OCLC's WorldCat Local Building Content Resources

OCLC recently announced how much their efforts to include access to publishers content has developed. Here from their press release:

An expanding collection of authoritative content from leading academic publishers is now accessible through WorldCat Local, the OCLC discovery service that offers users integrated access to electronic, digital and physical library materials.

WorldCat Local provides access to more than 750 million items, including books, journals and databases from international publishers; the digital collections of groups like HathiTrust, OAIster and Google Books; open access materials; as well as the collective resources of libraries worldwide through WorldCat.

OCLC continues to negotiate access to critical library content on behalf of the cooperative to ensure access to libraries’ most popular resources. To view a full list of the nearly 1,200 databases and collections available through WorldCat Local, visit the website.

Databases recently added to the WorldCat Local central index include:

• American Psychological Association: PsycARTICLES, PsycBOOKS, PsycCRITIQUES
• Alternative Press Center: Alternative Press Index, Alternative Press Index Archive

Content providers that will soon add databases to the WorldCat Local central index include:

• Accessible Archives
• Oxford University Press
• Taylor & Francis
• CABI
• OECD
• Sabinet
• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Databases now available in WorldCat Local through remote access:

• Gale: Contemporary Authors, ¡Informe!, Making of Modern Law, Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center
• EBSCO: ATLA Religion Database ™ with ATLASerials ™ , PsycEXTRA, PsycINFO
• H. W. Wilson: Book Review Digest Retrospective: 1905-1982, Essay & General Literature Index Retrospective

WorldCat Local now offers vendor record sets from:

• ProQuest: ProQuest U. S. Executive Branch Documents, 1910-1932
• ProQuest: Gerritsen Collection of Women’s History, 1543-1945 (six collections in varying formats)
• Cassidy Cataloguing: Lexis I – E-treatises

The WorldCat Local search experience also grows richer with the ongoing addition of article-level metadata to WorldCat.org. When this metadata is added to WorldCat.org, it is automatically made part of WorldCat Local. Article-level metadata for the following resources have been added recently to WorldCat.org:

• ISIS Current Bibliography of the History of Science
• Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine

For more information, visit the WorldCat Local website.

The Global Library Information Site from OCLC

Via the OCLC cooperative website an announcement about the launch of their global library information website.

Our library often gets requests for combined statistics of this second kind that don't take into account the fact that there is no one, single global repository of library data. In order to help provide that kind of comparative information, we've created the Global Library Statistics page for the use of the entire library community. The service was originally a joint project of OCLC Research and the OCLC Library, and Research has contributed to its development.

Just choose a region and then a country from the drop-down menus or click on the map arrows to narrow your search. Then click on the tabs at the top of the table below the map for information about a specific category.

The page has information about (as much as possible) the total global library universe. It includes data for the total number of libraries, librarians, volumes, expenditures, and users for every country and territory in the world broken down into the major library types: academic, public, school, special and national. These figures do not represent OCLC membership, although the information is broken down into three regions that represent those used by the OCLC Global and Regional Councils: the Americas (North and South America), EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India), and Asia Pacific (Asia, Australia and Oceania). The statistics also include available data for languages used, and the number of library schools, publishers, and museums.

The staff of the OCLC Library extracted data from respected third-party sources, both electronic and print, that in their judgment are the most current and accurate sources to which they have access. For many countries, data were either unavailable (indicated in the charts as NA) or sporadic. Also, for a lot of the world, the data were not as current as we would have liked. We felt, though, that a fairly recent figure was better than none at all.

Report: Ithaka S+R Library Survey 2010 - Insights from Library Directors

From the executive summary of the most recent Ithaka S+R report on library strategies from the perspective of library directors. There are also a series of webinars scheduled to review the report beginning this Wednesday.

On strategy and leadership:

Most respondents do not think their libraries have conducted sufficient strategic planning to meet user needs for services and optimally manage collections. Thirty-five percent of respondents agreed with this statement, “My library has a well-developed strategy to meet changing user needs and research habits.” Slightly less than half said they have all the information they need to make informed decisions about when to deaccession print journals to which they have access digitally.

Library directors envision a high-level strategic prioritization of their research and teaching support and facilitation functions (expected to be important to more than 90% of respondents in five years) in conjunction with a shift away, in some cases, from collections acquisitions and preservation functions (expected to shrink so they are important to 80% or less of respondents in five years).

There are a number of important divergences between high-level strategies on the one hand and budget priorities on the other, suggesting that library directors are in some cases not able to fully execute the strategic direction they have in mind for their libraries.

On service offerings:

Library directors at all types of institutions see supporting teaching and learning as one of their primary missions: 94% of respondents said that they see teaching information literacy skills to undergraduates as a very important role for their libraries. They would also like to work more closely with faculty members on supporting classroom instruction. However, a notably smaller share of faculty members values the library for its teachingsupport role, raising questions about how the library best works within an institutional context to pursue this role.

Library directors believe that it is strategically important that their libraries be seen by users as the principal starting point in the discovery process. While they recognize that faculty members and students increasingly rely on resources outside the library for discovery of information and content, they would like to invest more in discovery tools to aid users.

