Library landscapes: digital developments

Derek Law

Introduction

This chapter looks at the future in terms of the kind of landscape in which libraries will operate. This will inevitably be a landscape that is dominated by the Internet and the new kinds of provision and usage that are possible in a digital world. It investigates key aspects of digital libraries and the relationship between digital libraries and knowledge creation and use in different communities. It considers the view that there is an urgent need for libraries to develop a strong online presence in addition to the physical building in order to remain relevant in today’s online world – especially because they are social institutions, rooted in social communities. The chapter looks at a range of current and likely future communication tools, including wikis, blogs, social networking and podcasting and looks at how to develop a range of resources that will best meet the needs of the library population.

Societal Change

The notion that the world is changing fundamentally and that the digital natives have arrived is hardly novel, but once it enters the heart of the establishment we must grant a new gravitas to the presumption of such change. The way in which church and state have both arrived at this conclusion now leaves little room for the sceptic.

The Catholic Church has adopted this view. For World Communications Day 2010, Pope Benedict XVI has developed the notion of cyber priests. He proposed a new commandment for priests struggling to get their message across: ‘Go forth and blog’. The Pope, whose own presence on the Web has grown massively in recent years, urged priests to use all multimedia tools at their disposal to preach the Gospel. This message can be found not only on Facebook, but also on the papal website Pope2You[1].

At almost the same time, the Lord Chief Justice of England[2] has called for a rethinking of trial by jury to meet the abilities of the Internet generation (Gibb, 2009). He believes that individuals no longer have the ability to listen to sustained oral presentations for hours on end and then draw valid conclusions. This in turn reflects a world where jurors are increasingly in trouble for such things as using Google Maps[3] to view crime scenes - and not only in the United Kingdom (Schwartz, 2009).

The world is increasingly populated by the a-literate, for whom reading and writing in the way past generations have understood these are becoming optional lifestyle choices and not the normal requirement of the intelligent individual. The a-literate expect:

§ Instant gratification

§ Convenience (which is seen as superior to quality)

§ Images are at least as important as text

§ If it’s not on the web, it doesn’t exist

§ Cut and paste is preferable to original thought

§ Just enough material for the task in hand, not everything

(Law, 2006)

Perhaps the ultimate if slightly tongue in cheek application for this attention deficit disorder generation is the Ten Word Wiki. (Ten Word Wiki, 2010). Rather like the haiku it attempts to distil if not wisdom then at least information in exactly ten words.[4]

Nor is this change unique to libraries. The virtual collapse of the local newspaper industry has been chronicled by the much admired Clay Shirky (2009), and his central theme paraphrased neatly:

This is the landscape in which libraries must now operate; a landscape where the maps of the past are of little value but the central tenets of our professional geography remain relevant - if in need of complete rethinking. Libraries have always believed passionately in the concept of service. But there is now a need for a complete reversal of thinking and successful libraries will have to build their services around the user’s workflow; libraries must be available to users when and where needed rather than expecting users to visit the library at times convenient to the organisation.

Different communities, different responses

Although the communities libraries serve may require different responses, it is the case that the underlying issues are the same. The Ithaka Report (2009) makes the unhappy if unsurprising comment that ‘basic scholarly information use practices have shifted rapidly in recent years, and as a result the academic library is increasingly being disinter mediated from the discovery process, risking irrelevance in one of its core functional areas’. This is just as true of students as it is of researchers, but while academic staff feel that they need libraries to buy materials to support research, students are much more likely to need support services to teach them how to undertake research and to find the relevant materials that the library already owns or has access to.

