Suchergebnisse

The arrival of e-books in Swedish libraries has been influenced by the ideas of provisions of equal access to all media and all Swedish citizens as well as by librarians' wish to provide best service to their users within the library's area of responsibility. They saw this new resource and service in the light of fulfilling their specific function in a democratic society that is usually expressed in Sweden as mediation (or transfer) of knowledge and culture to all. This is a common foundation, on which new media and information resources (including e-books) are incorporated into Swedish academic and public libraries.Apart from this common basis we see other similarities in work with e-books in both types of libraries, but also a number of differences. Most of them relate to the situation of libraries within their respective context and in relation to their specific role.Academic libraries are quite influential players in the global scholarly communication and supporters of both research and study processes. As such they are embedded in mainly international market of scientific information and scholarly materials. They have significant resources provided by parent universities for acquisition and a wide choice of commercially available material from different producers and vendors. They are organized into a national library consortium that has increased negotiation power. Thus, they have more freedom to experiment with a variety of business and pricing models offered on the international market. They also have high competence in the area of publishing and often play a role of a publisher themselves. Their involvement in research process and in open access initiatives puts them in a position to provide expertise to researchers in publishing and intellectual property areas.Public libraries are part of local cultural and educational landscape. As such they depend on the production of media and content in national languages that helps to cater to the needs and demands of the local population. They also are customers on a relatively small market of publishing, entertainment and education-related materials that help to fulfil their function in the enlightenment of the people. As public libraries offer open and free-of-charge access to their resources to the totality of the population in a particular territory, eventually covering the whole country, they are regarded as a disruptive player in the market economy. This perceived threat from public libraries was reborn in the emerging market of e-books.Despite these differences both academic and public libraries face similar challenges and problems in management of their collections, creating metadata, and providing access to them. So far, no such solutions that could satisfy all involved parties have been found. ; Sponsorship : Vetenskapsrådet

Abstract. The paper falls under the category Digital preservation and access management. The aim ofthe paper is to present the approach to evaluating the EU SHAMAN (Sustaining Heritage Accessthrough Multivalent ArchiviNg) project outcomes from the point of view of the needs and requirementsof the memory institutions. The complex approach to the evaluation of the outcomes is defined by thecomplexity of the projects goals. The evaluation and assessment design draws upon earlier evaluationof digital repositories and other projects in the area of digital preservation. The evaluation has to becarried out from the perspective of the representatives of research and development community, thememory organizations such as libraries, archives and museums, the end-users of technology, such aslibrarians, curators and archivists and the end-users of preserved materials, such as researchers,educators and artists. Quantitative and qualitative data collection tools and methods are constructed forthe use in the assessment process. The particular requirements that memory institutions have for longtermdigital preservation systems are taken into account. ; Sponsorship : European Union

The aims of the paper are: review the situation of e-books delivery in the Swedish public libraries (as it looked at the end of 2012); identify the barriers that public libraries encounter in providing access to e-books; highlight the policy-related problems of e-book provision through public libraries. A survey was carried out in October, 2012 of all public libraries in Sweden. 291 questionnaires were issued. 185 were completed, response rate was 63.3%. Theprovision of an e-book service has arisen as a result of either demand or an ideological belief that the ethos of democratic values and equality of access requires libraries to offer material in all media. Librarians find the situation of e-books provision through libraries unsatisfactory: the provider of titles removes them from the catalogue without warning or explanation, there are too few titles for children and students, and access to popular titles is delayed. ; Sponsorship : Svensk biblioteksföreningen

1. This deliverable reports on the demonstration and evaluation of ISP3, which was designed to demonstrate the potential of the SHAMAN framework for digital preservation in the context of e-science institutions and for the research and development community.2. The demonstration process was carried out by means of presentations of the training material to the scientists from LNEC and LIP in Lisbon, Portugal. The audiences for the demonstrations consisted of scientists working with different data and IT support staff.3. The evaluation is based on the reports of focus groups held with two groups of scientists, together with structured data from self-completed questionnaires, administered on the same occasions.4. The SHAMAN 'consciousness raising' event appears to have had useful consequences. In both institutions it appeared to fulfil the aim of drawing attention to the problems of digital preservation and to the role of the SHAMAN framework in finding answers to the problems. To a degree, the participants were already sympathetic to the ideas, since they were working in situations that daily brought their attention to the need for preservation policies. However, the discussions were also useful in extending the concept of digital preservation beyond the existing perceptions within the SHAMAN teams. In particular, the notion of the 'digital object' needs to be expanded to include not only digitized physical objects such as documents and images, but also 'born digital' phenomena such as data streams, software programs and analytical results of experiments. ; Sponsorship : EU: 7th framework programme

1. The report describes the demonstration and evaluation of ISP1, which was designed to demonstrate the potential of the SHAMAN framework for digital preservation in the context of memory institutions and for the research and development community.2. The demonstration process was carried out by means of presentations based on screen-casts in three locations, Frankfurt, Vilnius and Glasgow. The audiences for the demonstrations consisted persons occupying of a wide range of roles in memory institutions, including senior management, operational level staff and IT support staff.3. The evaluation is based on the reports of focus groups held in the three locations, together with structured data from self-completed questionnaires, administered on the same occasions.4. Participants in the focus groups responded favourably to the ideas demonstrated in the presentations. There was particular interest in the choice of mainly open source software and in automation of processes, both of which have cost reduction implications, and in the idea of a digital preservation policy: the majority of participating organizations had no such policy. Participants also drew attention to aspects of preservation which they found lacking in the presentation and which were desirable, specifically: the preservation of font information; working with already obsolete formats; the automatic extraction of necessary metadata; the fact of mixed media archives involving, e.g., film and audio files; support for controlled vocabularies for search and discovery; and demonstration of workflows at a more practical level.5. The questionnaire results revealed most approval of the retrieval and verification capabilities and less for the ingest processes. Otherwise the results supported the findings from the focus groups in general. There was a division of opinion over the value of the Multivalent browser and the application of grid technology, possibly because of differences in knowledge of these matters. Highest priority was assigned to data migration, access and authentication and bit stream preservation and least to independence standards and search capacity – issues that may be worth further exploration.6. Evaluation has also been performed to determine the project"s impact on the R&D community by means of submission and rejection rates of papers to journals and conferences, and bibliometric and Webometric analyses. The results demonstrate that the research outputs from the project are of interest to the R&D community and that the impact of the project as a whole compares favourably with other European projects in the digital preservation area.7. The evaluation has revealed strengths and shortcomings in the demonstration process, which will influence the development of demonstrators for ISP2 and ISP3. The SHAMAN framework for digital preservation is seen as offering new possibilities and rigorous methods for the field by the practitioners in memory institutions. ; Sponsorship : EU: 7th framework programme