Friday, August 31, 2012

ALA's Association for Library Collections & Technical Services hosts YouTube channel

http://www.youtube.com/user/alctsce/

ALA's Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) launched a YouTube channel in February 2012 to host its growing collection of webinar presentations. Currently, there are five playlists available (some webinars are featured on more than one playlist): Collections, Cataloging, Preservation, Institutional Repositories, and RDA Series Webinars. Within each playlist is a wide variety of presentations; on the "Preservation" playlist, for example, you can find videos addressing topics such as disaster preparedness, mold prevention and remediation, and digital preservation. The topics covered on the "Collections" playlist include effective subscription management, the rise and fall of reference collections, evaluating e-resources, and buying library materials on the out-of-print market. The "Cataloging" playlist includes a presentation with the memorable title "Cataloging Icky Things, or, If You Can Catalog a Book, You Can Catalog Anything!"  Those who are preparing for the implementation of RDA will appreciate the 19 webinars featured in the RDA Webinar Series, including "Cataloging Law Materials with RDA."

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Print Management at "Mega-scale"

Lavoie, Brian F. Print Management at "Mega-scale": Regional Perspective on Print Book Collections in North America. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research, c2012. At: http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-05.pdf

Using a mega-regions ("geographical regions defined on the basis of economic integration and other forms of interdependence") framework to model regional consolidation of shared print book library collections, this report explores a counterfactual scenario where local US and Canadian print book library collections are consolidated into regional shared collections. The analysis in this paper builds upon findings from the OCLC Research report, Cloud-sourcing Research collections: Managing Print in the Mass-digitized Library Environment (2011), and draws upon bibliographic and library holdings data from the WorldCat database.

Friday, August 10, 2012

App-titude

In its latest issue, The Charleston Advisor launches a new regular column focusing on "apps of interest in the library community".  The initial column provides a brief overview of vendor mobile apps with the promise of closer examination of specific apps in the future. Additionally, formal reviews of some apps will be offered in the review section of this publication.