Introducing The Source
State of the Blogosphere 2008
From the Technorati website
There have been a number of studies aimed at understanding the size of the Blogosphere, yielding widely disparate estimates of both the number of blogs and blog readership. All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream. The numbers vary but agree that blogs are here to stay.
Technorati’s 'State of the Blogosphere 2008' report will be released in five consecutive daily segments. Since 2004, the annual study has unearthed and analysed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, it was resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind. For the first time, bloggers were surveyed directly about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially.
Digital Preservation and Copyright
From the WIPO Magazine website
This article highlights the difficulties in preserving digital works, created today and gone tomorrow, for future generations. Both their nature and current copyright laws create a challenging task for preservationists.
Medieval literary treasures to go online
From The Independent website
Manchester University's John Rylands Library will be digitising much of its renowned collection of medieval manuscripts, including parts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The project, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee, will allow widespread access to the works online. Staff will begin to scan the pages using a high definition camera in October and the results will be available by late 2009.
Achievement in reading, writing, language conventions and numeracy 2008 (Note: PDF)
From the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy website
This year, for the first time, all Australian school students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 undertook the same assessment in reading, writing, spelling, grammar, punctuation, and numeracy. The results in this report show that more than 90 per cent of students in Australia are performing at or above the national minimum standard in each of the key areas and around 80 per cent of students achieved above the minimum standard.
University investment in the library: What’s the return? A case study at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (Note: PDF)
From the Elsevier website
Academic libraries are being challenged increasingly to demonstrate their value to their institution in compelling quantitative terms. There is a growing need to provide a response based on sound methodology to questions about the value of the university’s investment in the library. In making decisions about competing priorities, university administrators evaluate their options in terms of how to allocate resources in the optimum way that will enable the institution to achieve its goals. At the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC), Paula Kaufman, the University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, sought to identify the library’s contribution by saying “for each dollar invested in the library, the university received x dollars in return.” This statement framed the question of value from an economic perspective and guided the development of this case study.
On the Trail of the Elusive Non-user: What Research in Virtual Reference Environments Reveals (Note: PDF)
From the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) website
An extraordinarily interesting and somewhat paradoxical pattern is revealed in comparing trends in use statistics in academic versus public libraries over the past decade or so. Since 1995, there seems to have been a decline in circulation and reference services statistics at some academic libraries, and the “value of electronic resources may already have eclipsed that of physical resources". However, a different picture emerges in examining a review of public library statistics, which shows precisely the reverse – a pattern of increases in circulation and reference services for the same time period. What accounts for these inconsistencies in library use between different types of libraries? Why do people choose to use or not to use particular library services? In order to entice, attract and retain library users, we need to explore these critically important questions.
On the Dublin Core front: Harvard, NIH, and the Balance of Power in the Open Access Debate (Note: PDF)
From the E-prints in Library and Information Science website
This article reviews the recent decision by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences to submit scholarly articles to the University’s institutional repository prior to (or in lieu of) publication in a journal. The remarkable decision, the first of its kind in the United States, reverberated quickly across the open access landscape, making many wonder which universities will follow Harvard’s lead. This article also looks at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy, which as of 8 April 2008, requires NIH-sponsored investigators to place into PubMed a copy of their peer-reviewed journal articles. The impact of this legislation will be enormous, as some 80,000 articles per year result from NIH-sponsored research.
Why Public Libraries Close (Note: PDF)
From the WebJunction website
This report captures the first systematic look at public library closure on a nationwide basis from 1999 to 2003. It examines why libraries closed during this specific time period, and assesses what the potential impact of such closure was believed to be from the librarians’ perspective. This study also presents a methodology using geographic information systems (GIS) to assess possible hidden impacts on some library users and potential library customer markets.
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