The view from the other side

Steven Bell writes in Library Journal about attending a meeting of scholarly publishers:
"If I had one thought to sum up the experience it would be that the publishers seem genuinely more worried about the future than academic librarians. Despite how academic librarians tend to obsess about the future, we have little reason to believe our libraries and our jobs won’t be a part of it.

Scholarly publishers, however, see deep library budget cuts, institutional repositories, open access mandates, the growing need to offer their wares for an expanding array of platforms and devices, libraries with more and more consortial power, and other threats to their survival"

Worth a read:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6719631.html

"Best Of" LibGuides

I just came across a new feature on the Springshare LibGuides website, the "best of" section. The idea is to promote the best examples of LibGuides subject guides, and the added bonus is that all the featured content is available for use by anyone else. Nice.

http://bestof.libguides.com/index.php

Libraries and research Excellence (What we need to do!)

A very interesting and readable report published by OCLC recently on the role of the academic library in research assessment exercises says that "Libraries should claim their territory" and I couldn't agree more. The other recommendations are good too, and well worth taking 2 minutes to read.

From the OCLC Website: "Published in December 2009, the Key Perspectives report was written after studying the role of research libraries in higher education research assessment regimes in five countries: the Republic of Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark and Australia. This companion report provides a summary of the key findings of the Key Perspectives study, with some context for the recent increase in library involvement in research assessment, as well as recommendations for research libraries"

Direct Link to the report(PDF 267k): http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-01.pdf

Found via this post at the always interesting Hanging Together blog: http://hangingtogether.org/?p=765

Free UK Higher Ed Theses - EThOS

Search freely across 250,000+ theses that are produced in UK Higher Education institutions; theses that have been digitised already are offered to researchers for free downloading.

http://ethos.bl.uk

Nature launches iPhone App

From the website: "The nature.com iPhone application allows you to access science news stories and the latest published research from Nature Publishing Group on your iPhone wherever you are. As new articles are published they're pushed straight to your iPhone where you can read the full text immediately or just save them for later.

Tell the app which journals you're interested in or set up saved searches, which will show you the titles and abstracts of new articles from any journals in PubMed that match your key words."

I think this is significant for a number of reasons, mainly that content providers at many levels are adding value with products like this, and where are the library companies with products offering similar functionality?