I have resisted adding this page but there is no getting around it, e-books are here to stay and have many advantages. Besides being a lover of print medium I do own a Nook and a Galaxy Tablet which holds a great deal of both my fiction and reference materials.
11/29/2011 Lots of news to report today, starting with the new website created by librarians from Pratt Institute
The WAL team consists of three lovely ladies who all happen to be alumni of Pratt Institute’s prestigious School of Information and Library Science:
comes this article:
In Youngok Choi and Edie Rasmussen’s What Is Needed to Educate Future Digital Librarians; A Study of Current Practice and Staffing Patterns in Academic and Research Libraries they studied and surveyed 48 librarians from 39 institutions. Here are their results:
- While there are emerging units and positions within digital libraries, the working environment of digital libraries is collaborative in areas that range from computing systems to traditional library functions.
- Professionals working in those areas tend to be young and are relatively recent graduates. Because many libraries will eventually be transformed into digital libraries, and require professionals educated in this area, digital library jobs will be very attractive to the next generation of the library profession.
- Major tasks in which digital librarians are involved include management, leadership, and website-related tasks. Managerial tasks emphasized planning and oversight of digital library projects, while providing leadership and expertise in digital library areas contained elements of collaboration with other members of the library staff and with users. Trend analysis, such as monitoring the practice and standards of current digital libraries, is critical in these jobs.
I definitely think that library schools need to promote technology in their programs as most libraries are digital. The problem is that there is often a one size fits all approach to the classes. There are students young and old who have different skill sets and backgrounds that may or may not have prepared for the technology classes. Everyone knows which professors are the most challenging. What student is going to want to take a particularly challenging class when they don’t have the background for it. What library schools need are different levels of technology classes that students can build upon.
What are your thoughts? What do you think is needed to educate future digital librarians?
and from INFOdocket this article on the contribution to world history from Yale in the digital format memorializing the stories of Holocaust survivors
INFOdocket Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy
Yale University: Library Digitizes Holocaust Testimonies
Posted on November 28, 2011 by Gary D. Price
From the Yale Daily News:
Yale University Library is in the midst of the digitization of the Fortunoff Video Archive’s roughly 4500 testimonies from the Holocaust, many of survivors, without which the testimonies would soon become inaccessible.
The machines that play the 13,000 one-hour tapes in the Fortunoff Archive, which was officially acquired by the University in 1981 but received a large donation to its endowment fund from Alan Fortunoff in 1987, are no longer in production, so the transition to a digital format is essential for preservation, said Joanne Rudof, archivist for the Fortunoff Archive. Rudof added that digitization will allow researchers to access the archive remotely in place of having to go to the Sterling Memorial Library to watch a physical tape.
“People all over the world are waiting for access to this,” Rudof said.
[Clip]
Rudof said the initiative “dwarfs” any other digitization project on campus since most collections have only text or still images and require less storage space. Rudof said she estimates that 2,600 digitized of the 13,000 have been digitized already, though none of the digitized material will be available to researchers until whole project is complete.
Read the Complete Story below:
Library digitizes Holocaust testimonies 
BY SHARON YIN, STAFF REPORTER, Monday, November 28, 2011
Yale University Library is in the midst of the digitization of the Fortunoff Video Archive’s roughly 4500 testimonies from the Holocaust, many of survivors, without which the testimonies would soon become inaccessible.
The machines that play the 13,000 one-hour tapes in the Fortunoff Archive, which was officially acquired by the University in 1981 but received a large donation to its endowment fund from Alan Fortunoff in 1987, are no longer in production, so the transition to a digital format is essential for preservation, said Joanne Rudof, archivist for the Fortunoff Archive. Rudof added that digitization will allow researchers to access the archive remotely in place of having to go to the Sterling Memorial Library to watch a physical tape.
“People all over the world are waiting for access to this,” Rudof said.
The digitization began in February 2010, Rudof said, and will conclude “sometime in 2014.” Once the project is complete, users will be able to access parts of the archive electronically with a password after a registration process.
Rudof said the initiative “dwarfs” any other digitization project on campus since most collections have only text or still images and require less storage space. Rudof said she estimates that 2,600 digitized of the 13,000 have been digitized already, though none of the digitized material will be available to researchers until whole project is complete.
