Flickr Commons

The Library of Congress have been using Flickr for a while now to increase the accessibility of some of their enormous collection of historically interesting and out of copyright photographs as part of the Flickr Commons project. many other cultural institutions are also participating, including the State Library of NSW.

Last october the Library of Congress issued a report that gave the experiment a thumbs up:

"In the first 24 hours after launch, Flickr reported 1.1 million total views on our account; a little over a week later, the account had received 3.6 million page views and 1.9 million total visits. That included over 2 million views of the photos, and over 1 million views of the photostream. By early October, LC photos were averaging approximately 500,000 views a month and had crossed the 10 million mark in total views and the 6 million mark for visits. Interestingly, 82% of this traffic was referred from within Flickr; only 3% came from search engines"

So, could UTAS Libraries be increasing the accessibility of some of our digital collections by using Flickr Commons? I would suggest it makes a lot of sense.

Full PDF Report(http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_report_final.pdf)

Flickr Commons (http://www.flickr.com/commons)

"BlueNet"

I came across this by accident, but it is an interesting development that UTAS is leading. There has been quite a bit of talk about the role of the Library in curating eScience research data, I am curious as to whether anyone at UTAS Library has heard of this project?

"The BlueNet project will establish a national distributed marine science data network linking universities to the AODCJF, to support the long term data curation requirements, and data access needs of Australia’s marine science researchers.

BlueNet will build infrastructure to enable the discovery, access and online integration of multi-disciplinary marine science data on a very large scale, to support current and future marine science and climate change research, ecosystem management and government decision making."

Bluenet.org.au

Search interface "MEST"

Australia's most cited paper for 2008

I came across this via Stephen Abram's blog, from Science watch comes a list of the most cited countries (Australia is 9th), and each country's most cited paper. It's more of a curiousity than anything, unless you are the author of one of the papers I suppose, but interesting anyway. So (drum roll) the most cited paper is:

Most-cited paper from Clinical Medicine with 2,634 citations:
Title: "THE BCL-2 PROTEIN FAMILY: ARBITERS OF CELL SURVIVAL"
Authors: ADAMS JM; CORY S
Source: SCIENCE, 281 (5381): 1322-1326 AUG 28 1998

Unsurprisingly all the most cited papers are science or medical research. Full list here (http://sciencewatch.com/dr/cou/2009/09janALLPAPRS/)

New Librarians Symposium Links

A collection of links related to the New Librarians Symposium, held December 4-7 2008 in melbourne.
Vanessa Warren, Liz Badcock, Bess McArthur, Trevor Scaife, Katrina Dewis and Felix Wilson attended, and had a great time!

Conference homepage, with abstracts

Faceboook group for NLS

Flickr: a collection of images from the Symposium

Shanachie Tour

Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development Program

Athaneum Library

Mark Pesce's blog post 'The Alexandrine dilemma'

Sherman Young's blog 'The book is dead'

Evidence Based Library Journal

I'm not sure if I'm the last person to discover this journal. On the off chance that I'm not I thought I should share it. Its called Evidence Based Library and Information Practice. Its peer reviewed and published by the University of Alberta Learning Services. Its definitely worth a look.

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.