This research shows that institutional repositories are not yet being perceived or promoted as a valuable information resource by academic subject librarians, who view them as having varying value to their clients

E-books pose problems for presenting print reference material

"........Given how important reference material is to this sort of fiction, I find myself somewhat unimpressed by the way that the material is handled in Kindle—which is to say it’s handled poorly......."

50 Awesome Things!

50 Awesome Things, Connecticut Library Association Conference May 8 2012
Brighten your day!

 copyrighted image: fee still

What tool do you prefer? Reference management preferences at the CfA. | Digital Scholarship @ Harvard

Perhaps we too should conduct an online survey of users at RU? (Rhodes currently subscribes to Refworks)

"What prompted the question was a debate over preference: Papers, Zotero or Mendeley? Notice, there is no mention of RefWorks, which is a tool that the Harvard Library has purchased (Zotero and Mendeley are free, Papers is available for a minimal fee)"

What tool do you prefer? Reference management preferences at the CfA. | Digital Scholarship @ Harvard

Reevaluating the Role of the Research Librarian - Bio-IT World

As I've been doing research for my mini-dissertation on Embedded Librarianship, I came across several articles and blogposts on the topic which clearly articulate the changing role of the research librarian as being proactive and dynamic. This article endorses this and makes you think how advanced this concept is and how it has become a reality in many sectors. Reevaluating the Role of the Research Librarian - Bio-IT World

Open access to academic resesarch: Eyes on the prize are blind to reality

(Very interesting and topical issues of concern to all academic librarians)

 
From Steven Curry, scientist from Imperial College, London:

"Scientists’ quest for publication in journals with high impact factors is widely perceived as one of the more refractory barriers to the fuller adoption of open access, which I believe to be in the best interests of science. But the barrier problem is complicated...."

Facebook for nerds!

Social Networks for Academics Proliferate, Despite Some Doubts

JSTOR e-books program to launch in mid-2012.

Books at JSTOR: announced in January 2011, is an offshoot of JSTOR, which worked closely with eight university press partners to develop the initial plans for the online scholarly book program. The eight have now expanded to 30 partners. More than 15,000 monographs from the press partners (front and backlist titles) will be fully cross-searchable with JSTOR journal content.

Moving Beyond the NetLibrary Legacy, EBSCO Reshapes Its Ebook Platform

(Library Journal is presenting a series of articles called Exploring Ebook Options that takes an indepth look at some of the ebook platforms that are now in the marketplace. The series, which is focusing primarily on the public library market, has so far provided an ebook primer for libraries just starting out with downloadable media as well as profiles of  Baker & Taylor’s Axis 360 and Library Ideas’ Freading. This story examines  Ebooks on EBSCOhost, which has strong academic and corporate roots but is becoming more attractive to public libraries as well.)

(More) The world of university research has long been held to ransom by academic publishers

Academic publishing doesn't add upThe world of university research has long been held to ransom by academic publishers charging exorbitant prices for subscriptions – but that may all be about to end

An unlikely hero!