Libraries

At gathering of historians, both critics and fans of book digitization project see great benefits and significant flaws. Some see culture clash between search engine giant and scholars.

Will the decision of many college libraries to encourage students to text queries from their phones cheapen the research process, or rescue it?

New research indicates that e-book oriented libraries could save colleges a bundle, but academics may have a hard time letting go of the stacks.

WASHINGTON — In a report released in February, 17 librarians, scientists, and technologists spent 116 pages detailing the challenges of preserving culturally valuable digital artifacts. But at a symposium held Thursday to discuss the findings, it was perhaps Derek Law, chair of JISC Advance, a British advocate for technology in higher education, who articulated the problem most succinctly:

If libraries do not seriously rethink their role in the lives of researchers, they could come to be seen more as resource purchasers than as research collaborators, according to a report released today by the nonprofit group Ithaka S+R.

BALTIMORE — Nancy Roderer is one for bold predictions. As a library consultant in the 1980s, Roderer predicted that all academic journals would be electronic by the mid-1990s.

A decade into the 21st century, Roderer’s opinion might now be considered prescient, if a bit off on the timing. It may have taken a little longer than she predicted, but every relevant academic journal now publishes an electronic version, and many journals only publish in the digital format.

Colleges with lucrative online arms will get their nonprofit statuses revoked! All library functions will be outsourced! Campuses will be replaced by temporary versions in rented spaces that are built and disassembled at the beginning of each term! Scholarship will become more efficacious than ever before -- or will stagnate entirely!

Welcome to the future -- or, rather, to a series of many of possible “futures” posited in a new study released this month by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).

If the words “sweeping new exemptions to the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act” make you want whoop for joy and join a conga line, you just might be a fair use advocate — one who wants professors and students to be able to decrypt and excerpt copyrighted video content for lectures and class projects. Since Monday, a lot of advocates have been dancing.

Criticism from librarians prompts JSTOR to promise changes to its recently redesigned database portal.

As tighter belts lead to closer scrutiny, an academic library group tries to help academic libraries articulate why they are valuable.