Rudof estimated that around 100 to 150 people utilize the Fortunoff Archive every year, watching a total of roughly 900 testimonies. The new digitization will enable the library to measure the frequency with which testimonies are viewed, which it is currently unable to do. She added that a new time-coded summary online will also allow users to more efficiently move between segments of videos, while patrons must currently use a hard copy and fast-forward on the tapes.
Christine Weideman, director of the Department of Manuscripts and Archives, said in a Thursday email that the testimonies have been used in award-winning books, articles, documentaries and musical compositions.
Prior to the creation of the Fortunoff Archive, only audio and written testimonies existed for researchers’ use, Rudof said, and Fortunoff set the standard for making Holocaust video archives intellectually accessible.
“It pioneered the process of creating, cataloging, and providing access to video testimonies and is viewed by the research and library communities as an exceptional leader in the field of Holocaust studies and documentation,” Weideman said.
Jessica Helfand ’82 ART ’89, a lecturer in Yale College who teaches the freshman seminar “Studies in Visual Biography,” said she took her students at the Fortunoff Archive to teach them to use primary sources, but she said the testimonies made her students “grow up a little.”
“Something happens when they spend time with these testimonies,” Helfand said. “[Students] reach deeper, because the experience of bearing witness to these extraordinary testimonies is visual and historical and meaningful and unforgettable.”
Yale Hillel co-president Sam Gardenswartz ’13 said he is excited about the digitization of the archive because future generations of Yale students will be able to hear the stories of the Holocaust survivors included in the collection.
The Fortunoff Archive consists of testimonies in 19 languages.
and from the 
‘s Record Update we learn of Michigan University’s plans:
University taking steps toward e-textbook use
By James Iseler
The university is in the early stages of an initiative that could save students money by moving to electronic textbooks, particularly in large, introductory-level classes where textbook costs can be high.
Paul Courant, university librarian and dean of libraries, outlined the general scope and objectives of the project Monday in a presentation to the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs.
He told the faculty governance body that a collaborative group with members from Information and Technology Services, Academic Affairs, the Library, and a number of academic units is pursuing a timetable that is expected to pilot next year.
The group currently is negotiating with textbook publishers and is developing a Request For Proposals to determine which technical platform will be used to deliver e-textbooks. That would be followed by a pilot program during the fall 2012 semester, he said.
Details of the pilot program or how many courses it will include have yet to be determined. Any move toward e-textbooks would be voluntary for faculty, Courant said.
“We’re hoping to create a structure in which people will be enthusiastic about volunteering, but we’re not interested in creating a structure that is going to impose a requirement that faculty members use e-textbooks for particular courses,” he said.
Courant said the project is being driven by a market in which textbook editions change frequently and students can pay as much as $1,000 or more for books each semester, particularly for new editions. He envisions a system in which an e-textbook would cost about 35 percent of a hard copy’s list price, and would be covered by a course fee.
“If the students don’t save significant amounts of money, we will have failed,” Courant said. Moving to e-textbooks would have other advantages, such as the ability to “mix and match” chapters from various textbooks, link to other sources of information, or print copies on demand if desired.
While the university plans to negotiate for published e-textbooks, Courant also proposed expanding the use of open materials, in which instructors could compile content into an electronic format that could be used free or at a significantly reduced price.
“Even if we paid people to do this, to the extent that students would not have to buy it there’s a real savings there,” he said. “If you could get someone to write a really good introductory textbook that was open, and charge a course fee for the use of that book of $30 a student, students are better off.”
During the winter 2011 term, an e-textbook working group conducted a limited pilot program among 177 students in five courses. It found students prefer electronic versions that they can download to their computer or some other device, and print if necessary, rather than having to read them online in a networked environment.
“Students like the e-books fine, but only if they’re as convenient as regular books,” Courant said.
11/19/2001 Here is an article from Great Britain
Libraries face a digital future
Lessons from overseas suggest there is more to digital libraries than e-books
It’s a time of radical change for libraries. During the summer they were told by the Museums, Libraries & Archives Council and the Local Government Group to exploit digital technologies to survive the spending cuts. In a report on the government’s Future Libraries Programme the two bodies also argued that the latest IT developments present a huge opportunity for libraries to deliver more efficient and effective services.
Allen Weiner, Gartner’s research vice president in the US, took a similar line when he shared his thoughts about the role of technology in libraries at the Re-Thinking Libraries event in London this November.
Weiner’s boyhood library in north-east Philadelphia was a place to read books and to meet up, in effect a social centre. According to the Future Libraries report, the best libraries are showing they can provide a range of services, from helping people to find a job to being a meeting place for clubs and groups.
