New & Noteworthy

Citation

(2006), "New & Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 23 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2006.23923aab.001

New & Noteworthy

User Perceptions of Library ResourcesNew Report from OCLC

OCLC Online Computer Library Center has found that information consumers view libraries as places to borrow print books, but they are unaware of the rich electronic content they can access through libraries. The findings are part of Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources, a report issued today by OCLC. The new report, based on surveys of information users across six countries administered by Harris Interactive on behalf of OCLC, is a follow-up to The 2003 OCLC Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition, the award-winning report that describes issues and trends that are impacting and will impact OCLC and libraries.

Among the findings of the report:

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  Respondents use search engines to begin an information search (84 percent). A total of 1 percent begin an information search on a library web site.

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  Information consumers use the library but they use the library less and read less since they began using the internet.

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  Borrowing print books is the library’service used most; "Books" is the library brand.

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  Quality and quantity of information are top determinants of a satisfactory electronic information search, not speed of results.

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  Respondents do not trust purchased information more than free information.

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  A total of 90 percent of respondents are satisfied with their most recent search for information using a search engine.

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  Information consumers like to self-serve. They use personal knowledge and common sense to judge if electronic information is trustworthy, and they cross-reference other sites to validate their findings.

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  The survey results show that library’and information preferences and use are consistent among respondents in the six countries surveyed.

Survey findings are generally consistent across geographic regions. Responses about awareness, familiarity and usage of electronic resources showed consistent views among respondents in the six countries surveyed.

Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources is available for download free of charge at http://www.oclc.org/reports/2005perceptions.htm Print copies of the 286-page report are also available for purchase from the same site.

There is also a podcast of a 45 minute conversation between Paul Miller (Talking with Talis) and OCLC's VP for Member Services, discussing the report and the earlier Environmental Scan. The podcast is available at www.talis.com/podcasts and can be either listened to online or downloaded as an mp3 file for playback offline.

The Rise of Library 2.0White Paper Released, Podcasts Available

TALIS, a leading provider of products and services for public and academic libraries in the UK and Ireland, has released a new white paper by Ken Chad and Paul Miller entitled "Do libraries matter? The rise of Library 2.0". The authors answer the question – "yes", then proceed to outline how libraries must change and evolve in order to survive.

Modeling the phraseology of O'Reilly's Web 2.0, the authors have coined the phrase of Library 2.0 to represent a vision of "a very different library service that operates according to the expectations of today's library users. In this vision, the library makes information available wherever and whenever the user requires it."

TALIS has also made available podcasts on a variety of interesting topics with industry and library leaders, including Cliff Lynch.

White paper (PDF): www.talis.com/downloads/white_papers/DoLibrariesMatter.pdf

TALIS web site: www.talis.com

TALIS podcasts: talk.talis.com/

What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software: www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

NISOManaging Usage Statistics for Online Content with SUSHI

Libraries engaged in managing usage statistics for online content face both challenges and opportunities.

Challenges: Usage statistics are widely available from online content providers and Project COUNTER has provided useful guidelines for counting and reporting usage. Unfortunately, the statistics are not yet available in a consistent data container and the administrative cost of individual provider-by-provider downloads is high.

Opportunities: The emergence of Electronic Resource Management Systems with the capability of storing usage statistics has accelerated the demand from libraries to acquire usage statistics. A number of non-ERMS vendors are also interested in developing business models for the consolidation of statistics for library customers. All of the interested parties are seeking a standard model for machine to machine automation of statistics harvesting.

A cross-industry group of solution-seekers has emerged to apply their skills to building this model. Participants from libraries, ILS vendors and online content providers have collaborated on developing a model that includes an automated request and response for usage statistics. The request and response mechanisms have been designed within a web services model.

The NISO SUSHI Working Group is co-chaired by Adam Chandler, Cornell University, and Oliver Pesch, EBSCO Information Services. Other founding members of the Initiative are Ivy Anderson, Harvard University/California Digital Library (from December 2005); Patricia Brennan, Thomson Scientific; Ted Fons, Innovative Interfaces, Inc.; Bill Hoffman, Swets Information Services; Tim Jewell, University of Washington; and Ted Koppel, Ex Libris.

