New current awareness tool

ticTocs is a free Table of Contents service
http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/index.php?action=start

Here's what they say about it

• ticTOCs is easy to use, and it's free.
• Find 11,290 scholarly journal Table of Contents (TOCs) from 412 publishers.
• View the latest TOC for each journal.
• Link to the full text of 294,137 articles (where institutional or personal subscription allows).
• Export TOC feeds to popular feedreaders.
• Select and save journal titles to view future TOCs (Register to ensure your MyTOCs are permanently saved).

It might be a useful current awareness tool for those journals that are not indexed in a database that offers this serive, or for anyone who doesn't have access to databases post uni.

Measuring the value of academic libraries

This article looks at a quantitative study (claimed to be the first of its kind) on the return on investment in an academic library in terms of grant funding across the institution. For the University of Illinois there was a return on investment of $4.38 for every dollar invested in the library...... pretty interesting for us given the research strength here at UTas.

The Library as Strategic Investment: Results of the Illinois Return on Investment Study

http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/issues/2008-3_4/?000269

NLA Digital Newspapers - you can help

The National Library of Australia is digitising a significant collection of Australian newspapers, I wasn't aware that the PDFs of the articles are also run through an optical character recognition program and made available as text. However, the quality of the print is poor, and therefore the text conversion is unreadable, so the NLA allow you to edit and improve the text of articles as a way of contributing to the project.

Nice idea I thought, no login required but you can create an account if you want to keep track of what you have done, like Wikipedia, and you are contributing to the sum of human knowledge, in a small way.

Very 'Web 2.0'

http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/home

Google digitize magazine archives

Google are now digitizing archived and current magazines, searchable via Google Books.

See their media release here
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/search-and-find-magazines-on-google.html

You may be familiar with the Horizon report, produced by the New Media Consortium, which identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have an impact on higher education.

They have just released a report specifically for Australia and New Zealand which identifies key trends, critical challenges and technologies to watch in the next 1-5 years. Each topic includes a description, a discussion of relevance to higher ed, examples of how it is being used and additional examples and readings.

It's at http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2008-Horizon-Report-ANZ.pdf and it has a handy executive summary at the front.

Google Books Settlement and Libraries

From the Google Books Library Project page:

"Our ultimate goal is to work with publishers and libraries to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages [My italics] that helps users discover new books and publishers discover new readers".

So nothing too ambitious then...

Recently Google and the US publishers that sued them for their digitisation efforts agreed on a settlement.

There is a useful resource from the ALA and ARL called "A guide for the perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library project Settlement" available here. It isn't clear whether this agreement will apply outside the US, but the most relevant piece of information for me was this:

" Google will make available institutional subscriptions that will allow users
within an institution to view the full text of all the books within the Institutional
Subscription Database (ISD). This database will include the books in the in copyright,
not commercially available category. This access will continue only
for the duration of the subscription; access will not be perpetual, in contrast to
when a user purchases access to an individual book, as described above."

So, Google will be offering subscription access to the digitised version of some very significant Academic Library's collections, this could be big news for all academic libraries, allowing us to potentially expand our eBook collections to millions of volumes of scholarly material.

There is a lot more information in the ALA / ARL report linked to above, recommended reading.

Interesting times.

My favourite Library from the US

We visited many Libraries during our trip, public and academic, affluent and poorly funded. The New York Public Library was amazing for its scale and spirit, the large Academic Libraries like the University of Chicago and Vanderbilt were inspiring but this beautiful room is the Franke Reading Room, part of the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of the Art Institute of Chicago and it was my favourite.


The room is decorated with works of art from the collection of the Art Institute, which is Chicago's main gallery and has a great collection.
It isn't on the scale of the reading rooms of the New York Public Library or The State Library of Victoria, it felt much less grandiose and intimidating, and the rules were quite arcane (pencils only please!), but it was such a beautiful, intimate space I wished I had more time to sit down and study there.
More information here

Collaborative searching

Search together is a new product from Microsoft that is in the testing phase. People can collaborate on searching, storing results in a repository to be accessed by group members at a later time.
You need to have a Microsoft Live ID and it runs in Internet Explorer 7 so at the moment it mightn't be practical for us but I thought the possibilities for both us as a librarian team and our Schools are quite exciting.

Found via ResourceShelf

Information Literacy Assessment

ePrints contains the articles and presentations on the Science Information Literacy Project that I mentioned yesterday.

This project was led by academic staff from the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology (SET).

Our questions were:
How effective is our embedded teaching of information literacy?
Do students show enhanced learning outcomes as they move through the Zoology undergraduate curriculum?

We compared years and undertook a longitudinal study of a single cohort across the three years of their course.

The results were positive for both questions.

Mapping Generic Attributes

This project was initiated by keen academic staff in the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology (SET). The main aims were to motivate and to assist schools in integrating generic attributes (GAs) into their curriculum. "Champions" from each of the SET schools were identified and recruited to simplify our communication and broaden our impact. We hosted several workshops with the champions, achieving another of our aims, to promote a cross-disciplinary community. The key outcome of relevance to Liaison Librarians was the design of a set of tools to a) map aspirations for developing specific attributes within each unit b) map the current practice of addressing/teaching these skills and c) map current practice for all units across an entire course - gap analysis. I'm hopeful that this set of resources, which I have on CD, may be applied to our Information Skills agenda.

Assoc. Prof. Sue Jones, Zoology Head of School, presented a paper on the project at UniServe in 2007.

Please contact me if you're interested in more details.