Scholarly Information Practicies - redux

Dick Hartley pointed out the report "Communicating Knowledge: How and Why Researches Public and Disseminate Their Findings" (September 2009). The report from RIN and JISC deals with UK researchers. Among the findings: Peer reviewed journals are very important as a channel for publishing and dissemination (p. 16). Surprise!

Scholarly Information Practices

Bernie Sloan noted this publication: "Scholarly Information Practices in the Online Environment: Themes from the Literature and Implications for Library Service Development". In the conclusions "The question facing service developers... is not what services need to be offered digitally, but rather how do we process in the long term to move all services to an e-research platform." (p. 34). This is a good fit with the talk that Rush Miller gave at the USF Tampa Library this week. He also pointed out that the future of libraries is digital. (He used some of the same material from the Slideshare posting at http://www.slideshare.net/chris1tina/beyond-merely-surviving ) Miller seemed particularly adamant that we are on the move to electronic formats mostly. It does seem to me that we are getting there, but... why do we still have a shelving crisis at the Tampa Library at the end of every semester? What are our users doing with the books? Using the books as doorstops? Could we eliminate the shelving crunch by buying everyone a Kindle? ;)