SUSHI will be released by NISO as a Draft Standard for Trial Use early in 2006. This release will be followed by a workshop in the spring of 2006 which will introduce the initiative to a larger community of stakeholders. More information on the initiative can be found at the SUSHI web site at: www.library.cornell.edu/cts/elicensestudy/ermi2/sushi/

DLF MODS Implementation GuidelinesAvailable for Review

The Digital Library Federation's Aquifer Initiative (www.diglib.org/aquifer/) has invited public review and comment on the DLF MODS Implementation Guidelines for Cultural Heritage Materials. The guidelines are available at www.diglib.org/aquifer/DLF_MODS_ImpGuidelines_ver4.pdf (PDF document about 470kb). Comments, feedback, and questions may be sent to DLF-MODS-GUIDELINES-COMMENTS-L@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU

The primary goal of the Digital Library Federation's Aquifer Initiative is to enable distributed content to be used effectively by libraries and scholars for teaching, learning, and research. The provision of rich, shareable metadata for this distributed content is an important step towards this goal. To this end, the Metadata Working Group of the DLF Aquifer Initiative has developed a set of implementation guidelines for the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS). These guidelines are meant specifically for metadata records that are to be shared (whether by the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI PMH) or other means) and that describe digital cultural heritage and humanities-based scholarly resources.

SIMILEEnhancing Inter-Operability among Digital Assets, Metadata, and Services

Libraries worldwide face significant challenges in coping with the increasing amounts of digital material that they must acquire from external sources, either digital publishers or material produced by their institution (e.g. by the faculty and researchers of an academic institutions). These materials require new methods for long-term stewardship and preservation in addition to those that have evolved for print and other analog material.

Libraries must consider how these materials will be acquired, either from publishers or faculty, and deposited into library repositories, as well as their long-term storage, management, and preservation. They must arrange for an array of managed digital services including storage, transformation and transcoding, indexing, search, and access. Institutions need digital repository solutions that span these needs, allowing them to offer services for digital resources in the same way that they have in the past offered services for physical resources.

Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments (SIMILE) is a joint project conducted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries, and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). SIMILE seeks to enhance inter-operability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services. A key challenge is that the collections which must inter-operate are often distributed across individual, community, and institutional stores. The SIMILE project seeks to be able to provide end-user services by drawing upon the assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, and metadata held in such stores.

SIMILE will leverage and extend the DSpace digital repository system, enhancing its support for arbitrary schemata and metadata, primarily though the application of RDF and semantic web techniques. The project also aims to implement a digital asset dissemination architecture based upon web standards. The dissemination architecture will provide a mechanism to add useful "views" to a particular digital artifact (i.e. asset, schema, or metadata instance), and bind those views to consuming services.

The SIMILE effort will focus on well-defined, real-world use cases in the libraries domain. Since parallel work is underway to deploy DSpace at a number of leading research libraries, the hope is that such an approach will lead to a powerful deployment channel through which the utility and readiness of semantic web tools and techniques can be compellingly demonstrated in a visible and global community.

The SIMILE Project and its members are fully committed to the open source principles of software distribution and open development and for this reason, it releases the created intellectual property (both software and reports) under a BSD-style license. Subscriptions to mailing lists and an RSS news feed are available at the project's home page.

SIMILE project: http://simile.mit.edu/

Technology AnalysisOf Institutional Repository Software and Services

The Digital Knowledge Center (DKC) at Johns Hopkins University, working with the University of Virginia (UVA), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and an extensive network of collaborators, is conducting an architecture and technology evaluation of repository software and services such as e-learning, e-publishing, and digital preservation. The result will be a set of best practices and recommendations that will inform the development of repositories, services, and appropriate interfaces. This project is funded by the Mellon Foundation. The project wiki contains information that the group has gathered and links to additional information.

