The Distant Librarian

ERIC Restores Online Access to Full Text from 2005-2013

Well here's some good news!

ERIC Restores Online Access to Full Text from 2005-2013

 

Posted with Blogsy

2012 - my year in reading

In 2011 for the first time I started tracking the books I was reading, and in January of 2012 I posted about what and how I'd read during 2011. Here's my post for what and how I read in 2012.

In 2011 I tracked my reads in a basic text file in Evernote. That ended up being really short-sighted for metrics and such, so I started using Goodreads in 2012, and you can see my account there if you want to follow me or dive in more deeply to my reads. I'd hoped it would allow me to show more pretty graphs of my reads than it does, but in order to really match last year's categories I still have to do a little manual work.

2012 by the numbers

• Total number of books read: 43
• Average number of books read per month: 3.6
• Total number of pages: 13,707 
• Average number of pages per month: 1,142

I entered my 2011 reads in Goodreads as well so I could start to compare year over year, but things don't match up exactly because I didn't want to enter each separate volume of the two graphic novels I plowed through (Ex Machina and Y: The Last Man), but generally in 2012 I read more books, and more of them were ebooks. Didn't do the pages per month on a graph.

2013 is off to a pretty slow start as I was plowing through A Dance with Dragons. Best recommendation from 2012: the Wool Omnibus by Hugh Howey.

Elsevier acquires Knovel

1.    What is the scope of the deal?
Elsevier has purchased Knovel in its entirety.  
2.    Were there multiple bidders?
Yes, there were several.
3.    Why did Knovel investors decide to sell to Elsevier?
Knovel was not looking to sell and was aggressively investing in its business. We were approached by several potential acquirers because of the market’s growth potential and Knovel’s leading position. This presented an attractive opportunity to partner and grow the business much faster and more aggressively than we would on our own. Knovel investors and management believe that the partnership with Elsevier would benefit our customers, investors and employees to the greatest extent vs. other potential partners.

Read the full FAQ.

Netspeed 2012 program announced

The program (pdf) for Netspeed 2012, to be held in Edmonton, AB, Oct 18-19, has just been released.

Information about this year's conference seems to be a little scattered, with the official page linking to an official blog, and no link (except in the email I got) to the registration site, which is currently the only place you can get the PDF program. :-/

Looks like ebooks is the unofficial theme this year...

Some thoughts on the Access Copyright - AUCC Model Licence

I honestly don't have anything new to add to this situation, but I wanted to throw together a few links for you to follow (legally even!) if you want to try and figure out what's going through the heads of the administrators at Canadian Universities that are planning to sign on with the Access Copyright - AUCC Model Licence. I can sure think of better places for a University to spend a large amount of money!

First, Michael Geist, as always, offers a clear and well-reasoned post: Why Universities Should Not Sign the Access Copyright - AUCC Model Licence.

Second, earlier today The Faculty Association of the University of Calgary (TUCFA) posted a link to a fascinating PDF in which CAUT, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, responds point by point to the University of Calgary's response to CAUT's concerns with the AUCC/Access Copyright model licence. 

Finally, earlier this month Ariel Katz, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, took a detailed look at how the recent decision in the Georgia State University copyright case is relevant here in Canada. He concludes that, "... American universities are much more willing to assert and defend their rights, while many Canadian ones, short-sighted, extremely risk-averse, and ill-advised, still cling to their habit of being dependent on Access Copyright."

Ouch, and spot on, IMHO!

Oh, and I notice Dr. Katz is also keeping a running list of members in the Canadian Hall of F/Sh/ame.

New Book: Screencasting for Libraries

Greg Notess, one of the first to see the possibilities of screencasting in libraries, has just announced that his new book, Screencasting for Libraries, part of the excellent ALA Tech Set series, has now been published. I had a chance to review this title a couple of months ago and found it an excellent guide for those getting started, and it also includes some good tools and suggestions for the seasoned screencaster. 

There's a companion website that provides a couple of useful tools, but I found the section where Greg covers chapter 5, Implementation, fascinating. In chapter 5 Greg walks you through 12 different projects, using several different approaches and tools. In the companion website, you can actually see the end result of each of those projects - a wonderful (and obvious, for this subject) was to complete the learning loop.

Go check it out!

