Search. Cataloging. Digital. Catalog. Victorian. Dublin City Public Libraries homepage. Research Libraries Group/OCLC Programs Talk, June 2007 « Easily. High Anxiety In modernity, dread only takes a holiday once in a while. Right now Mr. Dread is hard at work all around the world, and he’s not just sticking to the big geopolitical dramas or some single-issue fear. He’s kicking back and making himself comfortable everywhere where uncertainty holds sway, which is to say everywhere: homes, workplaces, boardrooms, the shop, the street, the wilderness. So asking: why so anxious? Of anyone is an almost pointless question.
Who isn’t anxious? What I’ll ask about is this: what stirs many tenured faculty in humanities departments at wealthy private colleges and universities to so often pick and fret and prod at almost any perturbation of their worlds of practice–their departments, their disciplines, their publications, their colleges and universities? The crisis in the humanities, we’re often assured, doesn’t exist. The assurance is, in many ways, completely correct. And yet humanists are in fact anxious. There’s nothing wrong with self-interest. Slump Is Putting New Stresses on Libraries and Librarians - NYTi. How Does a Library Get Better the More It's Used? - Tennant. Shh! In British Library Reading Rooms, Flirting and Even Gigglin. Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Engaging academic users in a libra.
OCUL (Ontario Council of University Libraries) has released a nice white paper which discusses issues in providing an end-user access environment for its shared resources, and more interestingly, how that environment engages with the behaviors and expectations of its academic users. This document (pdf) was created to highlight opportunities and drive discussion for the OCUL consortium in both the short term through the launch of a new Scholars Portal server in 2008, and in the long term by incorporating more 'social' means of sharing and organizing information within OCUL's Scholars Portal and the larger academic community that it serves.
[Scholr 2.0] There is a pdf version and a commentpress version with the benefit of reader comments. As one might expect from a discussion white paper, there is a focus on questions and potential directions. Recommendations are given in several areas: It usefully brings together a range of material. DeweyBrowser. Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: The union catalogue and collaborat.
The National Library of Australia has released an interesting document about the value of union catalogues in general, and Libraries Australia in particular. Here is the concluding paragraph: As Australian library collections move from managing print-based materials to managing digital and licensed resources, the National Union Catalogue provides a significant platform on which to examine, test and create a future for library services. [libraries australia: value statement PDF] The union catalog was one of the earliest manifestations of library automation, and has been remarkably resilient feature of the library landscape since then. In fact, the last few years have seen some renewed interest in the union catalogue. On the management side there is interest in finding ways to remove unhelpful redundancy across operations, to build shared capacity, to achieve economies of scale and scope, to concentrate scarce technical or other expertise, and so on.