Project wiki: http://wiki.library.jhu.edu/display/RepoAnalysis/ProjectRepository

Project web site: http://ldp.library.jhu.edu/projects/repository

Library of CongressLaunches Effort to Create World Digital Library

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin announced in November 2005 that Google is the first private-sector company to contribute to the library's initiative to develop a plan to begin building a World Digital Library (WDL) for use by other libraries around the globe. The effort would be supported by funds from nonexclusive, public and private partnerships, of which Google is the first. Google Inc. has agreed to donate $3 million as the first partner in this public-private initiative.

The concept for the WDL came from a speech that Billington delivered to the newly established US National Commission for Unesco on June 6, 2005, at Georgetown University. The full text is available at www.loc.gov/about/welcome/speeches

In his speech, Billington proposed that public research institutions and libraries work with private funders to begin digitizing significant primary materials of different cultures from institutions across the globe. Billington said that the WDL would bring together online "rare and unique cultural materials held in US and Western repositories with those of other great cultures such as those that lie beyond Europe and involve more than 1 billion people: Chinese East Asia, Indian South Asia and the worlds of Islam stretching from Indonesia through Central and West Asia to Africa."

To lay the groundwork for the WDL, the library will develop a plan for identifying technology issues related to digitization and organization of WDL collections. These might include presentation, maintenance, standards and metadata schema that support both access and preservation. The plan will also identify resources, such as equipment, staffing and funding, required to digitize and launch an online presentation of a WDL collection. The content of the WDL will be primarily one-of-a-kind materials, including manuscript and multimedia materials of the particular culture.

In 2000, the library launched its Global Gateway web site (http://international.loc.gov/intldl/find/digital_collaborations.html) to present international collections of the library and materials from major libraries of the world. Current contributors to the site are repositories from Russia, Spain, Brazil, The Netherlands and France. The bilingual, multimedia presentations in Global Gateway concentrate on the historical intersections and parallels between the USA and the site's contributing nations. The new WDL will focus the other nations' own culture and history and will broaden the geographic scope by including non-Western nations and cultures.

The library's experience with large-scale digitization projects includes a number of scanning pilots with a variety of vendors, including Google. The library and Google recently completed a yearlong cooperative digitization of about 5,000 books in the public domain. The pilot developed procedures for handling and tracking fragile material as well as developing specifications for high-quality scanned images. Google will continue its scanning efforts by digitizing works of historical value from the Library of Congress' Law Library.

Once developed, the library's WDL plan would be made available to libraries, content owners and their supporters. This initiative will complement the large-scale national project that Congress has directed the library to lead: the formation of a network of institutional partners to build a digital preservation architecture for collecting, preserving and making accessible important material available only in digital form. For more information about this national program, go to www.digitalpreservation.gov.

UCSBCylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Libraries have created a digital collection of over 5,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections. In an effort to bring these recordings to a wider audience, they can be freely downloaded or streamed online. On the project web site there is the opportunity to find out more about the cylinder format, listen to thousands of musical and spoken selections from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and discover a little-known era of recorded sound.

The cylinder digitization project began in January 2002 as a pilot project with the goal of exploring the feasibility of digitizing the library's collection of cylinder recordings for online access. A $205,000 IMLS National Leadership Grant in the preservation/digitization category was awarded in September 2003, and the project began in November 2003. The project web site went online in October 2005 with an initial collection of 5,000 digitized cylinders. Cylinders continue to be added incrementally as they are digitized. Major funding for the project was provided by IMLS and the UCSB Libraries.

All audio files of the original cylinders are stored on the Davidson Library's Isilon cluster and use approximately 1.5TB of disc space. The files are streamed from a G5 Apple Xserve running Quicktime Streaming Server. The web site is hosted on a third server running Linux, which communicates with the library's OPAC in realtime through Z39.50 to generate the searchable catalog. The pilot project demonstrated the feasibility of transferring cylinders using modern electrical equipment on a large scale, but numerous hurdles had to be overcome during the course of the project. A Technical Report is in preparation to explore the details and challenges in greater depth.

