IFLA and E-Lending

Libraries have been supplying access to digital content to their users for over two decades. Until recently, this content largely consisted of access to cumulative databases of journals, newspapers, popular magazines and technical and specialized monographs. Nonetheless, the current escalation in accessibility and popularity of e-Readers and tablets, along with an equivalent escalation in the availability of commercial eBooks, has seen a growing demand for downloadable e-Books in public libraries.

This setting presents libraries numerous opportunities. The accessibility of digital content, downloadable onsite at the library or distantly through online catalogues, has the capability to expand a digital culture of reading that will profit patrons, authors and publishers. On the other hand, the existing state of affairs facing libraries is anything but optimistic. There are at the moment many complexities, as downloadable e-Books increase an assortment of technical, legal and strategic problems in which are leading to apprehension, to perplexity and to frustration for libraries and their patrons, publishers and authors.

IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations, has created a background paper setting out these struggles in full. Following the papers, IFLA issued Principle for Library e-Lending to aid librarians globally to approach the issue with prepared guidance.

http://www.ifla.org/      

Archives and The Internet

There is a common misconception that when content comes to archives, it is immediately digitized and put online; yet, the majority of material is in paper and, most likely, always will be.  Although the internet has open plenty of doors for people to do their own research, materials from archives are still what patrons turn to after a Google search.

Developing research ideas online before going to archives can make for a batter informed and specific process. Researchers often come to the archives more prepared since the internet. Yet, even with help of the internet, the material in the archives maintains its value. The research process is richer when people can look at original items; it is the raw material viewed in your own interpretation.

Rather than replacing traditional archives, technology is supplementing them by giving archivists new ways yo do their work. As time passes, the need for archives is growing, not shrinking; thus, as more content is created, there are more opportunities to preserve history. 

https://archive.org/           

Goodreads + Libraries = Happy Patrons

Goodreads is a social cataloging website founded in 2006. The website allows individuals to search Goodreads extensive user database of books and reviews. In addition, users can register books to generate library catalogs and reading lists; they can also create their own groups of book suggestions.

The mission of Goodreads is to help people find and share books they love with other booklovers and to improve the process of reading globally.  One feature of the website is that users can add to their own bookshelves, rate and review books, and see what books their friends are reading; along with participating in discussion boards and groups on a variety of topics. The website facilitates reader interactions with authors through the author’s blogs, interviews, and profile information. Authors can suggest or promote their own works, which helps diversify their target audience.

How can Goodreads help in libraries?  Easy! Goodreads can aid in the collection process by being added as a review source. If libraries sign up with Goodreads and have patrons also sign up and become friends with libraries, then the libraries can stay current with their collections and cater to their patrons needs. This is certainly a great way for libraries to stay with the changing times.

https://www.goodreads.com/   

Cooperative Collection Development

Archives, Museums, and Libraries

Libraries, archives, and museums coincide in a mixture of organizational settings and face increasing anxiety to deliver more integrated access to their collections. Large institutions have a vested interest in being able to share their assets, unique and rare materials, from their various archives, museums, and special collections in an amalgamated way with their community of patrons. Integrated access to collections is just one example of how libraries, archives, and museums can amplify their effectiveness and influence by working more closely together. Exactly how do these three respond to pressure for greater integration? They share data and technological infrastructures along with expertise in order create online research environments that meet patrons’ expectations.

Although the type of materials and professional practices vary, libraries, archives, and museums share, manage, and collect and use overlapping functions. By fulfilling these functions, collaboration creates a best solution for institutions and patrons. Research Libraries Group programs conduct investigations into library, archive, and museum collaboration, particularly in data or service relationships. This all leads up to the big movement in libraries, archives, and museums – cooperative collection management.

The process of selecting and managing collection materials as a network of libraries, archives, and museums, rather than as individual site, is termed cooperative collection development. The libraries, archive, and museums in the network expand the network’s information base beyond what a single library can afford to provide alone for the patrons. Joyce Chapman discusses the association of TRLN among three universities to digitize twentieth century materials on a large scale. In this way, students of the university and community patrons have access. Chapman examined challenges and the essential need of having effective communication. The cooperative endeavors and provisions were shared; nonetheless, each university upheld their own method of managing. The result formed over 80,000 digitized materials throughout the first year alone, when their target was only 20,000. This is the future for libraries, archives, and museums. A great example of this is the Consortium of Arizona Museum, Archives, and Libraries. 

http://www.statemuseum.arizona.edu/library/cazmal/

Metadata

 Dublin Core

Metadata is data that describes other data. Metadata summarizes basic information about data, which can make finding and working with particular instances of data easier. For example, author, date created and date modified and file size are examples of very basic document metadata.  Having the ability to filter through that metadata makes it much easier for someone to locate a specific document. A good example is Dublin Core. 

