Archive for the ‘Library’ Category.
January 21, 2008, 7:18 pm
Every librarian and faculty member should read the CIBER briefing paper Information behaviour of the researcher of the future (2 MB PDF). CIBER conducted this research for the British Library and JISC . The report focuses on information seeking behavior of students born after 1993 (the Google Generation). The paper also ties in research from OCLC's Perceptions studies. You may also want to listen to presentation given and Q&A's when the paper was released on January 16, 2008.
Found via Stephen's Lighthouse.
January 18, 2008, 5:38 pm
Data curation has been a topic cropping up at conferences I have been to this past year. I've heard it mentioned in sessions at ACRL and ALA, mostly by librarians from the big ARLs.
"Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all."
"The storage would fill a major need for scientists who want to openly share their data, and would allow citizen scientists access to an unprecedented amount of data to explore."
I still have to wonder how this will be monetized. Or, will this project be underwritten by Google's main revenue stream? Guess those institutional repositories will still have some room in them after all.
Read the full story with links to more details at "Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data" on Wired Science.
August 31, 2007, 8:48 am
I about spit out a mouthful of coffee as I was reading Lorcan Dempsey's blog this morning. Lorcan highlights the last paragraph of Nicholas Carr's post, Data center porn. Nicholas's post is reporting on Information Week's editor John Foley's visit to Google's new data center in The Dalles, Oregon.
This is what almost caused the spit take…
Patchett [the data center manager] goes on to describe the many community-service projects that Google employees are involved in around The Dalles, from wiring an outdoor stage to lending IT support to the fire department. One activity, though, strikes me as slightly troubling: "Google volunteers also 'weed the shelves' at the library every couple of weeks."
I never knew that working for Google auto-magically makes a person qualified to weed a library's collection.
