+ The EU-funded EuropeanaTravel Project
by Paul Ayris
EuropeanaTravel is a targeted project for cultural content in the target area digital libraries of the eContentplus 2008 Work Programme funded by the European Commission.[1] Its overall objective is to digitise content on the theme of travel and tourism for use in Europeana[2] as requested by the EDL Foundation.[3] The themed content will come from the wonderful collections of major university libraries and national libraries. The project is supported by CENL[4] and LIBER,[5] two founder members of the EDL Foundation, and by the Foundation itself. A secondary objective of the project is further to strengthen collaboration between CENL and LIBER by extending their experience of joint working, thus increasing human interoperability in support of Europeana. Other objectives include creating a LIBER closed access aggregation service to aggregate material from LIBER members for Europeana, continuing to mobilise support for Europeana amongst university libraries in a systematic way, and supporting the spread of best practice in digitisation by libraries.
+ A view on Europeana from the US perspective
by Ricky Erway
At the express request of the organisers of the second LIBER/EBLIDA workshop on digitization, Ricky Erway of OCLC provided an outsider’s view on the Europeana project. Erway looks at Europeana from many vantage points: mandate and funding; branding and public relations; learning from others; aggregation; cooperation; content; rights; metadata; technology; access; user feedback; and sustainability – offering valuable advice for the Europeana community in doing so.
+ The Long Tail, Copyright and Libraries
by Julien Van Borm
This paper is about the Long Tail as defined by Chris Anderson in 2006, its direct implications for copyright and its possible consequences for libraries and heritage institutions, e.g. for document delivery and the creation of repositories with images, sound registrations and documents.
+ Missing Web References — A Case Study of Five Scholarly Journals
Mohammad Hanief Bhat
"The present study attempts to ascertain the proportion of missing web references of 5–10-year-old research papers of the five leading open access (OA) journals in library and information science. The results suggest that the number of web citations has increased from 41.60% of all citations in 1998 to 53.32% in 2002. But a substantial quantity of web citations (32.09%) was found to be missing. The percentage of missing web citations goes on increasing with each passing year — ten-year-old publications having the highest number of missing citations, i.e., 39.96% and five-year-old publications having the lowest number of missing citations (25.89%). 0.92% of citations had moved to a new URL address and 74.14% of missing citations resulted in an HTTP 404 (page not found) error."
+ Facilitating Searches in Multiple Bibliographical Databases: Metadata Harvesting Service Providers
by Mangala Anil Hirwade, Mohini T. Bherwani
A metadata harvester is a software package that reads data from servers, writes it to databases, implements various kinds of searches, and writes HTML files to display the results. In this paper sixty metadata harvesting service providers have been studied. The study reviewed metadata generation, preservation and harvesting, and various technical issues arising at these stages.
+ 9th International Bielefeld Conference 2009: Upgrading the eLibrary: Enhanced Information Services Driven by Technology and Economics
by Almuth Gastinger
This article reports on the 9th International Bielefeld Conference ‘Upgrading the eLibrary: Enhanced Information Services Driven by Technology and Economics’, 3–5 February 2009, in Bielefeld, Germany. The conference focused on future challenges for libraries regarding the development of information services and infrastructures that meet the changing needs of scholarly communication, collaboration (e-science) and publication (open access) as well as new requirements regarding teaching and learning (virtual learning spaces). In addition, attention was paid to economic conditions and strategic positioning of libraries as a general framework for information services.
+ Curating Research: e-Merging New Roles and Responsibilities in the European Landscape (Conference Report)
by Inge Angevaare
On 17 April 2009 LIBER, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) and the Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation (NCDD) co-organised LIBER’s first workshop on digital curation/preservation, providing an introduction to the theme of digital curation and different perspectives on the roles research libraries can and/or must play in keeping the digital records of science safe for future generations. Speakers included Eileen Fenton (Portico), Dale Peters (DRIVER), Maria Heijne (TU Delft Library), Jeffrey van der Hoeven (KB, PARSE.insight) and ninety workshop attendees. The paper includes the conference report and some results of the PARSE.insight online survey into digital preservation practices of LIBER libraries.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
