Techniques to Understand the Changing Needs of Library Users
This paper demonstrates a set of techniques development by the River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester (USA) which have facilitated a tight alignment between the services, collections, facilities, and digital presence of the Libraries with the academic needs of the undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty at the… Read More
New Content Industry Talking Point: Fair Use Is Bad Because It Leads To Litigation
(techdirt.com): While people in the UK were initially skeptical of a planned review of copyright law in the UK (after all, it had been done just five years earlier, with most of the key points then ignored by the government), they were encouraged by some of the folks who were… Read More
Worldwide jitters over publishing
(theaustralian.com.au): The recent controversy about ranking journals in Australian academe has made its way across the globe. Anxious editors are sending out begging emails requesting recipients to assure the Australian Research Council that their work is important. Read More
Will Book Publishing Follow Music Into The Void?
(thequietus.com): Last month Waterstones – the UK’s pre-eminent high street bookseller – was sold to a Russian billionaire businessman for £53 million. That’s only £3 million more than Chelsea paid for Fernando Torres. The fate of Waterstones up until that point was intertwined with that of the UK music industry:… Read More
Take-up of smartphones, tablets increases sharply in UK
(smartgorillas.com): Take-up of smartphones, tablets and e-readers in the UK is rising sharply and users of such devices are also increasing their consumption of media “on the move” such as eBooks, according to a survey carried out by YouGov on behalf of KPMG. The KPMG Media and Entertainment Barometer, which… Read More
Faculty attitudes, perceptions and experiences of information literacy: a study across multiple disciplines at York University, Canada
(ojs.lboro.ac.uk): This Canadian-based survey research study investigates the information literacy (IL) instruction practices, attitudes and perceptions of university faculty at York University. Findings are based on results from an online survey distributed to all full-time faculty (1,451 in total) with a response rate of 15.2%. Read More
Internet Archive starts backing up digital books on paper
(arstechnica.com): If you want real long-term backups of digitized ebooks, then look no further than dead tree. At least, that's the consensus of the Internet Archive project, which has announced an incredibly ambitious plan to store one physical copy of every published book in the world. Read More
Google needs to clean up its Android Market malware mess
(zdnet.com): It’s not that Android is uniquely vulnerable to malware. It’s not. In fact, Android, which is based on Linux, has not only the Linux operating system’s higher than usual resistance to attack; it also has the advantage of running applications in a Java-like virtual machine (VM), Dalvik. What all… Read More
Discretion needed when publishing scientific findings
(guelphmercury.com): It seems that science and technology has progressed exponentially in the last 10 years. Much good has come out of these advances. But as with all advancements in society, we are forced to take the good with the bad. A Dutch laboratory has seemingly created a form of the… Read More
The Future of Education: Tablets or Textbooks?
(mobiledia.com): The federal government, book publishers and the technology industry are considering a large-scale effort to push tablets into public schools, raising questions about hidden costs to implement such a program. The proposed savings made headlines, but infrastructure issues and the effects of tablets upon learning deserve weighty consideration as… Read More