Project web site: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu

SAMMASAMMA to Migrate Library of Congress Audio/Visual Collection

The Library of Congress has contracted to use The System for the Automated Migration of Media Archives, or SAMMA, to migrate their extensive collection of audio-visual material in preparation for their move to the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, VA. Over the next several years the library will use SAMMA to migrate and digitize over 500,000 television items and close to 2,000,000 audio recordings.

The library realized that it would take almost 100 years, and be prohibitively expensive to migrate and digitize the audio-visual collections manually. To have the material accessible at the Culpeper facility, a more practical, cost effective, and efficient method had to be found. In examining the alternatives, the library concluded that Media Matters' innovative migration automation system would provide the high quality necessary to preserve the recordings while meeting the required cost and time restraints.

SAMMA integrates robotic tape handling systems with proprietary tape cleaning and signal analysis technologies. SAMMA's expert system supervises quality control of each media items' migration. From a thorough examination of the physical tape for damage to real-time monitoring of video and audio signal parameters as the media item is being migrated, SAMMA ensures that magnetic media is migrated with the highest degree of confidence and the least amount of human intervention. SAMMA also gathers technical metadata throughout the entire migration process, ensuring that the process is documented in depth and gathering important metrics about the state of an entire collection. The modular, portable system will be installed on-site and run 24/7. The final product is a re-mastered cassette and/or a digital file copy of each master tape at preservation quality and the technical metadata describing the condition of the media item and the migration process.

On completion, the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC) of the Library of Congress will be the first centralized facility in the USA especially planned and designed for the acquisition, cataloging, storage and preservation of the nation's heritage collections of moving images and recorded sounds. It is expected to be the largest facility of its kind.

Media Matters, LLC: www.media-matters.net/

OCLC PICAAcquires Fretwell-Downing Informatics Group

OCLC PICA B.V. (Leiden, The Netherlands) announced in November 2005 that it has acquired the Fretwell-Downing Informatics Group (FDI – Sheffield, UK). As a result, both organizations will strengthen and extend their system development and service infrastructures.

FDI will continue to trade under its own name. Both OCLC PICA and FDI are committed to supporting the existing product ranges. The acquisition enables both companies to make use of each others' technology, capabilities and skill sets.

FDI has a long history of supplying leading-edge information management solutions to over 250 organizations worldwide. FDI operates from its offices in the UK with a US subsidiary in North America plus additional offices in Australia and Europe. FDI's experience has resulted in a suite of advanced digital library solutions including information portals, library management, resource sharing, document delivery and digital asset integration. Read more about FDI at www.fdisolutions.com

Full press release: www.oclcpica.org/?id=1483&ln=uk

OCLC PICA web site: www.oclcpica.org/

Free Software ApplicationFor E-mail Preservation Available

The Digital Preservation Testbed project from the Nationaal Archief of The Netherlands has developed an application for the task of preserving organizational e-mail: TestbedXMaiL. This application is now freely available to download from the web site: www.digitaleduurzaamheid.nl/index.cfm?paginakeuze=299&categorie=6

This application demonstrates how email messages can be created in a sustainable manner and preserved for the long term using eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Sustainable preservation ensures that the authenticity, accessibility, and readability of a digital record is secured for the duration of a given preservation period.

The Testbed XMaiL application is freely available as open source software. The source code is publicly available. Any organization can download, adapt, and use TestbedXMaiL; however, it is not immediately ready for use. Anyone that wishes to use it must tailor it to the specific requirements of their own organization.

Digital Preservation Testbed Project web site: www.digitaleduurzaamheid.nl/index.cfm?paginakeuze=298&categorie=6

ARLEndorses Call for Action to Preserve E-Journals

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has endorsed the statement "Urgent Action Needed to Preserve Scholarly Electronic Journals."

The endorsement reflects ARL's recognition that now is a crucial time for the library community to act in support of initiatives that will ensure enduring access to scholarly e-journals.

The statement arose out of a recent meeting of US academic library leaders hosted by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and articulates four actions needed to support the development of qualified preservation archives for scholarly e-journals.

ARL's Scholarly Communication Steering Committee will be developing objectives and action items stemming from the statement's recommendations.

