President's Message

In a literature survey on how reference collections have changed to accommodate patrons’ web-based information-seeking behaviors, one notes a marked “us vs. them” mentality — a fear that the Internet might render reference irrelevant. These anxieties are oft-noted in articles urging libraries to embrace digital and online reference sources. Why all the ambivalence? Citing existing research and literature, this essay explores myths about the supposed superiority of physical reference collections and how patrons actually use them, potential challenges associated with electronic reference collections and how providing vital e-reference collections benefits the library as well as its patrons.

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><em>Abstract: This paper will introduce the reader to the world of freeware and open source software. Following a brief introduction, the author presents an overview of these types of software. Next comes a discussion of licensing issues unique to freeware and open source software, which leads directly to issues of registration. The author then offers several strategies readers can adopt to locate these software packages on the Web. The author then addresses questions regarding the use of freeware and open source software before offering a few closing thoughts.</em></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> </p>

Much of the focus of digital collections has been and continues to be on rare and unique materials, including monographs. A monograph may be made even rarer and more valuable by virtue of hand written marginalia. Using technology to enhance scans of unique books and make previously unreadable marginalia readable increases the value of a digital object to researchers. This article describes a case study of enhancing the marginalia in a rare book by Copernicus.

Review of EPUB 3: Best Practices

Plots and figures play an important role in the process of understanding a scientificpublication, providing overviews of large amounts of data or ideas that are difficult to in-tuitively present using only the text. State of art in digital libraries, serving as gatewaysto knowledge encoded in scholarly writings, does not take full advantage of the graphicalcontent of documents. Enabling machines to automatically unlock the meaning of scien-tific illustrations would allow immense improvements in the way scientists work and theknowledge is being processed. In this paper we present a novel solution for the initial problem of processing graphicalcontent, obtaining figures from scholarly publications stored in PDF format. Our methodrelies on vector properties of documents and as such, does not introduce additional errors,characteristic for methods based on raster image processing. Emphasis has been placed oncorrectly processing documents in High Energy Physics. The described approach makesdistinction between different classes of objects appearing in PDF documents and usesspatial clustering techniques to group objects into larger logical entities. A number ofheuristics allow the rejection of incorrect figure candidates and the extraction of differenttypes of metadata.


 This analysis compares how the traditional ILS and the next-generation ILS impact systems and technical services staffing models at academic libraries. The method used in this analysis is to select two categories of ILSes—two well-established traditional ILSes and three leading next-generation ILSes—and compare them by focusing on two aspects: (1) software architecture, and (2) workflows and functionality. The results of the analysis show that the next-generation ILS will have substantial implications for library systems and technical staffing models in particular, suggesting that library staffing models should be redesigned and key librarian and staff positions be redefined to meet the opportunities and challenges brought on by the next-generation ILS.
 Keywords: next-generation ILS, client-server computing, cloud computing, library staffing modes

Editor's Comments


 A description of modern telecommunications devices which can be useful in inter-library communications, including their capacities, types of signals and carriers. Described are telephone lines, radio broadcasting, coaxial cable, microwave and communications satellites.
 This article, and the one following, were presented as tutorials by the author's to participants at the American Library Association's Atlantic City Convention on June 25, 1969.

Can the navigation of complex research web sites be improved so that users more often find their way without intermediation or instruction? Librarians at Eastern Michigan University discovered that students were not recognizing navigational elements on web based research guides and tested possible solutions. In this study, two types of navigation improvements were applied to separate sets of online guides. Both sets of experimental guides showed an increase in use of navigation to secondary pages of the guides.