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Also check out DocuTicker, a compendium of 'grey literature' (reports published by government agencies, think tanks, research institutes and other public interest groups) available for free on the web.
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Complete Article (Including Methodology)
Top 10
1. Steve Jobs, Apple
2. Yun Jong-Yong, Samsung Electronics
3. Alexey B. Miller, Gazprom
4. John T. Chambers, Cisco System
5. Mukesh D. Ambani, Reliance Industries
6. John C. Martin, Gilead Sciences
7. Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon.com
8. Margaret C. Whitman, eBay
9. Eric E. Schmidt, Google
10. Hugh Grant, Monsanto
Source: Harvard Business Review (Jan-Feb, 2010)
A new five page article from the CSM.
“We attach this mysticism and exoticism to the book – we hold a paper book like it’s the only possibility,” says Christopher Harris, a librarian and the creator of the blog digitalreshift.org. “ ‘Only the book can hold this power,’ we say. Well, that’s just not right. You can put a book on an iPod or a Kindle. It’s the same story isn’t it? Is there really something mystical about printing a book on pulped paper?”
[Snip]
“We’re at the hinge point. As a librarian, I have to go where the information goes,” Harris says. “Yes, there are a couple ways to disagree with e-book readers – we can complain about the hardware or the software. But as with any disruptive technology, you’re either guided forward or you’re steamrolled. The only way to do it is to jump on the tiger and take control of it.”
[Snip]
“I think we’re in the very early stages of assembling a tool kit that will enable a tremendous amount of experimentation,” says Mike Shatzkin, CEO of The Idea Logical Company, a consulting firm. “It will be many years before we figure out what the new book forms will be and what impact they’ll have on the way people think and behave.”
Source: Christian Science Monitor
From the Announcement and Summary:
CIBER research group at University College London today announced the availability of the final report for its global library survey that concerns challenges, trends, and best practices during tough economic times. Co-sponsored by Charleston Conference, Baker & Taylor’s YBP Library Services, and ebrary.
“What comes through, both in the key findings and in the many unsolicited comments from librarians, is not depression or even resignation, but a much more positive and realistic assessment,” said Professor David Nicholas, Director of the Department of Information Studies, UCL Centre for Publishing, and CIBER research group. “Library managers see the current difficulties as being an opportunity to rethink what ‘library’ means in the twenty-first century, and to go beyond measuring activity (through benchmarking and performance indicators) to thinking more about the positive impacts of formal information provision on student learning, research performance and other key aspects of organizational missions.”
Key findings of the survey include the following:
* The current financial year is a tough one for academic libraries, with 34.7% of institutions receiving a total library budget that is at least 5% smaller than the previous year (excluding inflation).
* The outlook in two years’ time is mixed, with 31.4% expecting their total library budget to be smaller than in the current financial year, 40.1% about the same, and 28.4% expecting an increase.
* Overall, resource budgets are more vulnerable than personnel, services or infrastructure, with monographs and print journals being the most vulnerable to cutbacks.
* When trimming their resources budget, libraries were least likely to cut e-books, followed by electronic-only serials and database subscriptions.
* 52.5% of libraries view the acceleration of print to digital as the most effective option for balancing their budgets, with subscription as the most popular method.
* Just under half of all libraries see the demonstration of value through usage and outcomes data as the smartest way to manage the cost of resources.
Access to the Complete Full Text Report is Free But You Do Need to Register Here
Sources: Business Wire/CIBER/ebrary
A master of quick fixes — the last library typewriter in Tampa — now needs one
For the first time in history, it allowed a human to tap a backspace key and make a mistake go away.
Called “Selectric II,” it was conceived when Richard Nixon was president, when IBM made typewriters and when a hand-typed card catalog tracked every book at Tampa’s downtown library.
Librarians got machines for the public, giving each a room of its own with walls the shade of an avocado. The workhorses spit out labels for spines of books and stamped Dewey decimals on paper cards. They typed resumes, got people jobs.