Digital content

In a recent Research Information Network (RIN) study which considered key issues for researchers and the links which needed to be forged with librarians (RIN, 2010a), a number of useful points were made which reach to the heart of the challenges which have to be addressed. Libraries have tended to focus either on purchasing digital content or on digitising the paper collections they already possess. Of course it is arguable that the explosion of purchasing of electronic journals and e-materials has been in response to researchers needs. Another Research Information Network report (RIN 2010b) examined how researchers interact with journal websites and what the impact of this had been. It concluded that researchers show significant expertise when using e-journals, that they find the information they need quickly and efficiently, and that greater spending on e-journals was linked to better research outcomes. But there has been almost no debate on born digital content and how the huge explosion of such content should be collected, organised and managed. Academic staff increasingly see librarians as managers of the purchasing process rather than collection builders in support of research (Ithaka, 2009). Yet collection building and more particularly the aggregation of resources at a system level does demonstrate one of the elements we can contribute to a digital future. Dempsey (2009) reflects on this in relation to the long tail and links it to classic librarianship:

“It is not enough for materials to be present within the system: they have to be readily accessible ('every reader his or her book', in Ranganathan's terms), potentially interested readers have to be aware of them ('every book its reader'), and the system for matching supply and demand has to be efficient ('save the time of the user'). It is time for libraries to develop agreed strategies for digital collection development. Thus far efforts have been somewhat piecemeal and have tended to focus on digital repositories. Initially seen as tools for collecting research output, there has been a growing realisation that repositories could be one of the key building blocks of future library development hosting a whole range of types of digital resources. But this has to be coupled with an understanding of a raft of what may seem obvious infrastructural elements to librarians but are not necessarily so to scientists: long term archiving, bibliographic control, metadata, version control, authority control, audit trails, usage data, IPR management, navigation and discovery, delivery and access.”

Matching user support to user needs

As research environments become more complex, it seems sensible to explore how far scientists can manage their own infrastructure and how far they need support to manage this, in exactly the same way as estates professionals, human resources professionals and health and safety professionals manage elements of research support. What seems destined to become a classic case of not managing information happened in 2009-10 at the University of East Anglia where the science underpinning climate change was challenged because the information had not been properly managed. This need to manage information has in some libraries led to a revisiting of the concept of the subject librarian now described as ‘embedded’. There is even a neat coinage of ‘feral’ librarians[6] for those working in librarian positions but without library qualifications. Kesselman and Watstein (2009) judge that ‘embedded librarianship is one of the prime tenets of a user-centered library’. It is only by experiencing at first hand exactly how users manage their information, their information seeking and their workflows that librarians can begin to design and offer services which truly add value and are responsive.

Student use of Libraries

A recent Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), 2006 survey should have given librarians pause for thought. It showed that:

§ 89% of students use search engines to begin a search

§ 2% use a library web site

§ 93% are satisfied or very satisfied with this approach to searching

§ 84% are satisfied if librarian assisted

This reduction in satisfaction when librarians intervene does not suggest that all the effort going into information literacy training has been productive. This may reflect traditional approaches and what has been called the ‘eat spinach syndrome.’ When all that a student seeks and requires is just enough information for the task in hand or a short cut to the answer, library staff still insist on showing them how to undertake the task properly. The minatory approach requires the user to do it properly or not do it at all; eat your spinach, it’s good for you. This is no doubt well intentioned and worthy but obviously does not reflect what users want. Much more effort is needed to identify then meet user needs rather than holding on to the past.

If librarians wish to be real stakeholders in the teaching and learning process, this will require a fundamental rethinking and refashioning of the concept of user support. The key will be the ability to add value. Not just to manage collections of learning objects; to manage and preserve the wiki and blog spaces; to manage the content links and licensing - these are all well within existing library competences – but to provide the hotlinks and metadata which will allow the user to navigate with ease.

The work by the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) in 2007 clearly demonstrates that users significantly overestimate their skills and their ability to manage information. Students will often give up after their initial searches, assuming they have completed the research process, believing that if it’s not instantly discoverable on the Web, it doesn’t exist. Easier access to full-text articles and content online also seems to have changed students’ cognitive behaviour. Rather depressingly for librarians, such easier access is allied with very short spells of time spent reading the material. Electronic content encourages browsing, cutting and pasting, almost certainly accompanied by increased plagiarism. However, there is more than a suspicion that this is usually done through ignorance rather than malice. Research by the CIBER group is unequivocal in its findings, based on huge volumes of log analysis (Nicholas, 2009). The shorter an item is, the more likely it is to be read online. If it is long, users will either read the abstract or squirrel it away for a day when it might not be read (digital osmosis). Users seem to prefer abstracts much of the time, even when given the choice of full text. In short they go online to avoid reading (Nicholas, 2009).

