Fayetteville Library hackerspace project in New York

As the library of the University of Michigan makes its final decision about taking on responsibilitiy for OER (Open Education Resources) publishing at the University, a report entitled Reaching the heart of the university: Libraries and the future of OER looks at progress on this collaboration to date. Importantly, the authors, Pieter Kleymeer, Molly Kleinman and Ted Hanss, who will be presenting this as a paper at the Open Education 2010 Conference in Barcelona next month, also reflect more widely and on the many synergies between academic libraries and the OER movement.

The MARC data format was created early in the history of digital computers. In this article, the author entertains the notion that viewing MARC from a modern technological perspective leads to interpretive problems such as a confusion of “bibliographic data” with “catalog records.”

On occasion I’ve heard folks (/me points finger at self) bemoan the launch of a new website as the creation of “yet another silo”. But the technical silos that we perceive are largely artifacts of the social silos we work in: archives, special collections, rare books, maps, etc. The collections we break up our libraries into…the projects that mirror those collections. We need to work better together before we can build common digital preservation tools. To paraphrase something David Brunton has said to me before: we need to think of our collections more as sets of things that can be rearranged at will, with ease and even impunity. In fact the architecture of the Web (and each website on it) is all about doing that.

So today, I’m going to write a post so those who haven’t studied or trained as archivists will be able to understand (at a very basic level) what archivists do and why archives are important. [Hint: if librarians don't just put books on shelves, it would be safe to assume that archivists don't just put things in boxes.]

This presentation outlines sets of alternative processes for traditional library indexing and abstracting practices. To do this it first describes the apparent goal of indexing and abstracting. It then describes how these things have traditionally been manifested. Third, it outlines how the goals of indexing and abstract can be implemented through the exploitation of computer technology. Finally, it describes some ways computers can be used even more to go beyond traditional indexing and abstracting to provide services against texts.

Outsell estimates that the total US book market in 2009 was 41 billion dollars. They estimate that book sales to libraries was a bit over 1.6 billion dollars, which is almost 4% of the total market.

"The recent letter from the University of California Digital Library (CDL) about price increases proposed by Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the response from NPG have raised a storm of controversy and rebuttals. To me, the mess is symptomatic of a communications failure between publishers and librarians."

I was interested to hear the concept of a 'data well' discussed when I was in Sweden the other week. The Danish examples are of national infrastructures (although the actual creation could be sourced with other suppliers). 'Data wells' of the type discussed here are also under construction by OCLC, Serials Solutions (Summon), Ebsco, Elsevier, and Ex Libris, among others. And Google Scholar continues to operate.