Knowledge Leadership Associates » e-resources

The future: how will e-books affect libraries and the culture of reading?

Peter G. Underwood — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:14:12 +0000

Val Skelton has an interesting set of comments on the future of e-books in the 8 December 2011 issue of Information today Europe, where she reviews the proceedings of Online Information 2011 . Several speakers noted that the book industry is becoming somewhat like the music industry, with more consumers downloading material than entering a music store or bookshop. Inevitably, this will change the way in which media are marketed and will also have a profound effect on the way in which we shop, especially when the new generation of e-books become available. These are likely to offer a different experience of reading and provide better search and index facilities. What does it mean for libraries? Probably that services need to be geared to the “socially-networked” reader; however, what the impact might be in an African context has still to be explored.

The future: how will e-books affect libraries and the culture of reading? is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

All the news that’s fit to read . . .

Peter G. Underwood — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:39:18 +0000

Not quite the motto of The New York times, but an implied question in these troubled times. The furore surrounding News Corporation and Murdoch, father and son, has raised many questions about the behaviour of the press, freedom of information and the “right to know”. However, there are other aspects of the business models that should also concern us as librarians and providers of information services to the public. Ian Clark, in his blog, Thoughts of a [wannabe] librarian, has commented on the impact that direct charges to users may have had on the supply and use of news-related information in libraries. He comments, “Many libraries provide access to newspapers for free and, with declining budgets, it raised the question: should libraries subscribe to online newspaper content for their users? But it also raised a greater and more important question. If information is increasingly to be found behind paywalls in a time when libraries are faced with closure, how will we ensure equal access to information for all?” The question is even more pointed here, in South Africa, where the cost of a newspaper is high and a significant proportion of a worker’s pay, and where access to networked sources of information is often difficult and expensive. If libraries are impeded in providing access by the use of paywalls, doesn’t this have a direct effect on the social uses of information in South Africa?

All the news that’s fit to read . . . is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Change and digital decay

Peter G. Underwood — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 14:42:07 +0000

David Rosenthal provides a thought-provoking set of comments in his blog on “Are we facing a ‘Digital Dark Age’?” (DSHR’s blog, 8 February 2011). In it, he considers the problems of preservation of digital material and concludes that, “Looking ahead, the real problem we’re facing is a fundamental change in the publishing paradigm that has been with us since Gutenberg. Documents are no longer static objects that can be copied in such a way that any reader will find any of the copies equivalent. Each reader sees a unique object that created on the fly, and changes continually as the reader looks at it. The problems that may lead to a future digital dark age are much more fundamental than details of formats or storage media, they lie in a transformation of the very nature of documents.”

Change and digital decay is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Forthcoming Courses 2011

gretchensmith — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:24:53 +0000

Forthcoming Courses 2011 is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates