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The results from the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) annual survey of head and senior academic librarians in the UK was published on Thursday, indicating that the management of e-resources is perceived as the main challenge over the next several years. Read the entire JISC Attitudinal Survey 2008: Head and Senior Learning and Librarian Staff here.

“The research, supported by SCONUL3, found that in both the higher (HE) and further education (FE) sectors, the perceived shift away from print to a dependence on e-resources creates other challenges such as how to manage the volume of material, how users can access it and how libraries and learning resource centres (LRC) can provide or promote such resources. It also highlights financial issues such as potential funding sources for the increasing amounts of new technology, electronic materials and subscriptions likely to be needed by the learning institutions of the future.”

Other Key Findings:

• The SCONUL Top Concerns survey highlighted access management as a key issue among this audience. Encouragingly, the JISC survey shows the proportion feeling informed about access management issues has increased significantly since 2007 along with awareness and knowledge of JISC activity in this area and the UK Access Management Federation
• 61% of HE and 43% of FE libraries/LRCs report having digitised their own collections but relatively few currently have a digitisation strategy in place. A quarter of HEIs are planning to put one in place compared with one in ten in FE
• Around one in four HE libraries have collaborated with one another on jointly procuring collections, and a further 12% jointly digitising their collections
• Around one third agreed that academic libraries/LRCs could use social networking opportunities to engage students with their services but most were unsure especially in HE

via Open Education News

DJ Francis, author of OnlineMarketerBlog.com, writes a guest post for ReadWriteWeb titled 5 Ways to Sell Social Media to Your Boss. For anyone who is currently trying to push social media at their library or organization, you may want to check out the article’s helpful recommendations:

1. Keeping Up With The Joneses
2. Listening (Customer/Market Research)
3. Responding
4. Talking To Actual Customers
5. Set The Boss’ Sights Long-Term

Chris Brogan discusses 25 Ways to Build Your Community online. This post is aimed at bloggers and offers solid advice on ways to encourage a steady readership, and effective marketing strategies. Here are his first five suggestions:

1. Read at least 100 blogs regularly. Not every post, but a variety. Extra hint: go OUTSIDE your particular passion circle.
2. Write brief, tight, actionable posts that people want to reference later.
3. Don’t ignore the value of linkbait and viral content. Don’t ALWAYS do that, but hey, it can work.
4. Give people your best. I know that sounds trite, but I’m saying don’t charge for the best and give away your crap. That’s a yard sale. Be Tiffany & Co.
5. When you write about people, use LINKS to connect your writing to them. This encourages good neighbor policies.

Over 100 organizations in 20 different countries have signed up and committed to participate in the first ever Open Access Day which will take place next week on Tuesday, October 14. Founded by SPARC, Students for FreeCulture and PLoS, Open Access Day will help broaden awareness of Open Access issues “including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public.”

via Open Education News

Zoho, the popular online application suite with over 1.2 million users, launched an application marketplace last week, enabling developers to build applications with Zoho Creator and sell or give them away for free. Over 100,000 applications have already been created by third-party developers. Many of these new apps are geared toward business use, but there are also offerings for personal use. I have already installed a free project management tool and have my eye on a personal expense tracker.

The Noupe blog writes about 25+ Incredibly Useful Twitter Tools and Firefox Plugins, one of which I just recently started using called TwitterKeys - a bookmarklet which provides symbols and funky characters for you to copy and paste into your tweets. Here’s a handful of their suggested tools:

• Just Tweet It
• Twitter Patterns
• Twitturly
• Twitterrific
• LessFriends

Inside Higher Ed reports on the upcoming two-year pilot program at the University of Texas at Austin which will switch select classes to e-textbooks only. Partnering with John Wiley & Sons, the university will foot the bill for 1,000 enrolled students who will have the choice to access their textbooks online through Wiley Plus or download their e-books onto their computers. This innovative experiment will test student and faculty preferences for e-textbooks and determine the scalability of future deployments.

“This pilot aims to improve student outcomes, provide students with equity of access to the most current materials and increase faculty satisfaction and efficiency while respecting faculty independence and freedom of choice in the selection of course materials,” Bonnie Lieberman, Wiley’s senior vice president and general manager for higher education, said in a statement released Monday. “Our primary aim is to improve learning and teaching outcomes while significantly lowering the costs of learning materials for students.”

Ruth Reynard, Director of Faculty for Career Education Corp. writes about Avoiding the 5 Most Common Mistakes in Using Blogs with Students in the latest issue of Campus Technology. Anyone who is utilizing blogging for instruction will want to check out this article which discusses these five pitfalls:

1. Ineffective Contextualization
2. Unclear Learning Outcomes
3. Misuse of the environment
4. Illusive grading practices
5. Inadequate time allocation

Google has re-launched its Blog Search as a memetracker - a tool which tracks and aggregates discussions happening throughout the blogosphere. Those who have used Tech Meme or Postgenomic will be familiar with the interface. Users can browse through eleven popular categories on the left, and view much-discussed stories which are grouped on the right.

via ReadWriteWeb

Netflix, the video rental service and website launched an API yesterday that will enable access to its database of over 100,000 film and television titles. Netflix members have rated more than 2 billion titles in the collection. The API is free for commercial use and for mashup creation. It will be very interesting to see how libraries (and librarians) can make use of all of that data. Visit the Netflix Developer’s Network to get started.

via Programmable Web

Gmail users will want to check out this post from Mashable listing 13 Gmail Extensions for Firefox 3. These handy plugins will allow you to sign into multiple Gmail accounts at once, set up dynamic email signatures with links to your social networking accounts, use Gmail as a virtual storage facility for your files, and more.

Jody Gilbert at TechRepublic discusses 10 simple things you can do to improve your writing. This best practices guide provides helpful tips and recommended guidelines including:

• Avoid echoes (repeated words or phrases)
• Avoid nonparallel list items
• Be aware of agreement problems (singular or plural?)

The informative guide is also available as a PDF download.

Blog search engine Technorati posted the new State of the Blogosphere 2008 report last week in segments over five days. This incredibly detailed report which discusses the who, what, why, and how of blogging has now been posted in its entirety and is divided into the following sections:

• Introduction
• Day 1: Who Are the Bloggers?
• Day 2: The What And Why of Blogging
• Day 3: The How of Blogging
• Day 4: Blogging For Profit
• Day 5: Brands Enter The Blogosphere

Google is now offering embeddable previews for any book included in the Google Book Search collection. Several libraries including the University of California and the University of Texas Libraries are incorporating the previews into their online catalogs. Online bookstores and other companies are also taking advantage of the new feature. Want to check it out yourself? Try the Preview Wizard to embed a book preview such as the one below.

via Mashable

Both Campus Technology and Inside Higher Ed discuss a new study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s E-Business Institute which finds that undergraduates prefer classes which utilize lecture capture technology.

“According to new research released this week by the University of Wisconsin-Madison involving about 7,500 undergraduate and graduate students, an overwhelming 82 percent of students said they would prefer courses that offer online lectures over traditional classes that do not include an online lecture component. The researchers also pointed out the implications for these findings extend well beyond the classroom.”