Library Services in the Digital Age. Released: January 22, 2013 By Kathryn Zickuhr, Lee Rainie and Kristen Purcell The internet has already had a major impact on how people find and access information, and now the rising popularity of e-books is helping transform Americans’ reading habits.
In this changing landscape, public libraries are trying to adjust their services to these new realities while still serving the needs of patrons who rely on more traditional resources. In a new survey of Americans’ attitudes and expectations for public libraries, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project finds that many library patrons are eager to see libraries’ digital services expand, yet also feel that print books remain important in the digital age. The availability of free computers and internet access now rivals book lending and reference expertise as a vital service of libraries. So You're Going To Start A Huge New Web Project. I was asked this past week to consult for a company embarking on a huge new website redesign.
I thought I'd write up some thoughts that I would share with anyone in that position. You cannot neglect mobile. Look at any graph of mobile usage and it will tell the tale for you. Millions of mobile devices enter the world every day. Ignore this to your own demise. You'll need to decide if you are going to build a mobile-specific site or not. Mobile is a whole different world. Mobile Connections to Libraries. Released: December 31, 2012 By Lee Rainie, Kathryn Zickuhr and Maeve Duggan Some 13% of those ages 16 and older have visited library websites or otherwise accessed library services by mobile device.
This is the first reading in a national survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project on this subject. An earlier survey in 2009 by scholars at the University of Washington found that 6% of Americans ages 16 and older had used a mobile device to connect to a library site, so the incidence of this activity has doubled since then. Those who are most likely to have connected to a library site include parents of minor children, women, and those with at least some college education. Cambridge Digital Library - University of Cambridge. Office for Scholarly Communication. About the Library Lab Harvard Library has established the Harvard Library Lab in order to create better services for students and faculty and to join with others in fashioning the information society of the future.
By offering infrastructure and financial support for new enterprises, the Lab offers opportunities for individuals to innovate, cooperate across projects, and make original contributions to the way libraries work. The Lab leverages the entrepreneurial aspirations of people throughout the library system and beyond and promotes projects in all areas of library activity. Proposals from faculty and students anywhere in the university are welcome and the Lab encourages collaboration with MIT. Harvard Library Lab Description & Guidelines Harvard Library Lab Application Requirements Review Committee Members. Download Calibre Portable. The calibre portable build can be run on any windows computer running at least Windows XP SP3.
It is self contained, your calibre libraries and settings are all kept together in one place. To use, just run the portable installer and select the location where you would like the "Calibre Portable" folder. To launch calibre, double click the "calibre-portable.exe" program inside the Calibre Portable folder. While you wait for the download to complete, please consider contributing to support the development of calibre. Previous releases of calibre are available here. Upgrading. A universal digital library is within reach. Since 2002, at first in secret and later with great fanfare, Google has been working to create a digital collection of all the world's books, a library that it hopes will last forever and make knowledge far more universally accessible.
But from the beginning, there has been an obstacle even more daunting than the project's many technical challenges: copyright law. Ideally, a digital library would provide access not only to books free from copyright constraints (those published before 1923), but also to the tens of millions of books that are still in copyright but no longer in print. Copyright law makes it risky to digitize these books without permission from copyright owners, and clearing the rights can be prohibitively expensive (costing on average, according to estimates, about $1,000 per book). Even if the money wasn't a problem, hundreds of thousands — and probably millions — of books are likely to be "orphan works" whose rights-holders are unknown or can't be found. The U.S. Ebooks and Lending in Public Libraries.
Canadian Electronic Library. American Libraries E-Content Supplement to May/June 2012. Future U: Library 3.0 has more resources, greater challenges. Libraries are changing, despite their facades.
And they're changing to high-tech service companies with embedded librarians, according to some library professionals. Of course, that assumes they aren't defunded out of existence. For ladies and gentlemen of a certain age, the library is changing too fast. For kids, it's not changing fast enough. University students are caught in the middle. One popular image of the library of the future comes from the cartoon Futurama.