The withdrawal method
Your investment in eBooks and eJournals is paying off: everyone is using them. But what about their print equivalents? They occupy valuable space which could be used for a coffee shop franchise; not to mention preservation. It’s a dilemma tackled by Ithaka in its new report What to Withdraw. To retain or not to retain? More.
Harvard and the National Library of China
One of the largest collections of Chinese books outside China will be digitized and made freely available to scholars worldwide. The entire 51,000 volume Chinese rare book collection of the Harvard-Yenching library will be digitized over six years, the first phase beginning January 2010 with books from the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties. More.
Putting your mobile to work
It may already be the centre of your life. The mobile phone is almost as essential as, well, sleep. So it’s no surprise that publishers are making their products mobile –ready. Like IEEE for example which has released its mobile version of the Xplore digital library. Search two million documents on the move. But can you read full text on the device? More.
Improving the health of Australians
Rumour has it that they drink a lot and are a tasty bite for sea monsters. So the Informit Health Collection from RMIT, rings the right bells. It’s a full text online resource with cover to cover health content from the Australasian region including: evidence based research and case studies. Subjects range from urology and continence to rehabilitation and rural health. More.
Taking the book to Dubai
The land of sand, camels, tall buildings and financial meltdown. Dubai has it all except a reading strategy. But that’s changed because Cybrarian Ventures, a Singapore consultancy, has a contract to get the kids of Dubai reading. It all started with a study from the Mohammed Al Maktoum Foundation to spur a reading culture among an estimated 120 million children in the Arab world.
More.
Using citations down under
If you want to measure research impact and success, many governments and universities turn to citation databases. That’s what the Australian Research Council has done by selecting Scopus as its sole citation provider. It’s all part of the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative, which will measure research quality.
More.
Less than two years later
Are you surprised by how fast huge collections of books get digitized? Fourteen million scanned pages in more than 110,000 publications took less than two years to accomplish. The collection is the EU bookshop digital library, unveiled at the Frankfurt Book Fair. It’s free too. Just search and download
More.
They make our shoes and socks…
Can one ever talk about China and ignore superlatives? For many years the Middle Kingdom has been the factory to the world, making low end consumer necessities. But at the other end of the scale, there are changes too. China now leads all countries in the publication of chemical patents, says CAS. In the last decade, Chinese invention applications have increased by 1,400 percentMore.
Do you like them?
Do you have one? Someone must be buying them because new models are announced with increasing frequency. We’re told they manage our digital lives. Now you need just one instead of a few. This latest one has been honoured as a top finalist for the Consumer Electronics Association’s i-Stage event. More.
Virtual gallery of Islamic manuscripts
Two venerable libraries, one if the USA, the other in the UK are creating the virtual gallery. The project will scan 20,000 pages of Arabic and Persian manuscripts and improve access to catalogues and dictionaries. The collection will emphasize the contribution to world knowledge by Islamic philosophers, physicians and scientists. More.
Working with faculty
It used to be that students were herded to the library for an hour or two of instruction and then let loose on the card catalogue. How times have changed. In Singapore, SMU librarians work with faculty to make library tuition a real life adventure. Our story shows how a simple advertisement on YouTube led to a mind map and more. More.
It isn’t every day that a new bibliographic utility service is announced. SkyRiver, unveiled in the U.S. on 7 October, positions itself as a low cost alternative for cooperative cataloguing. Its Chairman is Jerry Kline of Innovative Interfaces. Leslie Straus, formerly VP of worldwide sales and marketing at Innovative, has come out of retirement to be its President. “This is an exciting venture that enhances library workflows while addressing the budget challenges libraries now face,” she says. SkyRiver offers unlimited access to the SkyRiver database, unlimited record requesting, unlimited user licenses and data transfer. Development partners are projecting significant savings compared to their current spending for similar cataloging services. Bloggers have uniformly welcomed the competition that OCLC now faces. But all are agreed that they are different beasts, OCLC of course being much more than an online cataloguing service. ACCESS interviewed Leslie Straus by email to find out more. This is what she had to say.
The need for a SkyRiver, at least in this part of the world, was really articulated and instigated by various libraries who were concerned about cataloging costs and the fact that there was only one full service utility available. It was time for there to be a choice. The fact that libraries in the US are suffering economically actually means that SkyRiver's appearance is very timely since the major thrust of the company is to offer a lower cost viable alternative.
While we intend to serve libraries around the world in the not too distant future, we need to focus right now on meeting the needs of US libraries. Even though the SkyRiver database is Unicode based and holds
many non-English language records, including titles published in Asia, we
want to be sure to incorporate local cataloging requirements and practices
wherever SkyRiver is used. We will be looking for development partners in
various parts of the world when that time comes.
Our current development partners include both academic and public
libraries so SkyRiver is appropriate for both types. SkyRiver is intended
to be a utility for libraries rather than for re-sellers of MARC data, so the latter are not a target market.
For a cataloger to switch to SkyRiver from OCLC involves, by design, a minimal learning curve. Typically, one can navigate the database and
start exporting records within minutes of seeing the SkyRiver cataloging
client for the first time. Perhaps the most significant implication, since
many libraries will continue to use OCLC ILL, is that library holdings will
be uploaded to Worldcat after being cataloged rather than as part of the
cataloging process. There is no technical challenge involved since many
libraries already do this and OCLC has well-established routines for accepting batch loaded holdings.
Other SkyRiver services (included in a flat rate subscription fee)
are unlimited LC authority file access and the ability to request records
that are not found in the SkyRiver database. The record requesting service
guarantees a 2 day turnaround, so that the requestor can know quickly
whether or not the record is located. The search continues for records not
found within that time and notifications are sent as those are found. As a
result, the requesting service mutually benefits both libraries and the
SkyRiver database.
Leslie Straus, President of SkyRiver
The SkyRiver database currently approaches 23 million records, the majority of which are from the Library of Congress. There are also a few million contributed records from libraries, whose number will grow as more SkyRiver customers come on board. Much effort is being devoted to optimizing the database for catalogers so that one does not have to sift through duplicate records or deal with unwanted skeletal records. The algorithm for loading data is very sophisticated and constantly being refined. There is, and will continue to be, constant monitoring of the database to keep it as efficient and clean as possible. The database holds records for all types of materials, not just books.
SkyRiver’s pricing operates on a flat-rate subscription basis. Thus, there is unlimited access, unlimited data transfer, unlimited record
requesting and an unlimited user license - simplicity that allows libraries
to budget more easily. SkyRiver's prices will typically represent savings
of 25 percent to 40 percent compared with a library's current cataloging costs. It's important also to note that libraries are free to use records they export in any way they please.
On the corporate side, SkyRiver is owned by Jerry Kline, who is also the owner of Innovative Interfaces. SkyRiver is a separate company,
however, and its relationship with Innovative consists of technology
transfer and other subcontracted resources. SkyRiver has sales and
operations staff of its own.
SkyRiver aims to be fully open for business in January 2010. Check the website for updates.
The withdrawal method
Your investment in eBooks and eJournals is paying off: everyone is using them. But what about their print equivalents? They occupy valuable space which could be used for a coffee shop franchise; not to mention preservation. It’s a dilemma tackled by Ithaka in its new report What to Withdraw. To retain or not to retain? 
