The Internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work "open access": digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access is made possible by the Internet and copyright-holder…

Today's academic libraries must demonstrate their value to cost-conscious university administrators. Budget trade-off decisions that involve the library can be difficult for any university administrator to make, and such decisions are complicated by the recent appearance of massive global digital libraries that seem poised to replace the…

Colleges share many things on Twitter, but one topic can be risky to broach: the reading habits of library patrons. Patrons' privacy is precious to most librarians. Yet new Web services thrive on collecting and sharing the very information that has long been protected. This points to an emerging tension as libraries embrace digital services.…

In the not too distant past, libraries kept a vertical file of printed materials that typically consisted of newspaper and magazine clippings, pamphlets, brochures, maps, photographs, and sundry whatnots. Most, if not all, of these materials were irregularly published or they were not published in any official manner. They were seen as incidental…

The advent of large-scale digital repositories, along with the need for sharing useful data world-wide, demands change to the current information structure. The merging of digital scientific data with scholarly literature has the potential to fulfill the Semantic Web design principles. This paper will identify factors leading to integration of…

What would it take for libraries to provide their patrons with the same kind of success in finding information using their resources as they achieve with Google, and as quickly? This author asserts that the answer is not that complicated: be more like Google, and then move beyond Google. With the technology available right now, this is not an…

The incorporation of technology into library processes has tremendously impacted staff and users alike. The University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries is no exception. Sixteen years of reference statistics are analyzed to examine the relationships between the implementation of CD-ROMs and web-based resources and the number of reference questions.…