New DVD Collection at St Teresa's

The St Teresa's Library at the Fremantle Campus recently acquired a significant collection of 1,600 DVDs from a local DVD shop which was going out of business.

The collection includes significant numbers of documentaries and sub-titled films from Europe and Asia and will greatly increase the volume of material available to students studying in the communications programme.

The Library will be adding these titles over the coming months and students will see a significant increase in the size of this collection when they return in 2010.

The Library also continues to use its ScreenRights licence to copy and reproduce free to air broadcasts for the collection and to offer access to the TV News databases for access to news and current affairs broadcasts.

Changes in library catalogues

The following article discusses the shift in some US university libraries towards 'Google-like' single entry point catalogues. It is an interesting summary of the 'state of play' in regards to the development of library catalogues.

Some of the points covered include:
- user struggles with the 'old' catalogue
- reasons behind the shift in some libraries to 'the new'
- questions about the usefulness of these new catalogues
- vendors of such catalogues and open-source catalogue development

There are a lot of comments after the article and they are definitely worth reading too (unsual I know). Discussion seems to focus around blaming information illiteracy and/or users, or blaming entrenched systems in libraries.

The article seems somewhat biased in favour of Googlising everything but it does give voice to the other side of the argument too.

Have a look! Link

Discoverability .. a report that's worth a look

Another post from Lorcan Dempsey's blog. This time he's reporting on a project from the University of Minnesota Library's Web Services Steering Committee on Discovery. They identified trends through their environmental analysis and then looked for corroboration (or otherwise) in their own usage logs. Lorcan Dempsey described this combination as being "quite effective".

Trends they identified:

1. Uses are identifying relevant resources outside traditional library systems.
2. Users expect discovery and delivery to coincide.
3. Usage of portable internet capable devices is expanding.
4. Discovery increasingly happens through recommending.
5. Users increasingly rely on emerging non-traditional information objects

Tracking library systems usage for a month showed:
Catalogue and website still heavily used...SFX link resolver a "critical component of fulfilment"
External systems and search engines driving increasing amount of traffic to library systems - Google was responsible for more traffic to the website than any other referrer and 15% of visits to the Archives and Special collections on the website came through Wikipedia.
Full post on Lorcan Dempsey's blog

ARL Special Report on Liaison Librarian Roles

Positioning Liaison Librarians for the 21st Century

Association of Research Libraries ARL

Discussions on what new models are there for libraries and what new roles for librarians

University Libraries of the Future

From Inside Higher Education 24 September 2009

Libraries of the Future
"The university library of the future will be sparsely staffed, highly decentralised, and have a physical plant consisting of little more than special collections and study areas.
That's what Daniel Greenstein, vice provost for academic planning and programs at the University of California System, told a room full of university librarians Wednesday at Baruch College of City University of New York, where the higher education technology group Ithaka held a meeting to discuss "sustainable scholarship."

“We're already starting to see a move on the part of university libraries... to outsource virtually all the services [they have] developed and maintained over the years,” Greenstein said. Now, with universities everywhere still ailing from last year's economic meltdown, administrators are more likely than ever to explore the dramatic restructuring of library operations....more

Stephen's Lighthouse blog has a more positive take:

"The "New Review of Academic Librarianship" has just published (and it's available for free download for a limited time period) a really excellent article entitled Academic Digital Libraries of the Future: An Environment Scan." [16 page PDF]

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a914077465#

There are lots of comments on both posts