Game Changers - new ebook from Educause

Educause has just released a new ebook called Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies, which you can download for free. I just ran a quick search through the 388-page PDF version and see that libraries are mentioned in a significant way about a half-dozen times, so you might find it worth your while to take a peek at least. Follow the link above to get to the table of contents as well; it's far too long to repost here! Here's the blurb from the site:

How can we reach more learners, more effectively, and with greater impact?

Education changes lives and societies, but can we sustain the current model? New models and new technologies allow us to rethink many of the premises of education—location and time, credits and credentials, knowledge creation and sharing.

Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies is a collection of chapters and case studies contributed by college and university presidents, provosts, faculty, and other stakeholders. Institutions are finding new ways of achieving higher education’s mission without being crippled by constraints or overpowered by greater expectations.

Find out who is changing the game and what we can learn from their different approaches in Game Changers.

11 tools for creating digital magazines

Can't remember how I came across this one, but over at NetMagazine you'll find a great post sharing 10 tools you can use to create professional-looking digital magazines, and most without any significant cost at all! Each entry lists the pros and cons of each tool, and links to a working example you can check out. The 11th tool in my title refers to the author's own startup, woop.ie, which is only a link at the end of the article.

 

After 244 years, Britannica announces it will discontinue its print version

As reported in the New York Times, "Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project."

It'll be interesting how this will change basic intro to research courses when "check an encyclopedia to get started" isn't actually an option...

10% of English book sales in Canada are now in digital format

I can't find the press release on the National Reading Campaign website, but a press release crossed my inbox this AM that sounds pretty interesting. Here's the PDF for your reading pleasure.

In a nutshell, the NRC now has data from a week in Jan 2011, and a week in Jan 2012, so they're able to give us some information about book sales AND book circulations from Public Libraries in Canada, including both hard and e-copy. Some of the interesting numbers:

• E-book sales comprised 10% of all books sold in English Canada. Public libraries reported that 3% of their circulation comprised digital formats. 
• 1,153,081 print books were sold by retailers including Indigo Books & Music, Amazon.ca and other national chains, as well as over 260 independent bookstores across the country. English language print book sales for the week increased 4% over 2011.
• 111,053 English language e-book sales were counted. As this is the first year counting ebook sales, no direct comparison can be made, but publishers report a “significant” increase from 2011.
• 2,141,553 print books were borrowed from 28 participating public library systems. 63,196 e-books were downloaded. Canadian libraries saw an 8% increase in print circulation and a 50% increase in digital circulation for an overall increase of 9% total circulation for libraries that participated in 2011 and 2012.

Check the full press release for further details.

Thanks for nothing, big guys (UofT and UWO cave to Access Copyright)

This made a big splash up here in Canada last week, but then seemed to quickly quiet down, and I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong spots. Read many of the details on the Excess Copyright blog, but as Howard Knopf points out, "In an astonishing development that has caught all but a handful by surprise, U. of T. and Western have signed copyright deals with Access Copyright that appear to be an early and complete capitulation to an important battle over the costs and parameters of access to knowledge in Canadian post-secondary institutions."

Down in the comments someone writes, "I actually sit on the Access Copyright Working Group for Western. No one that I know on that committee knew anything about this agreement. It also comes hot on the heels of the entire student body (undergraduate and graduate students alike) voting to opt out of the Access Copyright Tariff. There are many, many questions about the deal and the entire process that need to be made public."

See also Sam Trosow's post on the subject.

Does anyone have words from the institutions about why they've caved like this? 

CFP: Extend and Unify: Outreach and Education for Scholarly Communication and Information Literacy Programs

Call for Proposals: Book chapters on scholarly communication and information literacy
Title: Extend and Unify: Outreach and Education for Scholarly Communication and Information Literacy Programs
Book editors: Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Scholarly Communication Librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University and Merinda Kaye Hensley, Instructional Services Librarian/Coordinator, Scholarly Commons at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Estimated publication date: ALA 2013 Midwinter Conference
Publisher: Association of College and Research Libraries.This book will be published in print, available for purchase in various e-book formats, and available as a free downloadable book.

