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

Introducing The Source

High speed broadband access for public libraries

From the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) website

Greater access to high speed broadband for the public in libraries across England is now possible thanks to an agreement brokered by the MLA. MLA is working with JISC and JANET (UK), who respectively fund and operate the JANET education and research network, to give public libraries access to a wider range of high quality online learning resources and the option of a faster internet service. To give some idea of the potential improvement, JANET connection speeds are one gigabit per second (1Gbit/s) – up to ten times faster than existing typical bandwidths at central libraries in England, which in turn can be ten times faster than home connection speeds.


National E-Books Observatory project: Key Findings and Recommendations (Note: PDF)

From the JISC national e-books observatory project website

The results of the project exploring the behaviours of e-book users and the impact of course text e-books on print sales are now available. The final report summarises the key findings of the project and the recommendations for future action.


The Long Tail, Copyright and Libraries

From the Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche [Association of European Research Libraries] (LIBER) website

This paper is about the Long Tail as defined by Chris Anderson in 2006, its direct implications for copyright and its possible consequences for libraries and heritage institutions, e.g. for document delivery and the creation of repositories with images, sound registrations and documents.


Facilitating Searches in Multiple Bibliographical Databases: Metadata Harvesting Service Providers

From the Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche [Association of European Research Libraries] (LIBER) website

A metadata harvester is a software package that reads data from servers, writes it to databases, implements various kinds of searches, and writes HTML files to display the results. In this paper sixty metadata harvesting service providers have been studied. The study reviewed metadata generation, preservation and harvesting, and various technical issues arising at these stages.


Social Media: Tools for user-Generated Content

From Dr Axel Bruns' Snurblog website

These reports provide a toolkit for organisations as they come to terms with social media spaces and develop their strategies for engagement with their communities of users and followers.
This volume is divided into two parts: Part 1 offers background information that is crucial to the development of an understanding of how communities work and what motivates their participants to contribute, while Part 2 converts that understanding into a series of strategic recommendations for profit and non-profit organisations aiming to develop a presence within the social media environment.
There is probably nothing here that will surprise long-time followers of social media developments - instead, the report aims at those individuals and organisations who feel the need to develop social media strategies, but have yet to establish a full understanding of what makes online communities tick, and of how to engage with them.