Ce n’est qu’un au revoir
The Main Library of the University of St Andrews closed yesterday for a four-month period of intensive refurbishment. Most of the Library’s staff had already been distributed to other locations …
Read MoreAuthor: John MacColl
Libraries and reorganisations
Lorcan Dempsey has often pointed out that a university library is the creature of its parent institution. This is most certainly true, and is a reason why – though we …
Read MoreWhat does it feel like to be [your library name here]?
It’s now around six weeks since I swapped the bird’s-eye view of the research library sector internationally, which I had as a member of the staff of OCLC Research, for …
Read MoreArchives and Special Collections / Digital Preservation / Research Library Partnership / Supporting Scholarship
Research dissemination and ‘the archive’
Ithaka S+R recently published its Faculty Survey 2009: Key Strategic Insights for Libraries, Publishers, and Societies. It considers the way faculty views of the library are changing, and analyses library …
Read MoreAll futured out: UK public funding and risks to libraries
The future, it seems, has never been as popular as it as at the present time. We talk, think and write about it endlessly. The transformations in the world we …
Read MoreScholarly content and the cliff edge: the place of subject ‘repositories’
The famous (and famously reclusive) author J.D. Salinger died on 27 January this year, two days after the anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns – a day which is …
Read MoreLibraries and research excellence
Last month I mentioned the publication of A comparative review of research assessment regimes in five countries and the role of libraries in the research assessment process, which had been …
Read MoreNational 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 MoreClimate 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 More