Editors of the forthcoming ACRL publications book, Extend and Unify: Outreach and Education for Scholarly Communication and Information Literacy Programs, seek proposals for chapters from skilled librarians or

others involved in education around scholarly communication issues who have researched strategies and/or implemented programs on the intersections between scholarly communication (SC) issues and information literacy (IL). This book aims to create a roadmap for librarians to integrate scholarly communication and information literacy programs through instruction, outreach and other educative opportunities. Written for practicing librarians who wish to build a toolkit for integrating scholarly communication issues into information literacy and vice versa, this book will provide essays, case studies, best practices, lesson plans and outlines, and other material for building collaboration and promoting discussion on scholarly communication issues in libraries and in the academy.

Potential topics include:

• teaching strategies for addressing scholarly communication issues by population - undergraduates, graduate students, staff, administration, faculty as well as by academic discipline 
• examples of instruction and outreach through embedded librarianship and reference work 
• case studies detailing SC/IL program alignment, collaboration, partnerships between SC and IL librarians, student publishing, campus or discipline-specific research conferences 
• classroom-based, curricular integration for undergrads or graduate students which could include IL session outlines, lesson plans, outreach examples 
• essays focusing on educating students, faculty and/or staff, possibly by discipline, on specific issues e.g., author rights, copyright/Creative Commons, OA/public access or specific types of scholarly or creative work, e.g., data, images, performances, music, multimedia, etc. 
• addressing perspectives of faculty, staff, administration including buy-in, engagement, conversational openings, and educational programs 
• assessment of SC/IL programming and outreach efforts

Please note: We are looking for diverse perspectives on these issues across types of higher education institutions including community colleges, liberal arts colleges/universities, ARL institutions, etc.

Target audience: The target audience for this publication is both librarians who are responsible for instruction, information literacy, and/or scholarly communication; liaison librarians and/or bibliographers who are responsible for outreach and education of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff in any discipline, and program coordinators for both SC and IL.

Submission procedure and timeline: Authors are invited to submit proposal by March 2, 2012. Proposals should include author name(s), institutional affiliation, proposed chapter title, 2-page summary of proposed chapter and a current CV. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by April 2, 2012. Full chapters (4,000+ words) are expected to be submitted by June 30, 2012. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a blind review basis. Chapters should be unique to this publication - no previously published or simultaneously submitted material should be included. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project.

All inquiries and proposals should be emailed by March 2, 2012 to scil.book@gmail.com.

Stephanie Davis-Kahl
Illinois Wesleyan University

Merinda Kaye Hensley
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ebrary launches an iOS app

Well I was gonna give a complete review, but got called away for the afternoon, but you should should go check out the new ebrary iOS app (links to the Cdn iTunes store, so YMMV). I can tell you that it works pretty well, though is a little light on the feature set. You'll need an Adobe Digital Editions account, and will need to have an existing ebrary account set up from the full platform website. Here's ebrary's brief introduction to the app.

I'll tell you what though, it's sure a lot easier than the initial download option :-)

Mentoring a New Distance Education Librarian

A newish book popped up for me on an ego alert, and I learned that Mentoring in Librarianship: Essays on Working with Adults and Students to Further the Profession contains a chapter specifically on Mentoring a New Distance Education Librarian (it's chapter 27, written by Annie Knight). It's also available on Amazon, where you can search inside the book to decide if it's right for you.

2011- my year in reading

I started the first couple of weeks of 2011 on vacation, and was reading books on my iPhone at the time. I thought it'd be interesting to track how many books I read in 2011, something I'd never done before. I switched to reading on an iPad 2 when I got one in April, and did all my ereading either in the Kobo app, or the Overdrive app when borrowing books from Calgary Public Library. As I mentioned, I don't have numbers from any earlier years, but my strong sense is that I read more books this past year than any other in my adult life, in large part because of the ease of grabbing another title to read RIGHT NOW from an ebookstore, or CPL. Hope you find something interesting in here too. I'm not going to give you the actual titles read, most of which were some variant on SciFi or fantasy :-)

2011 by the numbers

• Total number of books read: 33
• Average number of books read per month: 2.75
• Total number of pages: 17,738
• Average number of pages per month: 1,478

 http://db.tt/aBJl8agV

Incidentally, I'm composing this on the iPad with charts pasted in from the Numbers app. I'm not at all sure the images will actually go through, but we'll see in a moment...

Nope, they didn't, so here's take 2.