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

IFLA Congress 2013 Singapore: Sponsorship for delegates of developing countries

The Singapore Government is pleased to offer *partial sponsorship for delegates of developing countries to attend the IFLA annual conference during 17-23 August, 2013.

*The amount of the sponsorship covers:

1. Accommodation at a designated hotel (check-in one day before the start of the conference, and check-out one day after the last day of the conference)
2. A daily per diem of SGD40/day from the first day to the last day of the conference
3. Local airport transfers
4. Group Accident and Hospitalisation Insurance during the stay in Singapore
5. Airport meeting services

(please note: the sponsorship does not cover conference fee and airfare)

Deadline

Application deadline is 28 February 2013. All selected applicants will be notified via email by April 2013.

Offer is on first come first serve basis for eligible applicants. We apologise if we are unable to accept your application due to overwhelming response.

All decisions are final and we will not be responding to any queries on the outcome of application.

Details at 

The Atlas of New Librarianship

After hearing the keynote of R. David Lankes at Internet Librarian International, I am trying to read his The Atlas of New Librarianship

The vision for a new librarianship must go beyond finding library-related uses for information technology and the Internet; it must provide a durable foundation for the field. Lankes recasts librarianship and library practice using the fundamental concept that knowledge is created though conversation. New librarians approach their work as facilitators of conversation; they seek to enrich, capture, store, and disseminate the conversations of their communities.

This book must be read by all library science teachers, and by practicing librarians. Supplements are available from http://www.newlibrarianship.org/wordpress/

ORCID is the DOI for an author/researcher

For an author, ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes themu from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized. They can include their ORCID identifier on their Webpage, publications, apply for grants, and in any research workflow to ensure them get credit for their work.

ORCID is the DOI for an author/researcher. They work or corss link with major A&I databases and publisher's ID systems (like Scopus Author ID or Thomson Reuters’ ResearcherID® )

ORCID just launched their Registry

Other researcher identifier systems are currently in use serving specific populations or types of research work. ORCID does not compete with these systems, but rather provides a switchboard for crosslinking. Elsevier is providing a way for researchers to link their Scopus Author IDs to ORCID and synchronize their publication information between the two systems. Thomson Reuters’ ResearcherID® will link to ORCID and allow researchers to synchronize their publication information. Several research information system providers are also planning to integrate ORCID identifiers, including figshare, KNODE, Faculty of 1000, and ImpactStory. Through its affiliate ORCID EU, ORCID is working with DataCite to link ORCID identifiers with research datasets.

This needs to be informed to your researchers and faculty.

Is OPAC dead or dying?

Melissa A. Hofmann and Sharon Q. Yang from Rider University disclosed their study results on 260 academic libraries OPACs in the USA. They found discovery tool use has practically doubled in the last two years, from 16 percent to 29 percent. A total of 96 percent of academic libraries using discovery tools still provide access to their legacy catalog. The percentage of institutions using ILS OPACs with faceted navigation has increased from 2 percent to 4 percent. Combining the use of discovery tools and faceted OPACs, at least 33 percent of academic libraries are now using a faceted interface. Discovery tools that aim to be the “single point of entry for all library resources” are the most recently popular. The findings identify trends that may inform academic libraries in the quest to providing next generation interfaces to their varied resources.

Most of them use AquaBrowser, EDS, Encore, Endeca, Mango, Primo, Summon, VuFind, WorldCat Local  etc to provide discovery tools to their patrons.

Discovering” what’s changed: a revisit of the OPACs of 260 academic libraries
Library Hi Tech, Vol. 30 No. 2, 2012, pp. 253-274
DOI: 10.1108/07378831211239942

Internet Librarian International 2012

I have presented this year's Internet Librarian International 2012 at the session Seamless and digital - lessons from new libraries (London 29-31 October 2012)

 

 With my wife Manju (KAUST Library Admin Consultant)

UKSG Annual Conference 2012 Proceedings

I have attended this year's UKSG Annual Conference held in Glasgow, Scotland (26-28 March 2012). 

The proceedings videos are now available from the Youtube Channel

Read the reports from http://uksglive.blogspot.com/

With Alan Hopkinson and Dr. Sanjay Kataria during UKSG, Glasgow

Google Scholar Metrics

Introduced on 1 April 2012 and are based on the Google Scholar database, which includes more journals and other publications than that used for the IFs. They are based on the h-index, which is defined on the Google Scholar Metrics page.

Google creates a list of all the articles a journal has published in a specified period of time. The citations to each article are counted in order to determine the publication's h-index, which is the largest number "h" such that each of the set of "h" articles were cited "h" or more times. As an example of how the h-index is calculated, consider a publication that has had six total articles having 2, 18, 11, 3, 22, and 9 citations, respectively. This gives the journal an h-index of four. Articles meeting the h-index criterion constitute the h-core. In the example, the core is the articles with 18, 11, 22 and 9 citations. Within the h-core, the median of the citation counts is used to assess the typical influence among the most highly cited set and is reported as the h-median. In the example, the h-median is 14.5. Read more from here