On collections:

The library‟s role as a buyer of materials remains of primary importance, both in terms of how library directors prioritize their spending and how faculty members view the library. Electronic journals are a significant budget priority for many, and respondents envision a continued gradual rise in the amount that they spend on digital materials and commensurate reduction in expenditures for print materials. They expect in five years to essentially complete the transition to electronic format for journals acquisitions and at that point spend nearly half their books budget on electronic books.

Most libraries have become comfortable with deaccessioning or moving offsite their print journal collections after they have reliable digital access to copies of these materials: 91% have already done so or are planning to do so in the future. This is not the case for books, at least not yet. However, a significant portion of respondents would be willing to consider deaccessioning or moving offsite their print books collections if the proper preservation and access infrastructure is put in place.

Hat tip @lorcanD

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 14): Long Distance Learning, OpenSource Textbooks, CCC, Harpercollins

Forbes takes a look at the rapidly expanding long distance learning market in India (Forbes):

The $260 million (market cap) Everonn uses a satellite network, with two-way video and audio. It reaches 1,800 colleges and 7,800 schools across 24 of India's 28 states. It offers everything from digitized school lessons to entrance exam prep for aspiring engineers and has training for job-seekers, too. "Never in my wildest imagination did I ever think I would be doing what I am doing today," says 49-year-old Kishore, who along with his family owns nearly 19% of the company. "When I started out I would have been happy if I'd reached 50 schools in south India."
Everonn debuted on FORBES ASIA's Best Under A Billion list in 2010. Revenues for the first three quarters of this fiscal year, through December, rose to $65 million--from $40 million the previous year. Profits touched $9.2 million--up from $6.1 million last year.

Edutopia opines about open source textbooks:

The Argument for Open-Source Curricular Materials:
The week this announcement was made, Edutopia had an article on the use of open source curricular materials – a growing trend being driven, in part, by the extraordinary cost of commercial textbooks. The argument for open curriculum has many elements in common with the argument for the increased use of open-source software. The most obvious feature of free open source (FOS) materials is the lack of cost for the materials themselves – most open-source content is free of cost in digital form. Historically there has been a tradeoff: low-cost (or free) comes at the expense of quality. (In other words, "There is no free lunch.") But FOS is different. Indeed, I've long argued that FOS software has the advantage of being free of cost, while, at the same time, providing greater value to the users.

This Lunch Is Not Only Free, It's Really Good:
The pairing of high quality with reduced cost seems counter-intuitive at first glance, but makes sense once you look into the open source community more deeply. Many of the developers and maintainers of open source materials are people who use these materials themselves, and thus have a strong interest in keeping the quality as high as possible. Historically this has been true since the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary – arguably the definitive dictionary of the English language whose entries were (and are) submitted by language fanatics, making it one of the largest and earliest open-source documents.

Washington Post on Orphans:

This may well be a practical solution, but the issue should not be Google’s to decide. As the lawfully elected representatives of rights holders and readers, Congress is best positioned to determine how copyright should apply in this case. An essential piece of any such solution is a body, similar to the recording industry’s ASCAP, that would be able to search for rights holders, disperse funds and oversee collective licensing of copyrighted works. This is an accepted strategy for exactly such situations, where an opt-in approach would be prohibitively onerous.

And Tracey Armstrong CEO of CCC comments on the above that this entity already exists (WAPO):

In fact, such an organization has been in existence for more than 30 years: the Copyright Clearance Center.

Mercury News on Orphan legislation:

However, Google might choose to a drop its court efforts altogether and take its cause to the legislative branch, one that would benefit the public interest.

This new strategy would be to have Congress pass legislation that would primarily make orphan works available to the public. Congress has considered similar legislation before, once in 2006. At that time, the U.S. Copyright Office advocated that after a thorough search failed to uncover the rightsholder, orphan books should be made available to the public. The legislation stalled because Congressional policy makers wanted to see how the Google Books case would play out in the courts.

Now that the outcome is known, Congress can act. Legislation would not only allow Google and commercialized enterprises from digitizing works, but libraries and universities too.

Allowing these organizations to scan out-of-print books and make millions of printed works readily available to the public will usher in an era of digital enlightenment.

Cory Doctrow in the Guardian on loaning eBooks:

Now, in point of fact, many ordinary trade books circulate far more than 26 times before they're ready for the discard pile. If a group of untrained school kids working as part-time pages can keep a copy of the Toronto Star in readable shape for 30 days' worth of several-times-per-day usage, then it's certainly the case that the skilled gluepot ninjas working behind the counter at your local library can easily keep a book patched up and running around the course for a lot more than 26 circuits.

Indeed, the HarperCollins editions of my own books are superb and robust examples of the bookbinder's art (take note!), and judging from the comments of outraged librarians, it's common for HarperCollins printed volumes to stay in circulation for a very long time indeed.But this is the wrong thing to argue about. Whether a HarperCollins book has the circulatory vigour to cope with 26 checkouts or 200, it's bizarre to argue that this finite durability is a feature that we should carefully import into new media. It would be like assuming the contractual obligation to attack the microfilm with nail-scissors every time someone looked up an old article, to simulate the damage that might have been done by our careless patrons to the newsprint that had once borne it.

From the twitter:

Reuters Special Report: Nic Callaway the publisher of the Madonna "Sex" book now building book Apps Reuters

Gallimard: 100 years in publishing Guardian