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

Introducing The Source


Creating catalogues: bibliographic records in a networked world

From the Research Information Network website

Bibliographic records play a central role in enabling users to find, locate and gain access to books and journals. The records are created and enhanced at different stages in a supply chain from publishers, through a range of intermediaries, to libraries and then to end-users. This report looks at how bibliographic records for content held by UK academic and research libraries are created and distributed, for printed and electronic books, and for scholarly journals and journal articles; and at how they are utilised by all involved in the supply chain, from the publisher to the final end user.


KnowPrivacy Report

From the KnowPrivacy website

The goal of this project was to examine both the data handling practices of popular websites and the concerns of consumers in an effort to identify practices which may be deceptive or potentially harmful to users‘ privacy and, based on our findings, offer potential solutions that policymakers should consider when discussing any new Internet privacy regulations or that website operators could implement to potentially avert or soften regulation.


Net Neutrality and what it means for libraries (Note: PDF)

From the E-prints in Library and Information Science (E-LIS) website

Net Neutrality, the idea that the Internet should be provided to all without discrimination based on content or applications, has been an important policy issue in the last few years. The focus of the presentation is on key concepts, historical perspectives, legislative issues, and the impact of Net Neutrality on libraries and their users.


Spinning a Semantic Web for Metadata: Developments in the IEMSR

From the Ariadne website

The authors reflect on the experience of developing components for the Information Environment Metadata Schema Registry, which exists to support the development and use of metadata standards.


This revolution will be digitised: online tools for radical collaboration (Note: PDF)

From the Disease Models and Mechanisms (DMM) website

What if everyone in the world were in your lab - a ‘hive mind’ of sorts, but composed of countless creative intellects rather than mindless worker ants, and one in which resources, reagents and effort could be shared, along with ideas, in a manner not dictated by institutional and geographical constraints?