But sometime around the election of Ronald Reagan, IBM teamed up with a 32-person company called Microsoft and started selling “personal computers” for $1,565 apiece.
…
Four public typewriters became three. Then, two. One.Then sometime last week, the typewriter hammered over the same spot again. And again. Its ribbon refused to advance. Even the backspace key could do nothing to help.
Source: St. Petersburg Times
Note: ResourceShelf senior editor Shirl Kennedy is a news researcher at the St. Petersburg Times.
In case you missed them, here’s a look at a few ResourceShelf posts from the past several days.
+ Peace Corps Launches Digital Library
+ New Academic Library Stats (U.S.) Published by National Center for Education Statistics
+ Digitization and Preservation: New Online from Harvard University: Islamic Heritage Project
+ President Approves $470 Million Budget for National Archives (U.S.); 2.31% Increase Over Last Year
+ The ipl2 Beta is Now Online, It’s the New Directory Resulting from Merger of the IPL and LII
From the Announcement:
The Chronicling America Web site has recently updated to include 287,000 additional newspaper pages from 15 states and the District of Columbia. The site now includes more than 1.7 million pages from 212 newspaper titles published between 1880 and 1922. This update includes increased date coverage of many titles as well as new titles from Arizona, Hawaii, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Utah, Virginia and Washington.
[Chronicling America] allows you to search and view newspaper pages from 1880-1922 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).
Source: Library of Congress
The January/February issue of Technology Review contains some useful profiles of “media” and “media related” companies. The section is titled, “Companies to Watch.”
Each Profile Includes:
+ Basic Directory Info (location, URL, date founded, phone number, number of employees)
+ Executive Leadership (with Bios)
+ Board Member and Advisors
+ Funding
+ Technology
+ Market
+ Strategy
+ Challengers/Next Steps
Direct to Profiles
+ Amazon.com
+ Amobee Media Systems
+ Apple
+ Baidu
+ Blip.tv
+ E Ink
+ Facebook
+ Google
+ Hulu
+ Innovid
+ Mashery
+ Netflix
+ New York Times
+ News Corp.
+ Pixel Qi
+ Quantcast Corporation
+ Sony
+ Twitter
+ Thomson Reuters
Source: Technology Review
While authors and publishers around the world are scared of Google’s attempt to scan the world’s libraries and make them available on the web, The Royal Library has agreed to let the search engine to do the job.
The reason for the move is that Google is willing to put up the money for the project, which the library has not been able to obtain from politicians.
Erland Kolding Nielsen, the library’s curator, estimates that the library needs up to half a billion kroner to preserve Danish literature published prior to the year 2000 in digital form. Parliament has, however, only approved up to 7 million kroner from 2010 to 2012 for the project.
‘I’m offering Google approximately 1.6 million volumes for scanning,’ Nielsen told Politiken newspaper. ‘Currently they have around 10 million volumes and their goal is to reach 30 million.’
Notes:
1) From the way the article reads, ProQuest will continue to digitise materials from the 15th and 16th centuries.
2) The Royal Library will not be able to digitise most content after approx. 1940 since works enter the public domain 70 years after the copyright holder dies.
Source: Copenhagen Post
This is a Q&A style interview.
Here’s one exchange.
Q. What e-reader will dominate?
A. Ingram wants to remain neutral and flow content to all the devices. Right now, there’s the Kindle (actually multiple Kindles), the Nook, multiple Sony e-readers; there’s one called Cooler Reader; there are IREX e-readers. Every week, it seems, a manufacturer of some new device visits our offices. People also read books on their iPhones or on laptops. That’s going to continue. And if we look out a few years, you’ll see the question raised: “How many devices do consumers want to carry?”
There really is a lot of uncertainty about which devices will make it in the long run or whether one super-device will be developed that does things we can’t even imagine today.
