Just a quick link to a well-written post about the Research Works Act debacle, by Rebecca Trager of Chemistry World. Isn’t it interesting to learn that one of the major backers of the RWA, mega-commercial publisher Elsevier, abandoned its support of the bill just hours before it’s dropped in the legislature.
The Yale Libraries have debuted the new MyCopy service by Springer. Has your library? Library patrons can now order their personal soft cover books via MyCopy. Following the successful completion of the MyCopy pilot project, Springer has extended this eBook service to all academic libraries in the USA and Canada that have purchased Springer eBook [...]
OCLC and Ebsco have announced an agreement that makes it possible for libraries that subscribe to both WorldCat Local and EBSCOhost services to provide their users with online access to the full text of electronic content. My system has a WorldCat Local beta installation (and several Ebsco products). Users who have tried the beta have [...]
Steve Ostrem at Library Journal wrote a nice article on how librarians can use Google Book Search for reference, research and collection development. Particularly interesting, and new, is the “popular passages” search, the subject headings, the ability to clip and paste from public-domain works and the personalization options now offered via “My Library” with a [...]
Brian C Gray shared this morning that the IEEE Xplore database reached two million documents this month. The two millionth article loaded into IEEE Xplore is “Intelligent Packet Dropping for Optimal Energy-Delay Tradeoffs in Wireless Downlinks,” by Michael J. Neely from the University of Southern California. It appears in the March issue of IEEE Transactions [...]
A little late, but interesting reading, ARL published mid-February a statement to publishers regarding research libraries and the global economic crisis. The document lists a few of the effects the economic crisis has on research libraries: current and future -possibly permanent -budget cuts cancellation of ongoing commitments bigger preference of electronic over print shortening of [...]
McGraw-Hill announced a major revision of its Digital Engineering Library. The new site will be called AccessEngineering and the URL (http://accessengineeringlibrary.com) will be activated March 9th 2009. The new site will offer new features and enhancements, including: New graphical user interface: state-of-the art functionality streamlines access to content and reader New taxonomy book view: the [...]
Brian Scott Mathews over at The Ubiquitous Librarian made some very interesting looking into the underground market for academic materials via illegal file sharing sites like bit torrent. Apparently, his fictional research brought up big time reference titles like the CRC handbooks, the entire Referex engineering e-book collection, Harvard Business Cases, textbooks and tutti quanti. [...]
Springer Science+Business Media launched a new website called AuthorMapper.com. This free website is an “analytical online tool for discerning trends, patterns and subject experts within scientific research.” Currently, AuthorMapper.com searches over three million journal articles to deliver a variety of useful information. The current searchable content is from all Springer journals, and metadata from other [...]
As the first USF librarian at the Lakeland campus (now Polytechnic), I opened the USF Polytechnic Library in January 2007 and have developed its various services. I've held positions as information broker, Internet consultant and academic librarian in Canada, the US and Europe. A blogger since 2001, I've created and maintained several sites in, and outside, of the biblioblogosphere. I'm active in SLA, and currently serve as on the boards of the Academic Division and the Florida-Caribbean Chapter.
