After 28 years, Carol Tenopir is ending her run on the "Online Databases" column. See her final take on "hidden gem" conferences, and whether there will ever be consensus in the scholarly publishing community.
Clay Shirky, keynote speaker at the 2010 NFAIS annual meeting in Philadelphia, believes that "abundance breaks everything." In times of scarcity or famine, we are accustomed to resolving problems and setting priorities; in the information More...
The Online Information Meeting each December in London is one of the last remaining conferences dedicated to e-resources in libraries. As such, it was somewhat surprising that few sessions this year focused on features or More...
It is tempting to fall into a funk with budget cuts looming, but the 29th annual Charleston Conference on Issues in Book and Serials Acquisition, held in November, took a positive approach with a theme More...
After 27 years of writing ten columns per year, starting this month I will be cutting back to just five per year, in addition to the annual Database Marketplace. My next column will appear in More...
It is more important than ever, suggested several companies in the annual Database Marketplace Survey (LJ 5/15/09, p. 22–25), to measure collection use fully and better evaluate the value of the library to its constituencies.Many More...
As libraries and the institutions that fund them prepare their 2010 budgets, things look grim. Both the Association of Research Libraries and the International Coalition of Library Consortia have issued statements calling on scholarly publishers More...
Cell phone ubiquity is yesterday's news: now, between PDAs, iPods, ebook readers, tablet PCs, and other handheld devices, all of us are rarely without full-fledged information instruments at our fingertips.So how do libraries and publishers More...
IT'S tempting to characterize all young people as wired digital masters who use technology in mysterious ways. But broad generalization can be dangerous, and I was especially glad to see caution urged by several speakers More...
Studies show that people start with a search engine like Google when they need information. As early as 2004, in a focus group for one of my research studies, a college freshman bemoaned, “Why is More...
In the popular television show Life on Mars, the hero is transported 35 years back in time. At first things seem normal, but then he begins to see odd differences (like no mobile phones or More...
Seen any good movies lately? Want to see pictures of your favorite actors on the set of their best-known films? Or maybe posters and lobby displays from Academy Award™–winning movies? Looking for biographies or articles More...
Most of us accept the notion that e-journals, through library subscriptions or open access, are good for science. They save readers time in tracking down articles and help them identify relevant materials from a wide More...
Online resources are critical to the concept of “libraries without borders,” the theme of the 2008 World Library and Information Congress at the 74th International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) general conference, held More...
The biggest industry news this summer was the announcement that ProQuest had acquired Dialog from Thomson Reuters. Dialog was beginning to look like an unwelcome stepchild as new strategies by Thomson Reuters were moving the More...
If you were in library school anytime during the last 40 years, you are probably familiar with F.W. Lancaster and his books on indexing, online searching, or paperless information systems. I recently reread the first More...
What if all publishers and librarians reached a mutual understanding about e-resources rather than constantly haggling over terms and conditions in contractual licenses? What if copyright law were the bottom line for e-journal rights, just More...
Widgets are interactive, single-purpose applications for displaying and/or updating information. They can bring newsfeeds, weather forecasts, and more to a desktop or mobile web platform. Variants known as 'web widgets'; (or sometimes modules or badges), More...
If you ever doubted that we are a global information community that shares similar needs and concerns, a trip to the Online Information Meeting in London will convince you. The December 2007 session, the 32nd More...
The programs at two recent conferences (the Charleston Conference and London Online) confirm that ebooks have established themselves in libraries. While the trade and consumer book markets still struggle to find an affordable and compelling More...
Andrew Keen, former internet entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, has become an articulate contrarian regarding all of the Web 2.0 excitement. His recent polemic, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture More...
Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Only the H.W. Wilson Co., at 108, has created an older abstracting and indexing tool. Despite the phenomenal developments in technology in the 20th More...
You don't have to go far these days to hear about the library's role in social networking. Sites such as Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and Second Life provide a personal, but virtual, library presence to link More...
Academics determine their contribution to their discipline by seeing how often their work is cited. They often judge journal quality by that journal's impact factor. Such citation measures are now well established as a method More...
By now you've heard that Thomson has sold its Learning Division, including Gale, using the funds to assist in its purchase of Reuters. These multi-billion-dollar sales (yes, that is Billion) demonstrate that digital information sources More...
