Library Resources: Procurement, Innovation and Exploitation in a Digital World

The possibilities of the digital future require new models for procurement, innovation and exploitation. Emma Crowley and Chris Spencer describe the skills staff need to deliver resources in hybrid and digital environments. The chapter demonstrates the innovative ways that librarians use to procure and exploit the wealth of resources available in a digital world. They also describe the technological developments that can be adopted to improve workflow processes and they highlight the challenges faced on this fascinating journey

Collaboration between Librarians and Learning Technologists to enhance the learning of health sciences students.

Collaboration between Librarians and Learning Technologists at Bournemouth University (BU) has been stimulated and cemented by Pathfinder funding from the Higher Education Academy. This paper will consider four case studies collected as part of the eRes Project that describe the use of Web 2.0 technologies in the School of Health and Social Care at BU. The project aimed to enhance the student learning experience in an increasingly electronic environment. This was achieved by developing and disseminating innovative pedagogical frameworks, bringing together learning activities and academically led quality e-resources within the unit of study. An e-reading strategy which encompasses models for resource discovery and e-literacy was developed, drawing on the experiences and findings of the case studies. Issues considered in this paper will include accessing academic electronic reading materials and using a social bookmarking tool integrated within BU’s virtual learning environment with students studying away from the main campus. Additionally the paper will consider how technology can be used to motivate students, especially in large groups and how it can be used to engage students with a subject perceived as “dry” or “difficult”. The rich possibilities of health science materials can be exploited more fully using new technologies embedded within the curriculum

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor

The Global Registries Initiative: Progress Report and Software Demonstration

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PresentationsDate: 2009-06-04 08:30 AM – 10:00 AMOver the last two years, key stakeholders in the U.S., UK, and Australia have held a series of meetings to address the need for a global network of digital library collection and service registries (http://globalregistries.org/meetings.html). These meetings brought together different communities to explore what steps would need to be taken to link registry and repository technologies and implementations together in an interoperable fashion. The architecture and standards used for the global network of registries have yet to be finalized, but there is growing awareness of the potential of such a service and there are software systems available that demonstrate its benefits. The speakers will showcase and discuss two such software systems: (1) A combined collections and services registry run by the Australian National Data Service that aggregates metadata records from Australia, UK, and USA (https://devel.apsr.edu.au/cosi/orca/search.php) using the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting; and (2) The LibraryFind Global Pilot, a discovery service that queries registries distributed over three continents. LibraryFind supports distributed search (or meta-search) protocols such as z39.50, SRU/SRW, and Open Search, as well as OAI-PMH aggregation (http://apollo.library.oregonstate.edu:3001/record/search) The presentation will be of particular interest to repository developers and managers who are interested in providing access to scholarly collections as part of broad disciplinary or institutional 'federations'. It will also provide an overview of registry technolgies and standards and how these relate to repository development in the context of an emerging global cyberinfrastructure. More information about the Global Registries Initiative can be found at the web site (http://www.globalregistries.org)

Peer to Peer Information Retrieval: An Overview

Peer-to-peer technology is widely used for file sharing. In the past decade a number of prototype peer-to-peer information retrieval systems have been developed. Unfortunately, none of these have seen widespread real- world adoption and thus, in contrast with file sharing, information retrieval is still dominated by centralised solutions. In this paper we provide an overview of the key challenges for peer-to-peer information retrieval and the work done so far. We want to stimulate and inspire further research to overcome these challenges. This will open the door to the development and large-scale deployment of real-world peer-to-peer information retrieval systems that rival existing centralised client-server solutions in terms of scalability, performance, user satisfaction and freedom