Governor Paterson has signed legislation (S.3903 Oppenheimer/A.6154 Paulin) that will allow libraries and library systems to engage in cooperative bidding. The legislation, which goes into effect immediately, will allow systems to jointly go out to bid on products or services, rather than as individual entities.  See http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?default_fld=&bn=S03903&Summary=Y&Text=Y for the full text of the legislation.

Four New York libraries have been chosen to participate in the Value, Outcomes, and Return on Investment study (“Lib-Value”), conducted under sponsorship of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and headed by Principal Investigator Carol Tenopir and New York state coordinator Bruce Kingma. Lib-Value is the third phase of two previous studies which considered the return on investment (ROI) of academic library electronic collections in terms of grants income (Luther 2008; Tenopir et al. 2010). Lib-Value extends this line of research by looking not only at ROI, but also more broadly at the library’s value, particularly as evident in three functional areas: research, teaching and learning, and professional and social outcomes.

• Baruch College (CUNY)
• Brooklyn College (CUNY)
• SUNY University at Buffalo
• SUNY Buffalo State College

These four libraries were chosen to collaborate with and expand the Lib-Value  team. Their participation is being coordinated through Nylink, in partnership with NYSHEI, and Bruce Kingma of Syracuse University.

OverCat, LibraryThing’s new index of 32 million library records (arguably the second-largest searchable database of library records in existence, after OCLC), was assembled from record sets from libraries around the world.  In addition to records from the 690 libraries to which LibraryThing connects, the core consists of full datasets from the Library of Congress, Washington State, Boston College, Oregon State, and Talis Base (a collection of UK libraries). LibraryThing has added to this records from the hundreds of thousands of books members have searched for and added from the site.

Please note that OverCat, which is being positioned as the first step in a major upgrade of LibraryThing’s cataloging functions, is available to LibraryThing members in the course of normal site activity—cataloging small collections of books.  It will not be available for external access, including by libraries.  It is not a back door to OCLC data (see WorldCat Records Use Policy).

More about OverCat and LibraryThing

See the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s website for a provocative article making the case for reducing the volume of published research. Citing the growth in the number and cost of journals, the ways in which faculty and researchers can game the system, and the dwindling ratio of articles published to those cited within five years, the authors provide several recommendations for stemming the tide of “redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research.”

This site from the University of California summarizes and has documentation for their negotiations with NPG, and offers suggestions for scholars to “influence the scholarly communication system to increase the impact and benefit of your scholarship:” http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/

Change is the new normal (have you heard that phrase an awful lot recently? Coined by bond-fund CEO Mohamed El-Erian, the new normal originally referred to “a fundamental shift in the balance of power between the rich world and the developing world“). As librarians and publishers struggle to define their roles, a theme that continues to rise to the top of the meme-o-verse is engagement with the consumers of your content and services.

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In California, the April 2010 unemployment rate was 12.6% (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). The state has operated throughout the last fiscal year on a temporary budget, and has so far failed to put together a budget that will help close the estimated $26.3 billion dollar budget shortfall that the state faces (want to try your hand at solving the problem? The Los Angeles Times offers an interactive state budget balancer). Whatever happens in the legislature, there will certainly be cuts to local and state services, including education and library funding.
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In the spirit of promoting terrific ideas, we’d like to recommend Thursday’s #followthereader twitter chat, which will be focused on how public libraries can increase ebook adoption. Visit the Follow the Reader blog to get a better sense of the broad questions this twitter chat is intended to address, as well as links to background info (a white paper from OverDrive and a Power Point featuring an IFLA-sponsored survey).

The Thursday, June 10 chat, scheduled from 4-5 PM ET, will feature guest Bobbi Newman, otherwise known as @librarianbyday (http://librarianbyday.net/), who is a librarian, teacher, techno geek, and video game junkie who is dedicated to helping libraries find their place in the digital age.

For directions on joining the conversation, visit Follow the Reader.

As reported in the Mercury News, http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_15112884?nclick_check=1, Stanford’s Physics and Engineering Libraries are packing up their print volumes and sending them to remote storage.

“The role of this new library is less to do with shelving and checking out books — and much more about research and discovery,” said Andrew Herkovic, director of communications and development at Stanford Libraries.

Libraries are the very heart of the research university, the center for scholarship. But the accumulation of information online is shifting their sense of identity.

Check out the article for more details of the shift away from books (a logical move for physics, especially, since most new research is published online).
For more about this very topic, please see a couple of our recent posts:

Bicycles, Boiler Rooms, and Barriers: Why We Need to Rethink the Library Building

Learning and Libraries in the Post-Commons World

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has worked along with many others in the Internet community for more than a decade to achieve his next big dream: the semantic web. His vision is a web that allows software agents to carry out sophisticated tasks for users, making meaningful connections between bits of information so “computers can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web.” The concept of the semantic web has been fluid and evolving and never quite found a concrete expression and easily-understood application that could be grasped readily by ordinary Internet users. Nevertheless, it has inspired many technologists and Internet experts to improve the performance of the web and it is a topic of great interest in the high-tech world.
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