MORE POSTS FROM 2011
From the BBC: The £26m warehouse in Swindon, which covers 13 acres and has 153 miles of shelving, is now home to many of the libraries’ lesser-used editions. [Clip] The project to relocate the books is now complete and has been hailed as “an extraordinary success”. Librarian Sarah Thomas said: “This has been an important […]
From the Austin American-Statesman: John Gillum started working for the Austin Public Library system in 1979, the year what’s now the John Henry Faulk Central Library opened. At the time, the city was less the half its current size. The library system used computers to manage its circulation, but personal computers weren’t considered an essential […]
From the Mercury News: In an effort to preserve the cash-strapped city’s budget, a San Jose councilman wants to replace retiring city library workers with community volunteers or face the more serious alternative of outsourcing the libraries altogether. “We have beautiful libraries, and if we allow volunteers to augment current city staff, our libraries would […]
From The Economic Times: Statistics and Programme Implementation Minister Srikant Kumar Jena today launched two new statistical products, ‘DevInfo India Version 3.0’ and ‘The Statistical Year Book 2012’, offering socio-economic data and a range of analytical tools. “These two statistical products are our attempt to keep in tune with the latest technology so as to […]
Rare Books Staff From American U. of Cairo Help Restore Burned Institut d'Égypte Documents
Archives and Special Collections, Libraries, National Libraries, News, Preservation
|From the News@AUC Post: The Rare Books and Special Collections Library and Archives (RBSCL) sent nine of its staff members last week to assist Dar El Kutub [Egyptian National Library] in the salvaging of books and documents damaged during the recent fire at the Institut d’Egypte. These volunteers, who are experienced in handling rare and […]
From MIT Technology Review: OpenStreetMap is exactly what its name implies—a wiki of maps and location data to which anyone can contribute, just like Wikipedia. With the help of some deep-pocketed boosters, including MapQuest and Microsoft, it’s suddenly a legitimate challenger to the hegemony of Maps.Google.Com. Google announced two months ago that it was going […]
New From ARL: SPEC Kit (#327) Looks at Reconfiguring Service Delivery
Academic Libraries, Associations and Organizations, Libraries, News
|The Complete SPEC Kit is Fee-Based (Order Form). From the SPEC Kit #327 News Release: The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published Reconfiguring Service Delivery, SPEC Kit 327, which investigates whether and how ARL member libraries have reconfigured staffed service delivery points in the main library and in any branches that report to the […]
Russia: National Electronic Information Consortium Now Providing National Access to "Science Classic" Digital Archive
Archives and Special Collections, Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Digital Collections, Digital Preservation, Libraries, News, Public Libraries
|From the AAAS: The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) announces that the Russian Ministry of Education and Science has selected Science Classic, the digital archives of Science (1880–1996), as the first acquisition in a major project to provide national access to scientific archives. Russian students, scientists, and professors can now access 116 […]
From the AP (via Chicago Tribune) A new map featuring information about Iowa’s historical sites, National Register areas and cemeteries is now available online. The Department of Cultural Affairs says it has uploaded information to its Iowa Site Inventory database on almost 114,000 historical and architectural properties, 280 National Register districts and 3,500 cemeteries. It […]
Title: Predicting Searcher Frustration Authors: Henry Feild, James Allan, Rosie Jones Date: 2010 Source: The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) In: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR 2010) Abstract: When search engine users have trouble finding information, they may become frustrated, possibly resulting in a bad experience (even if they are […]