Nancy E. Kraft is Head of the Preservation Department for the University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City and is the co-author of the publication “The Changing Book: Transition in Design, Production, and Preservation”.

I have been watching as the news reports capture images of the flood damage currently taking place in Iowa.  My heart goes out to everyone involved in this natural disaster that has damaged so many homes and businesses. But,  the story of the efforts to save the books stored in the basement of the University of Iowa Library has made a particular impact on me and my academic librarian heart - library staff, students, faculty members, other volunteers (book lovers all!) joined forces to save and move books to higher floors.  Kudos to all involved in this unexpected team “move” … you all make me proud!

Read more about the University of Iowa’s “Libraries Evacuation Timeline” here.

 

The current issue (Volume 11 Issue 2) of JEP:  Journal of Electronic Publishing is now available.

As mentioned in a class email, Carol A. Singer has an article about weeding in the recent issue (Volume 47 Issue Number 3, Pages 256 -264) of Reference & User Services Quarterly.  This issue is available on the shelf at the GRC, or is available online. Here is the abstract:

 A major review of the reference collection in Bowling Green State University’s Jerome Library was made necessary by the decision to incorporate the materials from the reference collection in the science library. The process of planning and implementing this collection review is described, emphasizing how this process has been affected by changes in technology and the demands made by library users. Suggestions that may help ensure a successful review are included.

 Paula A. Wilson writes one of the few articles I have been able to find about weeding ebooks.  Her article in written for public libraries and is somewhat older (2004) but most of the content of her article is still applicable to our academic library world. You will find her article in:

 

 

 Public Libraries[Chicago], vol.43, no.3, pp.158-159, 2004

Here is some information about the most recent electronic resources/new acquisitions from the York University Library News web site:  

EBook Collections Update

“York University Libraries’ ebook collections continue to grow in direct response to user demand – we have received the message loud and clear that York students and faculty want access to more and more scholarly content in electronic form.”

Here are some of our most recent additions.

Association of Research Libraries (ARL)  News Release:  

New approaches to scholarly communication are featured in the June 2008 issue of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Bimonthly Report, no. 258.

In the lead article, Duke University Scholarly Communications Officer Kevin L. Smith offers pragmatic strategies that authors and their institutions can use to manage authors’ copyrights to fulfill the requirements of the new National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy. Although the strategies Smith explores are focused on meeting the NIH’s article deposit requirement, they could also be employed to accomplish a more comprehensive strategy for public dissemination of research.

Karla L. Hahn, Director of ARL’s Office of Scholarly Communication, discusses the results of her study of publishing services provided by ARL member libraries. Hahn notes that adopting new roles in producing journals is the latest in a series of library contributions to disseminating scholarly journal articles. She encourages library and campus leaders “to give thoughtful consideration to the potential, the goals, the resource needs, and the value of investing in and fostering this rapidly evolving mode of university publishing.”

Additionally, brief summaries are provided of the recently released SPARC–Science Commons guide to creating institutional open access policies and of ARL’s new agenda for developing research library support for e-science.

This issue is in the mail to ARL member libraries and subscribers this week.

The issue is also freely available on the Web at

http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br258.shtml. 

Ebook news from earlier in the year:

  Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) has signed an agreement with the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) to provide all of its member libraries with the complete Springer eBook Collection, 2005 – 2008.

All of the 20 universities in Ontario are members of OCUL, including the University of Toronto, McMaster University, University of Guelph, and Nipissing University. 

 With the OCUL consortium deal, over 12,000 Springer eBooks will be made available to nearly 400,000 students and faculty within OCUL.The Springer eBook Collection is comprised of textbooks, monographs, reference works, handbooks, book series and encyclopedias. Read more of the press release.

 Is the electronic book approaching the tipping point?  Read the New York Times article to find out. 

Favourite quote from this article: 

Jeffrey P. Bezos,  the founder and chief executive of Amazon is quoted as saying:

 Even Mr. Bezos said he does not expect electronic books to replace bound paper versions anytime soon. “Anything that lasts 500 years is not easily improved upon,” Mr. Bezos said. “Books are so good you can’t out-book the book.”

After five weeks of the course, you should be getting some ideas about a topic for your final Critical Comment papers. 

Is there some issue, topic, or trend that has caught your interest? 

Do you have lingering questions about some of the topics under discussion so far? 

As mentioned in class, some issues are convered very quickly (for example, our discussions about consortium purchasing, censorhip of academic library collections or the issue of collector bias)  and you may want to explore one of these topics in more detail and more depth.

When you have posed questions in your previous Critical Comment assignments, I have tried to note in the margin of your paper:  “Maybe this would be a good topic for your final paper” because by this point in the course you should be thinking about the topic of the last assignment, starting to do some research and finding appropriate articles to analyze.