Science.gov: The Power of 10

Science.gov/ was launched in December 2002 and has broken new ground in interagency collaboration. Senior information managers representing 13 Federal agencies forged a consensus on how national science organizations could improve public access to the nation’s rich and diverse scientific research information and partnered to create the Science.gov Web portal.

One of the successful gateways, still existing....  Press release here

Google killed Meebo: many libraries scrambled to replace this tool as their virtual reference engine

Competition in the virtual reference market got really hot this past summer. Recent developments in virtual reference offerings suggest the market is much more dynamic than most of us would have imagined a short time ago. With Google’s acquisition of Meebo and its subsequent decision to shut down the chat widget service, many libraries scrambled to replace this tool as their virtual reference engine.

In any case, libraries and individual librarians have been using Meebo since at least 2007 to provide free virtual reference services, so Meebo’s demise sent them scurrying for a replacement. The good news was that other significant changes in the virtual reference marketplace were taking place, providing reference librarians with plenty of options. 

Read the detailed article by William Breitbach from
http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/oct12/Breitbach--Your-Guide-to-Meebo-Options.shtml

The Current State of E-Resource Usage Data in Libraries

While COUNTER and SUSHI have helped libraries come a long way toward improving the adoption and availability of usage statistics for library market vendors, I soon came to learn that there is still a good amount of work libraries must do to get the data they need to make critical collection development and database budgeting decisions. Any librarian who has managed electronic resources has experienced the—for want of words—joy of gathering and analyzing usage statistics. Such statistics are important for evaluating the effectiveness of resources and for making important budgeting decisions. Unfortunately, the data are usually tedious to collect, inconsistently organized, of dubious accuracy, and anything but a joy to work with.

How can we make this better? Read this article by Josh Welker:

http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/nov12/Welker--Counting-on-COUNTER.shtml