The Source: news about digital libraries and library innovations from around the web

Introducing The Source

Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization (Note: PDF)

From the Council on Library and Information Resources website

The digitisation of millions of books under programmes such as Google Book Search and Microsoft Live Search Books is dramatically expanding our ability to search and find information. The aim of these large-scale projects - to make content accessible - is interwoven with the question of how one keeps that content, whether digital or print, fit for use over time.
This report examines large-scale digital initiatives (LSDIs) to identify issues that will influence the availability and usability, over time, of the digital books these projects create.


Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0

From the Educause Review website

The building blocks provided by the Open Educational Resources movement, along with e-Science and e-Humanities and the resources of the Web 2.0, are creating the conditions for the emergence of new kinds of open participatory learning ecosystems that will support active, passion-based learning: Learning 2.0.


SERU: A Shared Electronic Resource Understanding (Note: PDF)

From the National Information Standards Organization website

SERU embodies a desire by publishers and libraries for a cooperative and collaborative relationship that recognizes that the provision of timely, high-quality materials and their protection is in the mutual interests of all parties. When license agreements became commonplace in the digital publishing landscape more than a decade ago, most electronic resource transactions involved expensive content and inexperienced partners, and licenses made sense for almost every transaction. SERU offers publishers and libraries the opportunity to save both the time and the costs associated with a negotiated and signed license agreement by agreeing to operate within a framework of shared understanding and good faith.


Oxygen: Social Intranets, Collective Intelligence, and Government Practices (Note: PDF)

From the Electronic Journal of e-Government website

How well are government intranets modelling the participatory protocols needed to develop the skills for effective government-citizen engagement? Does the inclusion of social media forms and user-generated content (chat, collaboration work, content sharing) add or detract value from the interactive online space at work? This paper presents work on a small Australian case study drawn from a comparative study of e-participation projects within government in Australia and New Zealand. The paper focuses on the development of, and everyday practices in, a password-only subscription intranet, Oxygen, which has been operating since December 2006 in the South Australian public service. Specially developed through funding gained in an internally-competitive round, Oxygen is designed by, and for, a specific demographic of young media-savvy professionals.


Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search? (Note: PDF)

From Stanford University InfoLab

Social bookmarking is a recent phenomenon which has the potential to give us a great deal of data about pages on the web. One major question is whether that data can be used to augment systems like web search. To answer this question, over the past year we have gathered what we believe to be the largest dataset from a social bookmarking site yet analyzed by academic researchers. Our dataset represents about forty million bookmarks from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. We conclude that social bookmarking can provide search data not currently provided by other sources, though it may currently lack the size and distribution of tags necessary to make a significant impact.