Electronic Resources and Academic Libraries, 1980-2000: A Historical Perspective

published or submitted for publicatio

Introduction to Library Trends 48 (4) 2000: Collection Development in an Electronic Environment

published or submitted for publicatio

Intellectual Property Research: From the Dustiest Law Book to the Most Far off Database

This issue of IDEA introduces a regular series of articles on intellectual property research tools and strategies based on my experience for over a decade as Intellectual Property Librarian and Research Professor at Franklin Pierce Law Center. Pierce Law is consistently ranked among the top law schools training IP professionals. I have taught IP legal research, patent, trademark and copyright searching to hundreds of students and IP professionals in Pierce Law Graduate Programs. I have tackled hundreds of reference and research questions as well as working on countless projects requiring IP information. So I have been faced with challenges and changes common to consumers of IP information. What are the types of data IP researchers seek? What are the options for access to such data? How do we evaluate the access points? What is the value added to our information access choices? The mission of this series is to present tools and strategies and answers some of these consumer questions within evaluative frameworks appropriate to the tools under consideration. Each information acquisition choice is made on a moment-by-moment basis subject to the press of business. Choices are made by the totality of the circumstances. Pressures and factors such as time and money often drive information consumption and will be acknowledged and addressed in the series. Despite the intense growth of IP as a legal specialty, the widespread focus on IP in other disciplines outside the law and the increasing use of non-legal data such as patent statistical indicators, little has been written on IP research. There are no dedicated treatises or periodicals on IP legal research. There are no comprehensive treatises on patent, trademark or copyright searching. The intent of this series is not scholarship and footnotes. The intent is to provide some helpful tools and strategies to those performing IP research on the spectrum from law to facts. So, the phrase IP research in this introduction, unless otherwise specified, refers to the acquisition all types of IP information by the full range of consumers

Minutes of the CD-ROM Workshop

The workshop described in this document had two goals: (1) to establish guidelines for the CD-ROM as a tool to distribute datasets; and (2) to evaluate current scientific CD-ROM projects as an archive. Workshop attendees were urged to coordinate with European groups to develop CD-ROM, which is already available at low cost in the U.S., as a distribution medium for astronomical datasets. It was noted that NASA has made the CD Publisher at the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) available to the scientific community when the Publisher is not needed for NASA work. NSSDC's goal is to provide the Publisher's user with the hardware and software tools needed to design a user's dataset for distribution. This includes producing a master CD and copies. The prerequisite premastering process is described, as well as guidelines for CD-ROM construction. The production of discs was evaluated. CD-ROM projects, guidelines, and problems of the technology were discussed