Everywhere, libraries are collapsing under their own weight, though this isn’t a matter of a tight budget restricting libraries from expensive information machines. Most libraries have all but done away with costly microfilm and microfiche readers and replaced them with inexpensive scanning and digital retrieval technology. Accessible technology has made it easier for a library to keep itself abreast of modern methods of information delivery. The issue with this universal accessibility to information is that this material is now available to the average library patron via their broadband Internet connections at home. There’s less and less reason to maintain a public building which functions as a locus of information when these things can be done from a Starbucks or a bedroom. As technology progresses, librarians are reduced from purveyors of organized information to glorified video store clerks. That is, for anyone who doesn’t already have Netflix.

» via Splice Today

The number of adults visiting libraries in England has fallen steadily over the last five years, a government report has revealed.

In 2005, 16.4% of adults people attended their local library once a month. New research indicates that the figure had dropped to 12.8% last year.

» via BBC News

“The times are changing,” said President Dan Kinney. “Colleges must adapt.”

With the fall semester ready to start, Iowa Western students will use the resources found in the cyberlibrary in the new student center.

“There are no books,” Kinney said. “Everything will be on databases online. We are not going to buy any more books.”

The existing books are being distributed to their respective academic departments.

» via Omaha.com » via TeleRead

Heading into the second decade of the 21st century, the urban library has become America’s knowledge center. “The problem is that many leaders think of libraries as they existed in the 1960s and ’70s,” says Susan Benton, CEO of the Urban Libraries Council. One idea the council would like local officials to consider is the notion of the urban library as a magnet for economic development. The concept is not new, but has taken on importance as some question the direct cost of running libraries. When the Seattle Public Library opened a striking new building in 2004, the number of daily visitors doubled, attracting thousands of people to the city’s downtown.

» via Governing » via LISNews

Universities are more likely to get funding for research when investments in University libraries is high, according to a new report released today. The study was funded by Elsevier, a publisher often employed by University libraries (which raises questions about the efficacy of the report, more on that in a moment). But if the findings are correct, it means the Universities that can’t invest in libraries in the first place, and need grants the most, can’t get them.

» via Fast Company

This, of course, is merely collateral damage in the digital revolution, if damage it is. There’s as yet no way to tell if this transition is good, bad, both, or neither, but surely the absence of a physical library, be it musical or literary, marks a fundamental shift in the way we live and think about things. In music, for example, the rise of iTunes, Pandora, YouTube, and all the other online music purveyors has quickly eroded our devotion to the long-playing album as the principal means of organizing music. After a half century of neglect, the lowly single is back on top. Most immediately this has repercussions for artists, maybe not so much for the people who buy their music. But who knows?

» via Newsweek

tingletech:

In its complaint, SkyRiver asserts that OCLC’s business practices violate Section 1 and Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The 39-page document provides a lengthy description of SkyRiver’s understanding of OCLC’s activities and argues that these practices amount to illegal anti-competitive monopolies and harm other firms, such as SkyRiver and Innovative Interfaces, involved in the industry.

The Future of the Library — Ten Things to Keep in Mind

1. Within ten years, most academic information will be available in digital format.

2. The campus network is vital to your information delivery system/library. Now is the time to assure that it is robust and can remain so.

3. Librarians today need to be: intellectually curious, collaborative, technologically sophisticated, good teachers, and adaptable.

» via Inside Higher Ed

Some of today’s children will grow up to be Presidents, artistic luminaries and notorious criminals. A century from now, long after they have completed their noteworthy deeds, historians and biographers will attempt to document their lives and times. And thanks to the shift from written to digital records, those scholars of a future past will face a challenge very different from the job of contemporary academics.

Through Twitter, Facebook and email, a child in 2010 will, over their life, produce a body of writing that dwarfs the collected output of even the most prolific Founding Fathers such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. This volume will shift the problems of historical research from the archeological recovery of rare texts and letters to the process of sifting through vast fields of digital information that weave through legal gray areas of corporate and private ownership.

“The problem we are going to face isn’t the loss of literacy, or the end of electricity, but having too much information,” said John Unsworth, dean of the University of Illinois’ Library School. “It’s the abundance problem, not the scarcity problem, that we should be focused on. There’s very little that isn’t recorded [these days]. The big problem we’re going to have is ‘I know it’s in there somewhere, but where is it?’”

» via Live Science

… there’s little in life that’s as watching-paint-dry-dull as the traditional “library orientation” talk. You know — the one that samples all of the library’s finding aids, touches on the difference between authoritative and unreliable sources, mentions the standard reference works in a field, and breezes through a list of specialized sources that no one will remember, let alone use. In many cases it’s the same colloquy you heard when you were an undergrad, except the directions for using the card catalog don’t involve actual cards anymore.

After years of frustration, last spring I gave up on the orientation. In my mind it created three types of the students: the half who tuned out, a quarter who burned out from information overload, and a remaining quarter who insisted they’d already heard the sermon and didn’t bother to show up. More frustrating still were two post-chat patterns: one group of students routinely asked me how to do the very thing they had just been taught, and a second group never applied any of the library skills necessary to conduct their research.

Librarians are generally blameless in this. If we get a spiel out of the 1950s, it’s because much of the time we provide information no more specific than “I’m teaching [Your Course Name Here] and my students need to do research.” From such slender threads it’s difficult to fashion much more than a library sampler.

» via Inside Higher Ed

Endeca Technologies Inc., a Cambridge-based search applications company, said that it has been selected by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation to “provide the software and technical assistance that will provide website users with a robust search engine experience when accessing the nation’s first online digitized presidential archives.”

The digital archives will launch on January 20, 2011, the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration as the 35th President of the United States, Endeca said in a press release.

“The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is the first among American presidential libraries not ‘born digital’ to undertake the creation of a digital library,” the release added. “Of the 13 presidential libraries in existence today, only President Bill Clinton’s and President George W. Bush’s contain born-digital materials.”

» via Boston Globe