For the annual database Marketplace survey (LJ 5/15/07, p. 34–48), we ask vendors what major trends will most affect the future of online products and services. Worries about declining library budgets topped the list in More...
Most librarians agree that quality matters, but the ongoing debate recently raised about the quality (or lack thereof) of Wikipedia entries (both intentional and unintentional) and the falsified credentials of some Wikipedia editors referenced in More...
Sometimes a user really only needs part of an article or part of a chapter-a table, a photograph, a map, or another item. Electronic journals and books make all of these levels of granularity possible.GranularityE-resources More...
Last year ended with a flurry of major sales in the information industry. Just as 2006 holiday shopping started, primary and secondary publishers announced acquisitions, mergers, and sales opportunities.Wiley buys BlackwellJohn Wiley & Sons' purchase More...
Federated searching SEEMS obvious in the age of Google: students, faculty, and the public have what they've come to expect-a simple search box for one-stop shopping for information. Of course, the unique bells and whistles More...
Libraries invest a large percentage of their budgets on electronic collections and digital services. Although the value is obvious to us, we are often asked to demonstrate value to our funders. Our users' perceptions may More...
The favored searching text in LIS programs for over a decade has been Online Retrieval: A Dialogue of Theory and Practice by Geraldine Walker and Joe Janes (Libraries Unlimited). It covers search basics and more More...
User expectations are changing, mainly owing to the web, search engines, and advances in communications technology. Libraries and information industry providers are taking steps, both large and small, to keep pace.A recent cartoon in The More...
I like recreational summer reading and quickly go through the newest books of my favorite contemporary authors and look for titles with similar themes. Readers' advisory librarians use a plethora of book resources to help More...
Linking to full text through link resolver technology and the OpenURL standard has made electronic journals a cornerstone of library collections. Users expect that full text will always be a click or two away and More...
Current events, current awareness, and faster news mean the immediate present often dominates our worldview. But for many researchers, history informs the latest hot topic.ABC-CLIO redesignsLast year, ABC-CLIO celebrated its 50th anniversary and redesigned its More...
Expect more search systems to incorporate visualization and other sophisticated search and display techniques. They not only give a system a distinctive look, they also help users get deeper into results and stimulate thinking about More...
My career as a librarian, LJ columnist, researcher, and teacher has been about building bridges-bridges between librarians and publishers, students and knowledge, and research and practice-which is probably why I was selected to deliver the More...
Chat reference provides new ways to interact with patrons. Research by Marie L. Radford of Rutgers University (mradford@scils.rutgers.edu) and Lynn Silipigni Connaway of OCLC (connawal@oclc.org), supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, will More...
Why all the fuss about electronic journals? That was the question raised by Michael Gorman, the outspoken president of the American Library Association (ALA), at a session on 'Future of Libraries'; at the recent Online More...
More than 1000 librarians, publishers, and vendors jammed into the 25th annual Charleston Conference in South Carolina, November 2–5. Created by College of Charleston librarian Katina Strauch, the meeting brings together everyone in serials and More...
All the talk of simplistic text-box interfaces as the goal leaves the impression that there is no need to know how to use special characters or syntax, that all systems are being dumbed down. Even More...
In the old days, it was difficult togather information about the use of library collections. Door counts, circulation records, and tick-marks at the reference desk gave crude approximations. To obtain data about periodical use, patrons More...
A combination of content creators, online vendors, other intermediaries, and librarians work to bring online information sources to end users. Although these interconnected parts are sometimes adversarial, the current information marketplace relies on interaction among More...
Librarians, do your vendor reps provide you with the information you need in the way you need it? Vendors, do you feel you are communicating effectively with your librarian clients? A recent survey of North More...
Can we deliver information the way our users want it-cheap, fast, and good? According to Stewart Bodner, associate chief librarian of the New York Public Library, that's what users desire and what librarians and vendors More...
Phil Davis, life sciences bibliographer at Cornell University and a 2004 LJ Mover & Shaker, is shaking up the scholarly community with his discovery of duplicate articles in Emerald/MCB University Press journals. According to Davis, More...
Much has changed in my 30 years of teaching library and information science (LIS) students about online searching. Certainly the specific systems and hardware have evolved but so has the role of the librarian; access, More...