See Also: What is Ingram
Source: The Tennessean
This is big news and it also happens to be very cool. Finally, keyword search of video transcripts is becoming mainstream.
You can now keyword search captioning transcripts (generated from the closed captioning) for thousands of shows in the Hulu database and then go directly to the specific part(s) of a program where those words were spoken.
This page has a complete intro to the service. Here are a few highlights.
The following comes from a blog post by Hulu’s VP, Product, Eugene Wei.
You can initiate a captions search from the Hulu Labs page [here you can search captioning from multiple programs] for the feature, but the more permanent home for captions search is in the new Captions tab on any show or video page for any program with captions.
Personally, we find both interfaces useful. Sometimes you want to search a specific program but at other times you want to search the entire database.
Here’s what a caption search for the word “Google” via the “Labs interface” looks like. Caveat: Not every program in the Hulu database is searchable and note how variations of the word Google appear in the results.
If you just want a quick preview of the search result, hover your mouse cursor over the image and a short segment of video around the search term will play in the thumbnail. To see it at full size, click on the search result text and we’ll send you to that spot in the full-size video.
One bonus that comes with caption search is what we’re calling the heat map. This is a visual graph of the user interest throughout the span of a video and is available on any captioned video that has accumulated enough user views. It appears at the top of the captions tab for those videos. We analyze a variety of viewer behaviors to generate the heat map.
You can see examples on this page.
Services including Blinkx and TVEyes (fee-based, 24 hours of programming for many stations around the U.S., the focus here is news) use a combination of speech-to-text and caption search. In January, when 2005 Google launched a Google Video beta, it included closed-captioning search.
From the Article by Mike Swift:
From his home office on a Los Gatos cul-de-sac, Mark Coker is part of a digital movement ruffling the pages of the publishing industry, helping to speed readers’ transition from words in print to words on a screen.
The founder of Smashwords, an electronic book publishing platform for self-published authors and small publishers, Coker thinks the transition from print to electronic books, for many readers, is inevitable.
Less clear, he says, is where readers will store the e-books they buy. Will those virtual libraries live on a personal device, such as Amazon’s Kindle? Or will people choose to store their e-books on the Internet “cloud,” on networks accessible through any computer or smart-phone? And how portable will readers’ digital libraries be? Will readers be able to share their e-books the way you pass a treasured paper book on to a good friend?
Source: San Jose Mercury News
We agree with the ideas set forth in the following Research Information article. We would add that metadata (cataloging), its development, organization, and usage also holds many opportunities for info pros.
Librarians are in the best position to make use of the increasing information available, having access to both internal and external information as well as knowledge of the information needs of their specific users. As we increasingly move towards a web of data rather than a web of documents it would seem that a basic level of proficiency in data collection and manipulation could become as important a skill to the future librarian as search engines are today.
At the simplest level, this may be data manipulation through mashup editors, although for real innovation to occur within the library community we will require more expert skills. Whilst the librarian’s skill set may be supplemented in part by their user community and by outsourcing to programmers, for libraries to be truly innovative, librarians need to be aware of potential opportunities, and this only comes from experimenting with the data and the platforms themselves..
Source: Research Information
President Barack Obama plans to deal with a Dec. 31 deadline that automatically would declassify secrets in more than 400 million pages of Cold War-era documents by ordering government-wide changes that could sharply curb the number of new and old government records hidden from the public.
In an executive order the president is likely to sign before year’s end, Obama will create a National Declassification Center to clear up the backlog of Cold War documents. But the order also will give everyone more time to process the 400 million pages rather than flinging them open at year’s end without a second glance.
[Snip]
Obama’s executive order “is an experiment, but it just might work,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “By changing the rules about what gets classified, this could lead to a dramatic reduction in secrecy throughout the government.” Aftergood obtained a leaked copy of an early draft of the executive order last summer.
The government spent more than $8.21 billion last year to create and safeguard classified information, and $43 million to declassify it, according to the oversight office, part of the National Archives and Records Administration. The figures don’t include data from the principal intelligence agencies, which is classified.