The four needed actions articulated include:

1. 1.

   Research and academic libraries and associated academic institutions must recognize that preservation of electronic journal is a kind of insurance, and is not in and of itself a form of access.

2. 2.

   In order to address these risk factors and provide insurance against loss, qualified preservation archives would provide a minimal set of well-defined services.

3. 3.

   Libraries must invest in a qualified archiving solution.

4. 4.

   Research and academic libraries and associated academic institution must effectively demand archival deposit by publishers as a condition of licensing electronic journals.

"Urgent Action Needed to Preserve Scholarly Electronic Journals" is available at www.arl.org/osc/EjournalPreservation_Final.pdf Endorsement occurred during the ARL Membership Meeting held October 26-27, 2005.

JISCIssues Call to Preserve Online Journals

Access to entire back runs of electronic journals could be lost to educational institutions when subscriptions are cancelled or when journals cease publication. Because libraries can only lease access to electronic journals, in contrast to their print equivalents, their assets are at risk and valuable online content is in danger of being lost.

Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), in partnership with Consortium of Research Libraries in the British Isles (CURL), has issued a call to librarians and publishers to meet these challenges together. An extended pilot will see the LOCKSS system, devised at Stanford University, deployed in selected libraries in the UK from January 2006.

LOCKSS – "Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe" – is a low-cost system that preserves access to a library's online journals in a local "LOCKSS box" in a manner acceptable to publishers. The chosen libraries will each keep copies of the journals they subscribe to and together they will ensure continued access to subscribed online journals even if a publisher should disappear, a journal cease publication, or the library end its subscription.

The pilot will be supported by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) through the provision of technical advice and training, and by content complete, JISC's agent for Nesli2 in negotiating journal license deals. Participating libraries will help identify additional titles to include in the programme.

For further information: www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=funding_circular7_05

JISCIssues Reports on Digitization in the UK

In August 2004, the JISC and CURL Digital Content Creation and Curation Task Force issued an invitation to tender for a study of the current provision of digitized collections for researchers in the UK higher education sector. JISC and CURL commissioned a team of researchers from the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University to carry out this survey. This has resulted in a report entitled: "Digitisation in the UK: the Case for a UK Framework" which is freely available for download.

The objectives of this study were to:

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  Produce a high level survey of digitized material, both already available and in the process of being created, held in UK research collections across all disciplines.

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  Survey demand for digitized material and identify gaps in existing provision Develop a mechanism for identifying future digitization priorities.

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  Review funding structures and opportunities and assess possible ways of funding priority areas.

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  Recommend standards and formats for future digitization projects.

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  Provide an outline action plan for a national digitization strategy for the UK research community.

Report (PDF): www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISC-Digi-in-UK-v1-final.pdf

JISC digitisation reports and studies: www.jisc.ac.uk/parkinson.html

Internet SocietyAnnounces Launch of IETF Journal

The Internet SOCiety (ISOC), a professional membership society with more than 100 organizations and over 20,000 individual members in over 180 countries, has announced the premier issue of IETF Journal, a new Internet Society publication produced in cooperation with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The aim of the journal is to provide an easily understandable overview of what's happening in the world of Internet standards with a particular focus on the activities of the IETF Working Groups (WG). Each issue of the IETF Journal will highlight some of the hot issues being discussed in IETF meetings and in the IETF mailing lists. Volume 1, No. 1 (Autumn 2005) takes a look back at the recent 63rd Meeting of the IETF in Paris.

This publication will give anyone with an interest in internet standards an opportunity to keep abreast of many of the topics being debated by the IETF, and also facilitate participation in IETF activities for newcomers. Readers are encouraged to send feedback and suggestions for themes or topics for future articles to ietfjournal@isoc.org.

http://ietfjournal.isoc.org/

New Open Access JournalExplores Human-Technology Interaction

Human Technology: An Inter-disciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments is an international, scholarly online journal that presents articles exploring the many issues and challenges surrounding human-technology interaction. Continually evolving information and communication technologies (ICTs) touch nearly every aspect of our contemporary life. On the other hand, development of these modern technologies is closely intertwined with human practices and social innovations. The human-technology interaction and the human role in different technologies needs constant investigation, investigation that is highly interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in its nature. Published by the Agora Center, an independent and interdisciplinary research consortium at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, Human Technology is a new, scholarly online journal that provides an outlet for this kind of essential research and scientific discussion.