Google Scholar, introduced in beta form in November 2004, already has everyone talking. People wonder how scholarly the material is, whether it will put commercial information retrieval systems out of business, and if it will More...
"I have absolutely no regrets about enhancing our reference services through chat." "It's been a smooth and successful expansion of our existing reference service." "It's so successful we've moved from being a pilot project to More...
Virtual reference services seem a natural extension of our digital collections and our emphasis on access to the library anytime, anywhere. If our patrons use the library from home, it makes sense to provide them More...
With wireless connectivity and small laptop computers, we are no longer tied to the desktop for online searching. Handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs) offer even greater portability. So far, the most common uses of PDAs More...
ERIC, one of the first online bibliographic databases, was started in 1966-when subject-themed clearinghouses were established to gather, index, and input bibliographic information and make available journal articles and gray literature. The ERIC database has More...
From the ongoing discussion in the online version of Nature, to articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education and even USA Today, open access publishing is a hot topic. But open access publishing can have More...
For the second year in a row, respondents to the annual LJ Database Marketplace Survey (LJ 5/15/04, p. 38–49) see poor library budgets as "the major issue or trend to impact database and information product More...
Only the most dedicated supersearchers are motivated to learn and control command systems, like DialogClassic, that rely on the user to input complex search strategies. Infrequent searchers and most end users choose interfaces that do More...
Librarians, publishers, and aggregators alike often call Google their main competitor. Google, or similar web search engines, is the information finding tool of first choice for many users-far ahead of proprietary online services or libraries More...
Searching Through Embedded DatabasesThe day of the standalone database may be numbered. Database searching is now embedded in the latest version of Microsoft Office software, so the process of looking for information is interwoven into More...
It should be easy to determine the exact number of scholarly journals that are available online. Surprisingly, it is a challenge. Even how many scholarly journals are published in print isn't easy to calculate. Coming More...
Why haven't library system and information database designers included as many user-friendly features as Amazon and Google? This question, posed at the recent annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIST), More...
The information industry is international. With major English-language online publishers based in the Netherlands, Germany, and Canada (not to mention Alabama and New York), the information you lease may be generated and designed anywhere in More...
What do people really want from digital sources? As librarians, we wonder if they prefer print or electronic journals, and whether they would rather do everything themselves or sometimes ask for help. Do they even More...
Online companies continually tinker with their systems. Commercial aggregators need to accommodate new databases or new features such as linking. Search engines must change ranking algorithms to subvert rogue web sites or hackers who seek More...
Foretelling the future has never been easy, but even the smartest futurist could not have foreseen the recent economic woes. Each year for the annual Database Marketplace feature (see LJ 5/15/03, p. 38ff.), we ask More...
The National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services (NFAIS) was founded to bring secondary publishers together to share common concerns. As I witnessed at the 45th annual NFAIS conference in February, secondary publishers these days More...
In my column "The Age of Online Instruction (LJ 9/1/02, p. 36,38), I made the bold assertion that "in this age of online libraries, librarians in all types of libraries are online educators." I should More...
I have always liked metaphoric interfaces. When the Internet Public Library (IPL) and the Engineering Information Village (Ei Village) first came out in the mid-1990s, they both made good use of metaphors. IPL used the More...
Just before midnight, September 30, 2002, 19 databases disappeared without a trace from the Dialog online system. The reason? CSA (Cambridge Scientific Abstracts) and Dialog had failed to reach a renewal agreement. On October 1, More...
Common wisdom says that currency is what is valued in online databases. With the exception of genealogists and historians, it is assumed that readers don't want old materials. From the publisher's side, it just isn't More...
Serials librarianship is hot. It wasn't too long ago that library schools were eliminating serials management courses while libraries were merging serials departments into acquisitions and cataloging. Now, in the era of electronic journals and More...
Academic librarians have always recognized their role as teacher. But instruction has not always been a large part of public or special library work. In this age of online libraries, however, all librarians are online More...
The blurring of lines among special librarians and other information professionals makes the tracks that some conferences use seem artificial. After all, many librarians work as online experts, knowledge managers, and builders of electronic libraries-often More...
For the annual Database Marketplace Survey (see LJ 5/15/02, p. 42ff.) company representatives were asked what major issues or trends will impact database availability and distribution in the next year. While budget woes are clearly More...
