Amid Unspeakable Tragedy, Newman Library at Virginia Tech a Safe Haven
The nation's thoughts are with the Virginia Tech community in the wake of yesterday's shocking tragedy. The Newman Library is closed today, as is most of the Virginia Tech campus, but from media reports it is clear that librarians offered a horrified, shaken community a place of refuge during an unimaginable ordeal. Kostayne Link, an interdisciplinary studies major from Roanoke, told the Roanoke News that, when police officers told her to run, she headed for the library.
"There were staff members, librarians and such [inside the library], and they were telling us to get in, that they were going to put the campus on lockdown, that we needed to get in and stay in as soon as we could," Lane told reporters. "There were probably, like, ten staff members there, but I didn't see a policeman the whole time I was in the library, so it was actually kind of scary...I was on the first floor, and there are five floors. There were a good hundred people there. And a lot of people were just sitting around me." From all of us at Library Journal, our hearts go out to Virginia Tech.
UK Report Assesses Library/Research Link
A recently released UK report suggests that libraries have historically served the research community very well, but that rapid, seismic shifts in the information landscape must be addressed. The report, Researchers' Use of Academic Libraries and their Services, was commissioned by the Research Information Network (RIN) and the Consortium of Research Libraries (CURL). It collected "empirical data and qualitative insights from over 2250 researchers and 300 librarians." Michael Jubb, director of RIN, and Robin Green executive director of CURL, note in their foreword that the report forms an "authoritative account of the current state of relationships between researchers, academic libraries,"
What's the good news from the study? "Currently, the majority of researchers think that their institutions' libraries are doing an effective job in providing the information they need to do their work." Librarians' roles are rapidly shifting, however, as are the ways researchers work. The not-so-good news, therefore, is that both institutional support for libraries and their ability to embrace change on pace with these shifts are lagging. "Researchers are eager for more digital content and libraries are eager to provide it," the report states. "While nearly all researchers think funding the library should be a high or top priority for their institution, librarians indicate that it is not always easy to secure top-level support." In addition, the survey found that there "has been a sharp fall over the past five years in the number of researchers who visit their institution's library regularly," mostly in the sciences, with researchers choosing to have desktop access.
The study cites the rise of digital research, more interdisciplinary work, more cross-institution collaborations, and the "expectation of massive increases in the quantity of research output in digital form," as significant challenges. Print finding aids are used by very few researchers, the report notes, highlighting the need for better metadata for library holdings and more efficient cataloging. "Information resources that cannot be found electronically may well be overlooked," notes the executive summary, "since few researchers will invest the time required to track down items that cannot be quickly be identified using digital finding aids."
But as technology changes the way researchers and librarians work, there is an even greater danger of disconnect, as researchers turn to repositories and new modes of social networking to share research-based information. Librarians, the study notes, must work to stay in that loop. "Libraries need to proclaim their value so that researchers properly understand and acknowledge what the library is bringing to their working lives, particularly to their desktops," the study observes. "The successful research library of the future needs to forge a stronger brand identity within the institution."
Scientific Societies Create Federated Search Database
Thirteen leading science and technology societies have united to create Scitopia.org, a free federated search portal of their content. Scitopia.org will aggregate the "entire electronic libraries" more than three million documents, including peer-reviewed journal content and conference proceedings, spanning 150 years from some of the nation's most venerable scientific societies. Barbara Lange, director of product line management and publishing business development for IEEE, said the association's goal in developing scitopia.org was "not to provide yet another search portal but rather to provide a platform where this highly cited content can be found with greater ease, unencumbered by the noise of the Internet." Scitopia.org will go live June 2007.
Scitopia.org users will be able to search for full text articles by article title or author name. Once content is selected, the user will be directed to the publisher's digital library site to access the full text, or researchers at institutions with subscriptions to the content will be automatically authenticated and can click through to access it directly. Members of partner societies may also be able to access full text, depending upon the association's membership policies. Pay-per-view options will allow others to purchase as many articles as they choose. As a federated search, no new subscriptions will be needed to use scitopia.org.
Collaborators include: American Geophysical Union; American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics; American Institute of Physics; American Physical Society; American Society of Civil Engineers; American Society of Mechanical Engineers; The Electrochemical Society; IEEE; Institute of Physics Publishing; Optical Society of America; SPIE; Society of Automotive Engineers; and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
U. of Florida Creates Dean of Libraries Role; Hires GPO's Russell
Judith Russell, former superintendent of documents at the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) has been named the new dean of libraries at the University of Florida (UF) effective May 1. Russell succeeds Dale Canelas, who retired as director of libraries on Feb. 1. after a long, successful tenure. Canelas, who was in the role since 1985, served the longest tenure of any library director at the University of Florida, with numerous accomplishments, including the establishment of a book preservation program, a fundraising program, and the Digital Library Center to make resources accessible electronically. Canelas also oversaw renovations of the Smathers Library and establishment of the State University System Electronic Resources Committee to provide for statewide consortial pricing, reducing UF's costs for electronic collections.
Deputy director John Ingram has run the library since Canelas's retirement. Russell will step into a position elevated from director to dean "to reflect the increasing importance of library and information services to the academic and research missions of the university," said Provost Janie Fouke. "The new dean of libraries will help us to integrate information resources across the university and, most importantly, help us identify the campus library needs for the next decade." Russell holds a master's degree in library science from the Catholic University of America. She started working for the GPO in 1991 as director of the Office of Electronic Information Dissemination Services. She also has served as deputy director of the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science. As superintendent of documents, Russell led a staff of 220 staff and managed a $70 million annual department income. Russell said she was "attracted by the challenge of leading the libraries of a major university into the future."
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