Articles in the first issue (Vol. 1 No.’1, April 2005) discuss various usages of mobile technologies, the influences of electronic games on youth, the development of new technologies from the human perspective, and the transfer of emotions from one device to another. The second issue (October 2005) is a special issue focusing on information and communication technologies (ICTs) and education.

Human Technology presents innovative, peer-reviewed articles that explore the issues and challenges surrounding the human role in all areas of our ICT-infused societies. Through Human Technology, researchers are encouraged to collaborate on and to explore the interdisciplinary nature of the human-technology interaction from multiple and valid perspectives. This distinctive journal intends to serve as the meeting place of interdisciplinary dialogue about how humans and societies affect and are affected by the diversity of communication and information technologies. The semi-annual online journal is offered without charge.

www.humantechnology.jyu.fi/

Two New ReportsFrom the Pew Internet & American Life Project

Teens creating and consuming online content: blogs, music, video, etc.

Half of online teens download music, one in three download video, one in five have a blog, and one in five remix others' digital material into their own creations.

About 21 million or 87 percent of those ages 12-17 use the internet, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The results highlight that this is a generation comfortable with content-creating technology. Teens are eager to share their thoughts, experiences, and creations with the wider internet population. Some key findings:

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  33 percent of online teens share their own creative content online, such as artwork, photos, stories or videos.

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  32 percent say that they have created or worked on web pages or blogs for others, including groups they belong to, friends or school assignments.

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  22 percent report keeping their own personal web page.

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  19 percent of online teens keep a blog, and 38 percent of online teens read blogs.

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  19 percent of internet-using teens say they remix content they find online into their own artistic creations.

Teens are often much more enthusiastic authors and readers of blogs than their adult counterparts. Teen bloggers, led by older girls, are a major part of this tech-savvy cohort. Teen bloggers are more fervent internet users than non-bloggers and have more experience with almost every online activity in the survey. "For American teens, blogs are about self-expression, building relationships, and carving out a presence online," said Amanda Lenhart, co-author of the report entitled, "Teen content creators and consumers" and Senior Research Specialist at the Project. "Most young people aren't spending their time at the highly-trafficked A-list blogs. They're reading and creating the `long-tail' of blogs-personal sites read by networks of friends and family."

These findings are based on a November 2004 survey of 1,100 youth ages 12 to 17 and their parents. The margin of error for responses based on the sample of teens or parents is 3 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level.

Teens continue to actively download music and video from the internet and have used multiple sources to get their files. Half of online teens (51 percent) report downloading music, compared to just 18 percent of adults who report similar behavior. Nearly one-third (31 percent) of teens report downloading video files so that they can watch them any time they want.

Teens who get music files online believe it is unrealistic to expect people to self-regulate and avoid free downloading and file-sharing altogether. Out of the 622 teens in the survey who say they have tried music downloading, 75 percent agree with the statement that, "Music downloading and file-sharing is so easy to do, it's unrealistic to expect people not to do it." Just 23 percent disagreed with this statement.

To view the entire report, please visit: www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/166/report_display.asp

Search engine use

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a data memo on the recent rise in search engine use. Search engines have become an increasingly important part of the online experience of US internet users. The most recent findings from Pew Internet & American Life tracking surveys and consumer behavior trends from the comScore Media Metrix consumer panel show that about 60 million US adults are using search engines on a typical day. These results from September 2005 represent a sharp increase from mid-2004. Pew Internet Project data from June 2004 show that use of search engines on a typical day has risen from 30 percent to 41 percent of the internet-using population, which itself has grown in the past year. This means that the number of those using search engines on an average day jumped from roughly 38 million in June 2004 to about 59 million in September 2005 – an increase of about 55 percent. comScore data, which are derived from a different methodology, show that from September 2004 to September 2005 the average daily use of search engines jumped from 49.3 million users to 60.7 million users – an increase of 23 percent. This means that the use of search engines is edging up on email as a primary internet activity on any given day. The Pew Internet Project data show that on a typical day, e-mail use is still the top internet activity. On any given day, about 52 percent of US internet users are sending and receiving email, up from 45 percent in June of 2004.

