Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library

This report updates and expands on A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services, originally commissioned by the DLF as an internal report in summer 2003, and released to the public later that year. It highlights major developments affecting the ecosystem of scholarly communications and digital libraries since the last survey and provides an analysis of OAI implementation demographics, based on a comparative review of repository registries and cross-archive search services. Secondly, it reviews the state-of-practice for a cohort of digital library aggregation services, grouping them in the context of the problem space to which they most closely adhere. Based in part on responses collected in fall 2005 from an online survey distributed to the original core services, the report investigates the purpose, function and challenges of next-generation aggregation services. On a case-by-case basis, the advances in each service are of interest in isolation from each other, but the report also attempts to situate these services in a larger context and to understand how they fit into a multi-dimensional and interdependent ecosystem supporting the worldwide community of scholars. Finally, the report summarizes the contributions of these services thus far and identifies obstacles requiring further attention to realize the goal of an open, distributed digital library system

Getting started with cloud computing : a LITA guide

"A one-stop guide for implementing cloud computing. Cloud computing can save your library time and money by enabling convenient, on-demand network access to resources like servers and applications. Libraries that take advantage of the cloud have fewer IT headaches because data centers provide continuous updates and mobility that standard computing cannot easily provide, which means less time and energy spent on software, and more time and energy to devote to the library's day to day mission and services. Here, leading LITA experts demystify language, deflate hype, and provide library-specific examples of real-world success you can emulate to guarantee efficiency and savings. Among several features, this book helps you select data access and file sharing services, build digital repositories, and utilize other cloud computing applications in your library. Together, you and the cloud can save time and money, and build the information destination your patrons will love."--Publisher's website.Edward M. Corrado, Heather Lea Moulaison, Editors ; with a Foreword by Roy Tennant.Perspectives on cloud computing in libraries / Heather Lea Moulaison and Edward M. Corrado -- Understanding the cloud : an introduction to the cloud / Rosalyn Metz -- Cloud computing : pros and cons / H. Frank Cervone -- What could computing means for libraries / Erik Mitchell -- Head in the clouds? A librarian/vendor perspective on cloud computing / Carl Grant -- Cloud computing for LIS education / Christinger R. Tomer and Susan W. Alman -- Library discovery services : from the ground to the cloud / Marshall Breeding -- Koha in the cloud / Christopher R. Nighswonger and Nicole C. Engard -- Leveraging OCLC cooperative library data in the cloud via web services / Karen A. Coombs -- Building push-button repositories in the cloud with dspace and amazon web services -- Untethering considerations : selecting a cloud-based data access and file-sharing solution / Heidi M. Nickisch Duggan and Michelle Frisque -- Sharepoint strategies for establishing a powerful library intranet / Jennifer Diffin and Dennis Nangle -- Using windows home server and amazon s3 to back up high-resolution digital objects to the cloud / Edward Iglesias -- Keeping your data on the ground when putting your (lib)guides in the cloud / Karen A. Reiman-Sendi, Kenneth J. Varnum, and Albert A. Bertram -- Parting the clouds : use of dropbox by embedded librarians / Caitlin A. Bagley -- From the cloud, a clear solution : how one academic library uses google calendar / Anne Leonard -- Integrating google forms into reference and instruction / Robin Elizabeth Miller -- Ning, fostering conversations in the cloud / Leland R. Deeds, Cindy Kissel-Ito, and Ann Thomas Knox -- Not every cloud has a silver lining : using a cloud application may not always be the best solution / Ann Whitney Gleason -- Speak up! using voicethread to encourage participation and collaboration in library instruction / Jennifer Ditkoff and Kara Young.Includes bibliographical references and index

Full Report: Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Sciences

A "build it and they will come" approach to many university digitization initiatives has precluded systematic investigations of the demand for these resources. Those who fund and develop digital resources have identified the general lack of knowledge about the level and quality of their use in educational settings as pressing concerns. This full report describes our research and the complete results of a large 2-year study. The purpose of our research was (1) to map the universe of digital resources available to a subset of undergraduate educators in the humanities and social sciences, and (2) to investigate how and if available digital resources are actually being used in undergraduate teaching environments. We employed multiple methods, including surveys and focus groups. Our definition of digital resources was intentionally broad and included rich media objects (e.g., maps, video, images, etc.) as well as text

Guidelines for e-reference library services for distance learners and other remote users.

