eBooks for kids?

I find it hard to imagine picture books being replaced by eBooks, or at least that they would be the last to move over to an electronic platform, but after watching this video of a presentation from Penguin about what they have planned for the iPad, I'm not so sure.

Marshall Breeding on the future of Library Systems

This has already appeared on the Library News blog, but it can't hurt to publicise it in one more place, can it?

UTAS Library recently hosted Marshall Breeding, who was a keynote speaker at the VALA conference in Melbourne. Marshall Breeding is the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research for the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and is a prolific writer and speaker on library technology.

With Marshall’s kind permission we have made his talk available for online viewing and download.

Click here to open the Lectopia page to watch Marshall’s lecture:

http://lectopia.its.utas.edu.au/lectopia/lectopia.lasso?ut=516&id=29018

For more information, look at Marshall's profile page at Vanderbilt University, which has links to many of his publications.

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?

85 reasons to be thankful for librarians

For those of you who might be struggling post-christmas break and pre-semester 1

http://www.zencollegelife.com/2009/12/29/85-reasons-to-be-thankful-for-librarians/

Even has a university library focus......

Enhancing the Student Experience Through Effective Collaboration: A Case Study

Interesting article

http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1361-4533&volume=15&issue=2&spage=145

Rejecta Mathematica

At a session about bibliometrics at the IL seminar I attended recently in Melbourne, a journal called Rejecta Mathematica was mentioned in which articles may only be published if they have been rejected by a peer reviewed journal. The journal cites the following aims:

• "mapping the blind alleys of science": papers containing negative results can warn others against futile directions;
• "reinventing the wheel": papers accidentally rederiving a known result may contain new insight or ideas;
• "squaring the circle": papers discovered to contain a serious technical flaw may nevertheless contain information or ideas of interest;
• "applications of cold fusion": papers based on a controversial premise may contain ideas applicable in more traditional settings;
  
• "misunderstood genius": other papers may simply have no natural home among existing journals.