Weiner said technology can take this forward and transform libraries into “next generation resource centres” and major places for gathering knowledge. But he warned that they need to be abreast of IT developments: “People are going to bring their technologies to the library, they are not going to wait for you to have those technologies there. They are going to bring them and you need to be aware and take advantage of that.”
His view was backed up by the chief executive of ePub Direct in Ireland, Gareth Cuddy, who told delegates: “If you do not provide e-books, then they will download them from somewhere else.”
Cuddy appeared confident about the continued growth of e-books, however. He said that Europe is 12-18 months behind the US in the adoption of the technology and that in the US 82% of public libraries now offer e-books.
Anythink libraries in Adams County, Colorado provides one example. As reported by the Guardian’s Public Leaders’ Network, Anythink is moving toward providing downloadable books, films and music and continues to provide products to support staff, such as handheld devices that allow them to help users find items, take out loans and email them an acknowledgement of return dates.
According to Cuddy 70% of publishers expect that by 2014 more than half their publications will be electronic, and a key challenge for libraries and publishers is for books to be available across a wide range of platforms.
Weiner urged libraries to adopt open standards rather than cater for any one type of reader. “The iPad is the world according to Apple, it is not an open standard,” he said. “If you think of the democracy a library represents, it should be built on open standards.”
He maintained that cloud computing offers great opportunities for libraries. “For example, Amazon today offers Kindle clouds where the books are not in your Kindle, they are up the cloud… The library cloud could be the place where libraries store all kinds of content, not only books but videos, or content that is created in the library.”
He claimed to be a big fan of “hyper-local journalism”, which he defined as a group of people within a community getting together and writing about that area. Weiner believes that a library is a perfect place for them to meet, write or start their own blog.
“And could the library help them publish it? Absolutely!” he exclaimed. “If it goes into the cloud it gets fed into search engines and then your library cloud becomes the place that people can access the content in open standards across a whole variety of devices.”
Gert Poulsen, deputy librarian at Copenhagen Business School, told the conference that take-up of e-services in Denmark’s public libraries is low and academic libraries such as his are expected to have a “good effect”. Four years ago the business school adopted a “strategic approach to e-publishing”, which focused on creating more physical space by having fewer print materials and more electronic resources.
The library’s use of e-journals dates back 10 years, when it subscribed to 4,000 electronic publications. This figure has climbed to 35,000 and last year students and staff carried out1.5m downloads of e-journals, according to Poulsen.
In 2010 Copenhagen Business School’s budget for electronic books was €72,000, but this year that leapt to €130,000 and it now spends about 45% of its books budgets on digital publications. To encourage further take-up of e-books, the library has set up a €55,000 fund for students to make purchases.
The Future Libraries report makes the point that an effective service can only be achieved by understanding the needs of users. The Copenhagen library appears not to have tackled this fully, as its digital drive has not been particularly popular. “We know that if students get to choose between print and e-books, they actually prefer the print book,” Poulsen admitted. “We are still discussing how to deal with the dilemma.”
For example, text books at the business school remain unaffected by the electronic drive because students can’t put notes in e-books from the library. “Students prefer to print certain chapters and make notes on the page,” he said. “So we have to make e-books more relevant to students.”
Other major considerations for the library are whether to purchase publications as an individual institution or as part of a consortium. At the business school, 50% of purchases are part of national agreements and the remainder, which includes most e-books, are purchased as an individual institution.
“Read the contract because some vendors limit the number of downloads… You have to decide which usage model you find acceptable. We have said that we will go for multiple users at one time, not just one,” Poulsen said.
Another obstacle to the adoption of digital materials is that inter-library loans are almost impossible without violating copyright. “We have to consider inter-library loans very carefully when setting up deals,” he said, adding: “We have a full time contracts manager and she is worth all her salary.”
Students and staff at the Copenhagen library are sometimes “confused” about the different formats and models for e-books, but Poulsen and his colleagues are experimenting with different providers to find the best solution. “I hope that in the future the publishers will let the library decide which format they want,” he said.
Like the conference speakers, the joint report on the Future Libraries Programme emphasises the importance of public libraries as community focal points, and in meeting the needs of a new generation of library users. The document recommends exploiting digital opportunities, but also admits that the programme does not have all the answers and “is still a work in progress”. It concludes that change will only happen if political leadership and professional expertise are “harnessed in the same direction.”
This article is published by Guardian Professional.