OCLC Research 2011: “Seeking Synchronicity,” insights into virtual reference
At the end of 2011, we are doing a mini series of blog postings to reflect on some of the year’s highpoints. This posting is the second in the series. …
Read MoreMeasurement and Behaviors
Libraries / Measurement and Behaviors / Miscellaneous / Modeling new services / Supporting Scholarship
National systems of research assessment and implications for libraries
Research assessment is a very big deal in some countries. Countries whose university systems are largely publicly-funded routinely check up on the research quality of individual universities to ensure that …
Read MoreLibraries / Measurement and Behaviors / Miscellaneous / Modeling new services / Supporting Scholarship
Climate change for libraries
At the RLG Partnership Annual Meeting in 2007, Timothy Burke told the assembled research librarians ‘you have to figure out how to be hydraulic engineers of information flow rather than …
Read MoreMendeley scrobbles your papers
Mendeley is a social web application for academic authors that has been receiving quite a lot of attention recently. Victor Keegan wrote about it in The Guardian last week, likening …
Read MoreJournals and the tainting of science
The main feature article in last week’s Times Higher, A threat to scientific communication: do academic journals pose a threat to the advancement of science?, by Zoë Corbyn, examines the …
Read MoreSpecial collections and university rankings
The University of Leeds has made two prestigious acquisitions recently which have been deemed worthy of announcing from the university’s own news page. In early June, the university acquired the …
Read MoreLibraries / Managing the Collective Collection / Measurement and Behaviors / Supporting Scholarship / Systemwide Organization
Impact Measures and Library Selection
I have just been reading a recent article by Kathy Enger* published in Library & Information Science Research that examines the potential value of citation analysis as a selection tool …
Read MoreEfficiency and scholarly information practices
There is a good article* in the most recent issue of JASIS&T by a group of Canadian scholars who challenge James Evans’ controversial claim that the increase in online availability …
Read MoreA national service for research data management in the UK?
Last Thursday I attended a meeting in London on the UK Research Data Service – a project which has until recently been a feasibility study, run jointly by RLUK and …
Read MoreArchitecture and Standards / Digital Preservation / Measurement and Behaviors / Miscellaneous / Modeling new services / Renovating Descriptive Practice / Supporting Scholarship
Herbert’s Adventures In Linking
The title of this post is my homage to another famous Belgian. I have been posting from the 9th International Bielefeld Conference in Germany. In yesterday’s closing keynote, Herbert Van …
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