Recently, a graduating student, hoping to work as a corporate information specialist or academic reference librarian, came to me in a state of near-panic. Her distress went something like this: "Factiva, LexisNexis, Westlaw, Dialog, ProQuest, More...
OCLC and VTLS have signed a licensing agreement that will see the source code of the vendor's Virtua ILS product be used to expand the WorldCat database. Lynn Keller, OCLC product manager for WorldCat, said More...
Gale and Dialog are allying themselves for future development of what is being cryptically described as "online products and service for the academic and public library markets worldwide." Few details were available at press time, More...
ABC-CLIO again has extended its partnerships by entering into an agreement to link its Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life databases to journals found in the Project MUSEĀ® database. ABC-CLIO customers that also subscribe More...
Earlier this year the UK company Ingenta changed its name from "ingenta" (with a small "i") to "Ingenta" (with a big "I") to avoid confusion with its web address and online system (ingenta.com). The company More...
More than a decade ago I wrote about three family-owned publishers that served online information professionals (see "The Database Press," LJ 3/1/89, p. 56–57). Online Inc., MecklerMedia, and Learned Information Inc. each focused on the More...
It's been several years since I last attended the Online Information Meeting in London, so I was especially looking forward to the 25th-anniversary meeting this past December. Although some Americans chose to cancel, many Europeans More...
Gale Group's InfoTrac databases and online Resource Centers have expanded business content with the addition of Business Monitor International and Economist Intelligence Unit data. These new agreements add 90 magazines, newsletters, and other publications to More...
ProQuest Company's Information and Learning unit has acquired SoftLine Information, the producer of online databases for libraries and educational institutions. SoftLine's products offer more than 500 newspapers and magazines from ethnic, minority, gender, alternative, and More...
The Dialog Corporation is now marketing Dialog Company Profiles, a new standalone product offering one-stop access to up-to-the-minute, comprehensive studies of nearly 500,000 publicly traded and privately owned companies from 188 countries. The web-based service More...
Although ProQuest bought most of the company, the SoftLine-developed Alt-HealthWatch product was acquired by EBSCO Publishing, marking the tenth full-text medical database EBSCO has added to its line in 2001. Alt-Healthwatch centers on "complementary, holistic, More...
Ask librarians what they think of when they hear 'Cambridge Scientific Abstracts,' and most, not surprisingly, would likely cite bibliographic databases in the sciences. That is probably why Cambridge Scientific Abstracts officially changed its name More...
EBSCO Publishing has combined six subject-specific reference series to create the Curriculum Online Package, which is accessible via EBSCO host. According to the publisher, the package contains 'over 50,000 full-text articles' from an assortment of More...
BioMed Central has launched a collection of online meeting abstracts to aid librarians and researchers. The new service will provide a centralized, searchable database of various meeting abstracts, allowing scientists to access freely summaries of More...
It may be effective to find relevant literature by searching for articles by subject descriptors or keywords, but subject searching is not the only way. When authors of scholarly pieces cite relevant sources in the More...
A decade ago I wrote a column called 'The Most Popular Databases' (LJ 4/1/91). I used data from a company called Information Market Indicators (IMI) that tracked usage in a wide sample of libraries, plus More...
Judging from the size of their booths, the number of activities sponsored, and the glitz of their parties at the Special Libraries Association (SLA) 2001 annual meeting in San Antonio, LexisNexis, Factiva (Dow Jones/Reuters), and More...
Now that libraries have substantial digital collections available to users from their homes or offices, it isn't surprising that remote access ("virtual") reference services are the latest trend. LJ recently provided an overview of virtual More...
If you invest in high-technology stocks or just follow the stock market, the woes of high-profile dot-com companies are hard to escape. I seem to get asked several times a week if the information industry More...
A group of special librarians who run information services for multinational corporations recently told me what they looked for in new MLS graduates. They want people who feel comfortable learning and searching multiple online systems, More...
After over 20 years, the face of online meetings is changing. As of 2001, Online World is no more, the National Online Meeting sports a new name, and ASIS (now ASIST) continues to refocus its More...
We all know how the escalating price of journal subscriptions takes a bite every year from our libraries' budgets. Still, if you are reading this in a library in the United States, the U.K., or More...
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
