"The ACRL publication Value of Academic Libraries: A Comprehensive Research Review and Report is a review of the quantitative and qualitative literature, methodologies and best practices currently in place for demonstrating the value of academic libraries, developed for ACRL by Megan Oakleaf of the iSchool at Syracuse University. The primary objective of this comprehensive review is to provide academic librarians with a clearer understanding of what research about the performance of academic libraries already exists, where gaps in this research occur, and to identify the most promising best practices and measures correlated to performance. "

Blog about the ACRL report: "Futures thinking for academic librarians: Higher Education in 2025"

"The report has identified 26 possible scenarios for academic libraries in the year 2025, the distant horizon being justified by a need to see beyond our current woes. It impressively handles very up-to-date ideas on higher education and ponders their potential impact on academic libraries, and this adds to the value of the report. Then each scenario is positioned on a quadrant that plots impact against probability."

Washington DC--The American Library Association (ALA), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) announce the release of "A Guide for the Perplexed Part II: The Amended Google-Michigan Agreement." The amendment represents important additions and this guide provides an overview to help librarians better understand the revised terms.

he Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) announces the release of a new digital publication, "The Kaleidoscopic Concern" by Kaetrena D. Davis-Kendrick. This annotated bibliography on racial and ethnic diversity in librarianship focuses on new areas of study such as gender issues and white privilege with regard to racial minority and ethnic librarians. "The Kaleidoscopic Concern" is available on the ACRL Web site as a free downloadable digital publication

Especially the last two paragraphs

A much better than average report on the relationships between librarianship and the values of libraries and the values held by the media savvy, technology-centered students of today. Describes the two sets of values, and describes how libraries can adabt to the new expectation in meaningful ways.
 

pg 99 "It is clear that Millennials and others comfortable with a wide range of media and technologies will redefine the traditional manifestations of research and creative activity with these new mashed, cut and pasted creations. For them, the line between consumer and creator is blurred in a way that previously was not possible."

pg 100 "Clear rifts have emerged in the virtual terrain that is occupied by library policies, services and collections and is explored by online users. These rifts or disconnects can be grouped into three classifications for redress. These include technology (infrastructure and integration), policy (copyright, IT policy, liability), and unexploited opportunities."

Useful overview of new ways of thinking about the role of library discovery systems in the context of the networked environment.  Highlights the necessary changes to the function of library catalogs now that discovery, location, request and retrieval can be separated from one another. 

"Much of the discussion is about improving the catalogue user's experience, not an unreasonable aspiration. However, we really need to put this in the context of a more far-reaching set of issues about discovery and about the continued evolution of library systems, including the catalogue, in a changing network environment. In this environment, users increasingly discover resources in places other than the catalogue."

Looks at the development of various classification systems leading up to tagging, or user created metadata. Argues that tagging more closely mirrors the nature of web information.

Argues that ontologies are a bad ideal for organizing the world online. Points out that library classification systems are designed to optimize space on the shelves, not to describe the essences of identities. Also, that library classification systems are fundamentally about organizing books, not about organizing the enormity of human knowledge. The same flaws exists in a hierarchical file system. That it is designed with the assumption that a thing can only be in one place at one time -- it makes some attempt to have the organizional structure of ideas match the physical world, where in fact a pointer, or an idea, or a metaphorical path can be in countless places at the same time, and can have many equally important and useful relationships which describe it.

That ontologies are useful where there are expert users, clear categories and a limited domain. But, much less useful for non-expert users or large domains, and fuzzy categories. Links are the universal pointers on the web, and the addition of tags is simple, and provides a much more useful finding system than an ontology. With a system like delicious, you get to know who's doing the tagging, not just what the tags are, so you get to limit searches by people and time, limiting the size of your group [penntags tie-in].

 Alexander, Bryan. "Web 2.0. A New Wave of Innovation For Teaching and Learning" EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 32–44.
pg 33
"The idea dates as far back as the 1960s and JCR Licklider’s thoughts on using networked computing to connect people in order to boost their knowledge and their ability to learn."
The new ways of using the web are about manipulation of content and participation by readers.
pg 34
Describes the importance of "microcontent" for users, who can move around the web. Microcontent is of course not new, and can be seen to go back to email messages, etc.
Tying the use of microcontent and user participation together with user-created metadata, such as tags and folksonomies. [With all of this microcontent out there to be manipulated, and all of these ways of manipulating it, users need to be able to tag the content with terms to help them retrieve them, as they can not count on remembering which bit of microcentent came from where, etc.]
pg 35 -end.
Introduces and describes delicious, mentioning people connecting to each other through metadata. mentions penntags and h20 and then moves on to wikis and writely.
moves on to blogs and rss, moves on to blog searching, technorati, memeorandom, etc. to digg, ohmynews. then onto sites that let users combine these, like gnosh and rollyo. Raises the question of how universities will deal with this: (Pg 42) "How will colleges and universities consider preserving such small pieces of intellectual work, especially as the works migrate across multiple, shifting, changing platforms?"
Then raises questions about copyright, etc.

Paper proposals due on May 10.