PDF version of report: www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/167/report_display.asp

Pew Internet & American Life Project: www.pewinternet.org/index.asp

National Library of AustraliaReport on Harvest of Australian Domain Web Sites Available

The National Library of Australia completed the first whole Australian domain harvest during June and July 2005. The crawl was undertaken by the internet archive on behalf of the library. Approximately 185 million unique documents were crawled from 811,000 hosts. The total size of the harvested content is 6.69 terabytes. An internal report on the whole domain harvest entitled "Report on the crawl and harvest of the whole Australian web domain undertaken during June and July 2005" by Paul Koerbin has now been made publicly available.

The objective of the project was "to collect, for preservation purposes, as much, in terms of breadth and depth, of the .au domain as possible within a defined and limited crawl duration and to gain more understanding of the issues associated with this approach to digital archiving." The report contains the technical specifications of the project as well as sections on issues identified and lessons learned.

Report (pdf): http://pandora.nla.gov.au/documents/domain_harvest_report_public.pdf

Evidence-based LibrarianshipALIA Conference Proceedings Available Online

A total of 30 conference papers from the 3rd International Evidence-Based Librarianship Conference, which was held 16-19 October 2005 in Brisbane Australia, are now available online. The theme of the conference was "Evolution of evidence: global perspectives on linking research with practice". The conference was sponsored by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA). Activities from the conference are also documented on the conference blog: eblconference.blogspot.com/

Conference papers: http://conferences.alia.org.au/ebl2005/conferencepapers.html

Virtual Reference DeskMoves Resources to WebJunction

The Virtual Reference Desk (VRD), a pioneering project in the development of digital reference, is moving its resources to WebJunction, the online community dedicated to emerging technology and training needs of librarians. This represents an expansion of the ongoing partnership between Syracuse University's Information Institute of Syracuse (IIS) and OCLC Online Computer Library Center.

The VRD is a project dedicated to the advancement of digital reference and the successful creation and operation of human-mediated, Internet-based information services. The IIS has been home to the VRD since 1997. OCLC and the IIS have collaborated on the VRD project since 2002.

In the expanded partnership, VRD will make its substantial and highly regarded body of virtual reference information available to the library community at WebJunction, a rich environment that includes threaded discussions, online courses, over 15,000 members, and a growing network of other partners. The Information Institute will continue the project's ambitious research initiative, and will collaborate with OCLC on the 2005 VRD Conference.

Originally developed with funding by the US Department of Education, The VRD has grown from a basic research project in 1997 to a consortium, agenda setting international conference, tool builder and clearinghouse for the virtual reference community. The VRD project has been instrumental in creating technical standards, quality standards, education resources, software and setting the research agenda in the reference field.

The IIS at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University is a long standing research center in the areas of education, technology and librarianship. It has been the source and host for a number of highly visible and widely successful digital education information services. The IIS created The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM, sponsored by the US Department of Education), The VRD, AskERIC and the Educator's Reference Desk. All projects share the same goal: to improve student learning by providing educators, policy makers and parents with quality information to improve teaching and the educational environment. IIS projects bring together universities, government agencies and private enterprises to promote easy access to high quality educational information to a diverse user population.

The School of Information Studies at SU is a nationally ranked center for innovative programs in information policy, information behavior, information management, information systems, information technology, and information services. The school offers an undergraduate degree, certificates of advanced studies, three professional master's programs, and a PhD. The School of Information Studies was established in 1896 as the School of Library Science and is accredited by the American Library Association (ALA).

For more information, visit the school's web site: www.ist.syr.edu