Source: AP (via SF Chronicle)
Internet Regulation Threatens Free Expression
Government regulation of the Internet could “provide the vehicle for advancing new First Amendment theories for media regulation,” warns Robert Corn-Revere in “The First Amendment, the Internet & Net Neutrality: Be Careful What You Wish For,” released today by The Progress & Freedom Foundation. The paper is adapted from remarks Mr. Corn-Revere delivered at a Federal Communications Commission panel discussion on “Speech, Democratic Engagement, and the Open Internet,” which took place on December 15, 2009.
In the paper, Corn-Revere, a Partner at the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP in Washington, D.C, discusses the relationship between the First Amendment and regulatory policy, particularly the treatment of new communications technologies. “It should not be forgotten,” he argues, “that the federal government’s initial impulse was to censor the Internet and to subject it to a far lower level of First Amendment protection. It pursued this agenda for more than a decade but was blocked by a series of First Amendment rulings.” Indeed, the courts determined that “the open Internet would be at great risk if the government is allowed to exercise such power.”
+ Full Paper (PDF; 758 KB)
Source: The Progress & Freedom Foundation
It’s never too late to return an overdue book, magazine or CD. Just ask any librarian.
Such is the case of the recent homecoming of the Julius La Rosa record “Candy,” which was checked out more than 47 years ago – Feb. 12, 1962 – from the Fondulac District Library.
“A person came into the library, put the record on the desk and said, ‘We don’t know what to do with it. A family member passed away, and we found it in their stuff,’” said Amy Falasz-Peterson, the library’s director, on Wednesday. “Before we could get their name, the person left.”
Because the album was nearly 17,438 days – nearly five decades – late, any record of who the borrower was has since been discarded.
“We haven’t had albums in 13 years. I don’t even think we have a record player anymore,” said Falasz-Peterson. “If (library material is) overdue by a couple of years, we would have just figured we weren’t getting it back and forgot about it. It happens.”
Source: Peoria [IL] Journal Star
…the time has come for WikiLeaks, which calls itself “the first intelligence agency of the people,” to think locally, says Daniel Schmitt, a German computer engineer who is a full-time unpaid spokesman for the Web site. “We are trying to bring WikiLeaks more directly to communities,” he said in a telephone interview.
The organization has applied for a $532,000 two-year grant from the Knight Foundation to expand the use of its secure, anonymous submission system by local newspapers. The foundation’s News Challenge will give as much as $5 million this year to projects that use digital technology to transform community news.
Source: NYT
The Nov/Dec issue of The European Library Newsletter was edited by ngibjörg Steinunn Sverrisdóttir, Director of the National and University Library of Iceland.
The Library was established in 1994 with the union of the National Library of Iceland (founded in 1818) and of the University Library of Iceland (founded in 1940). It now has about 100 employees and holds nearly one million physical items, print, manuscripts, audio recordings and other multimedia. Subscriptions to databases and access to electronic journals is extensive and the Library gives access to national heritage material, both digitized and born digital through its websites.
Another article that will be of interest is: BOK’s [The National Library} Digital Demands
Finally, this section includes info about several “BOK” special exhibitions.
See Also: Visit the BOK Web Site (in English)
Source: The European Library Newsletter
Just about each and every week we post several items about public libraries being busier than ever but funding being cut. That’s why it’s good to read this story from Oregon.
A $100,000 grant from the Oregon State Library will make 5,000 or more books available in electronic form through the Oregon Digital Library Consortium.
The e-books, which can be read on any device except Amazon’s Kindle, are expected to be available in March. The Kindle can be used only for books purchased through Amazon.com.
“Libraries don’t want to be left behind in being able to offer this exciting new format,” said Heidi Nowak, who leads the consortium and the Klamath County Library.
The consortium already has eBooks and audiobooks available via OverDrive.
Source: The Statesman Journal (OR)
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