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is an open organization engaged in the development of interoperable metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. DCMI's activities comprise work on architecture and modeling, discussions and collaborative work in DCMI Communities and DCMI Task Groups, annual conferences and workshops, standards liaison, and educational efforts to endorse large approval of metadata standards and practices.

DCMI had its foundation when the World Wide Web was in its early stages. This metadata system was designed for describing resources on the web. Eventually, the set of 15 metadata elements was finalized and as an RFC. The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) became a national standard in 2001 and an international standard in 2003. 

The mission of the DCMI is to make it easier to find resources using the Internet through developing metadata standards for discovery across domains, defining frameworks for the inter-operation of metadata sets, facilitating the development of community or discipline-specific metadata set that work within the frameworks of cross-domain discovery and metadata interoperability.


http://dublincore.org/

OPAC

An online public access catalog (OPAC) is an online database held by a library or group of libraries. Users search a library catalog to locate books and other materials available at a library. The first large-scale online catalogs were developed at Ohio State University in 1975 and at the Dallas Public Library in 1978. These and other early online catalog systems tended to closely reflect the card catalogs that they were intended to replace. Using a dedicated terminal or telnet client, users could search a handful of pre-coordinate indexes and browse the resulting display in much the same way they had previously navigated the card catalog.

The 1990s saw a relative stagnation in the development of online catalogs. Although the earlier character-based interfaces were replaced with ones for the Web, both the design and the underlying search technology of most systems did not advance much beyond that developed in the late 1980s.At the same time, organizations outside of libraries began developing more sophisticated information retrieval systems. Web search engines like Google and popular e-commerce websites such as Amazon.com provided simpler to use systems that could provide relevancy ranked search results using probabilistic and vector-based queries. Prior to the widespread use of the Internet, the online catalog was often the first information retrieval system library users ever encountered. Now accustomed to web search engines, newer generations of library users have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the complex search mechanisms of older online catalog systems.

The newest generation of library catalog systems are distinguished from earlier OPACs by their use of more sophisticated search technologies, including relevancy ranking and faceted search, as well as features aimed at greater user interaction and participation with the system, including tagging and reviews.These newer systems are almost always independent of the library's integrated library system (ILS), instead providing drivers that allow for the synchronization of data between the two systems. While older online catalog systems were almost exclusively built by ILS vendors, libraries are increasingly turning to next generation catalog systems built by enterprise search companies and open source projects, often led by libraries themselves. The costs associated with these new systems, however, have slowed their adoption, particularly at smaller institutions. An example of a next generation OPAC system is included in the Libramatic software package.

http://www.eosintl.com/modules/opac/

LibraryThing and Libraries

LibraryThing and Libraries

LibraryThing is a social cataloging web application of storing and sharing catalogs and various types of book metadata. Anyone can access their catalog from anywhere, including their mobile phone. Since everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books and finds suggestions for what to read next. Users can import information from approximately 700 libraries, including the Library of Congress, National Library of Australia, the Canadian National Catalog, the British Library, and Yale University. 

So how does LibraryThing relate to actual libraries? LibraryThing allows for social tagging to be used as a way for users to catalog. As a recent approach for creating metadata, social tagging, or user tags, has caught the attention of library and information science researchers. Many researchers recommend incorporating social tagging into the library environment and combining folksonomies with formal classification. Studies have shown that it is possible to use social tags to improve the accessibility of library collections. 

Since it has become popular, LibraryThing has a system of OPAC enhancements designed to make cataloging more engaging for libraries that is called LibraryThing for Libraries (LTFL). This system allows library patrons to experience new content and to tag for better accessibility for the library. What is in in for the library? The library can have an updated list of resources that are more useable for its collection, which is a great step for the weeding process for collection development.

http://www.librarything.com/