Until recently the provision of distance education was undertaken mainly by various professional associations and commercial agencies offering vocational training. Library provision to meet the needs of registered students was limited. Over the past 30 years, however, the delivery of higher and further education to students studying at a distance has become a core part of the activity of many academic institutions: a few specialist higher education institutions such as the Open Universities established in Britain and India, and some conventional universities that established teaching centres away from their main campuses

Bridging the 'Know-Do' Gap

Today’s children are tomorrow’s citizens. Good health and well-being in the early years are the foundations for well-adjusted and productive adult lives and a thriving society. But children are being let down in Australia and elsewhere by the lack of knowledge transfer between the worlds of research, policy and practice. Improving such transfer is the job of knowledge brokers – the various ways they can operate are explored in this book through case examples and the lessons learned from experienced proponents. The book concludes by posing three sets of ideas to shape the future of knowledge brokering

Mark Oliphant and the Invisible College of the Peaceful Atom

The weapon first created by atomic scientists of the 1940s was unprecedented in its power and potential to kill. Not only can it destroy infrastructure and all living things over a wide area, it leaves a haunting invisible footprint of radiation that can continue to harm long after its heat has dissipated. The atomic bomb was first conceptualised, proven and built by civilian scientists and overseen by an ambitious military and wary bureaucrats. The scientists belligerently lobbied their governments to take the potential of atomic weaponry seriously and it is hence not surprising that they are often portrayed as ghoulishly mad savants who strung the bow of mass destruction.1 The atomic bomb proved such an effective killing machine that it provoked the Anglo- Australian physicist, Sir Ernest Titterton, to include a chapter in his 1956 book, Facing an Atomic Future, entitled ‘The Economics of Slaughter’.2 Titterton presented grotesque calculations that suggested atomic weaponry could kill for as little as ‘2½ d [pence] per man, woman and child’.3 The atomic bomb, as we know, played a decisive hand in the end of the world’s most deadly war—World War Two. During the Cold War the role of the atomic bomb—and its even more devastating offspring, the thermonuclear hydrogen bomb—caused tension, anxiety and outright fear as the world’s superpowers faced off in an arms race in which all-out conflict could have resulted in the end of humanity. The story of the twentieth century is, in many respects, the story of the atom. During the early years the investigations into the structure of the atom were centred in powerful European nations such as Britain, Germany and France. But during the war the United States borrowed scientists and the knowledge from Europe and combined it with resources and enterprise to efficiently produce the technology for the final vanquishing moments of World War Two. This rise of American atomic utility continued into the Cold War arms race. In addition, postwar, industry looked in wonderment at the technology achieved during the war and saw how productive large groups of collaborating scientists could be. The postwar technological age was, in part, a product of a change of mode in scientific research from the university to government, military, and private enterprise. The origins of the atomic age can be traced to Henri Becquerel and Marie and Pierre Curie’s discovery of radiation in the late nineteenth century; Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity in 1905; and Ernest Rutherford’s proof on the structure of the atom in 1909.4 The atomic age reached a crescendo with the dropping of atomic bombs that smote Japan in August 1945. There are several names that history links particularly to the atomic bomb, including the Germans Otto Hahn and Friedrich Strassman, who split the uranium atom in 1938; Austrians Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, who first explained this as nuclear fission in 1939; the Hungarian Leo Szilard, who theorised an uncontrolled nuclear explosion in the same year; Enrico Fermi, the Italian who built the first nuclear reactor; and the eccentric American polymath, Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project to build the first bombs. Yet in the background was Mark Oliphant—a remarkable Australian scientist whose intellect, likeable and roguish personality, and international friendships helped stitch together this vast patchwork of scientists that made the bomb possible