There is a growing shift to digital offerings among public libraries. Libraries increasingly are fulfilling roles as technology hubs for their communities, with high demand for technology and career development training resources. Ebooks and other digital materials are on the rise, while print is being scaled back. More libraries are turning to…

For nearly a decade now, librarians have discussed and deliberated ways, for the sake of convenience, to integrate internet-like searching into their own catalogs to mimic what academic library patrons have been using outside the library. Discovery tools and web-scale discovery services (WSDS) attempt to provide users with a similar one-stop shop…

Recent years have seen an explosion of the number of institutions involved in or beginning to think about web archiving. Many National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) members, as well as other universities, historical societies, and state and local governments, have recognized the need for and importance of preserving a variety of web content…

The rise of technology gives individuals new options when it comes to viewing and managing their collection of reading materials. Where there used to be wooden bookshelves filled to the brim with bound volumes of paper, there now sits a small, handheld, battery-powered device that, when one thinks about it, does so much more than simply show one…

Selecting the most appropriate content for a community is a challenge librarians have faced since the dawn of libraries. Formal patron-driven acquisition (PDA) models have been around for at least a decade. These models attempt to collect materials based on known patron demand. Some libraries simply use a suggestion form, while others use…

Social media now offer a fresh opportunity to enliven the learning process. But to gain traction, they will have to prove their relevance. Librarians are quite vocal in advocating for the preservation of human interaction around digital media; one might say that it is their charge to be certain that the human factors within digital libraries are…

Technology has transformed libraries. There are digital libraries, electronic collections, online databases and catalogs, ebooks, downloadable books, and much more. With free technology such as social websites, newspaper collections, downloadable online calendars, clocks and sticky notes, online scheduling, online document sharing, and online…

In this article, the author shares the successful digitization effort of their library and demonstrates how they were able to expand their first digital collection. The author started working at James G. Gee Library when the director asked him to try digital collections and was asked to study an open source collection management program called…

The rapidly evolving digital world inspires much use of nautical terminology: (1) navigation; (2) discovery; (3) the voyage; and (4) the new terrain at the end of the journey. Considering how quickly new technologies are arriving on smartphones, the nautical adventure is continuing at an increased pace. Innovations in basic library services follow…

In these days of distance learners, virtual libraries, and electronic information, no library can be without some way of providing remote access to affiliated users, whether they are distance students, online students, or local students and faculty members working from home. Libraries subscribe to any number of electronic resources and journals,…

Digital repository is one sector of digital content creation that receives less mainstream attention. Unlike blogs with accretions of documents and commentary or websites with masses of ephemeral pages that come and go, digital repositories have a more plodding pace of development. They conform to demanding standards for metadata and information…

The Information Group at Millipore has been successfully using a digital rights management tool to secure the email distribution of archived laboratory notebooks. Millipore is a life science leader providing cutting-edge technologies, tools, and services for bioscience research and biopharmaceutical manufacturing. Consisting of four full-time…

Librarians and archivists find themselves facing the prospect of digitization. Everyone is doing it, everyone needs it. Discussions rage nationally and internationally concerning what to digitize and the best means to present and retain digital objects. Digitization is the act of making something digital, expressing a physical object "in numerical…

Describes Gopher, a distributed document delivery service for electronic publishing across a computer network that allows a user to access data using a client-server communications model. The use of Gopher in campuswide information systems is described, and its use in libraries with electronic journals and multimedia documents is discussed. (three…

In 2004, Georgia State University (GSU) Library's Southern Labor Archives, located in Atlanta, began working with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) to plan for the digitization of the union's 105-year-old journal. With generous financial support from IAM, the authors, who are GSU staff members, began…