Now libraries might argue that they have always embraced a service philosophy. Perhaps the change which is needed is to recognise the requirement to offer what users need, when and where they need it rather than to provide services we think they should have. An excellent example of this approach is the University of Hong Kong, where a major rethink of how the library identified need and responded to users led to major changes in the way it operated, was staffed, and has transformed the concept of service (Sidorko and Yang, 2009). The review was aimed at positioning the library as a key player on campus in terms of teaching and learning support. Each organisation will produce different solutions to meet local needs but the emphasis in Hong Kong on a client-centred approach is striking.

Libraries and an online presence

Libraries were some of the earliest adopters of computing, with a history of systems development stretching back almost fifty years. In truth what we largely engaged in at first was mechanisation of existing processes, but nonetheless libraries have been receptive to change. But it may be the case that they misread the Internet. Huge effort and investment was put first into Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) and then into websites based on the premise ‘If we build it, they will come’. Libraries imagined they were building hubs which would attract users, only to discover that in reality they sat not at the centre but at the edge of users’ digital worlds. Users largely bypassed these complicated facilities in favour of the ease of searching which Google provides.

It is not then clear that we have learned the lesson, that if our users don’t want it, we shouldn’t make it. Arguably we need a much clearer understanding of the larger forces at work before developing specific tools. Libraries have rushed to become involved in social networking sites, but few have stood back to observe the large societal forces at work. The issue of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, raises the question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes ’metaness‘and regards the mash-up as ’more important than the sources who were mashed‘ is largely undiscussed in the professional literature but is producing serious thinking elsewhere (Kakutani, 2010). Libraries have engaged in almost every fad from Facebook to Second Life without perhaps considering how service philosophy should change beyond a rather hackneyed concept of being where the users are. And yet there are examples of good practice, at least in isolation. Kelly (2008) has suggested that the key definers of social networks for libraries are:

• Application areas where users can easily create content

• Syndication/alerting technologies which share news

• A culture of openness which makes content available for sharing and reuse

• A culture of trust which encourages the sharing of content, bookmarks and discussion

• Social sharing services which share images, bookmarks and stories

• And social networking which allows everyone to implement the above.

These concepts really need to underpin any decision to use the tools described below, or else we run the risk of further littering the web with inactive library blogs, lifeless virtual library communities, and out-of-date Facebook pages. The following partial list of tools and examples shows the very mixed response from libraries.

Apps

Libraries have been quick to explore and exploit mobile technology as a development tool. There are a growing number of library apps for the iPhone. These start with simple information sources giving addresses and opening hours. Others begin to offer access to the library catalogue. OCLC’s WorldCat offers access to a range of libraries and shows where the nearest copy of a work may be found. This has been further enhanced by linking to a shopping price comparison tool. Users can scan a book barcode with the RedLaser app on an iPhone and find WorldCat.org results. The app uses the WorldCat Search API[7] and WorldCat Registry APIs[8] to deliver results for libraries nearby, complete with contact information and driving directions.

With the launch of DukeMobile 1.1, the Duke University Libraries (Mobile Libraries Blogspot, 2010) now offers the most comprehensive university digital image collection specifically formatted for an iPhone or iTouch device. It includes about 32,000 images of photos and other artifacts from twenty collections that range from early beer advertisements to materials on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene in the 1960s and covering women’s history, early American sheet music, Duke history and other topics. Although a growing number of scholarly institutions offer images and other material online, Duke is the first to offer collections that take advantage of the iPhone’s design, navigation and other features.

Others will follow these examples, which are based as much as using the tools which users have, as on exploiting any specific social space.

Blogs and the Twitterati

One approach popular with librarians is the use of tools which require active posting of information and thoughts. Librarians have embraced Twitter with the passion of a first schoolroom crush. Apparently no conference is complete without its Twitter feed. However, it is much more difficult to discover good examples of the use of Twitter by libraries in support of users. It is estimated that some 300 US libraries have Twitter feeds, with only 400 librarians active in the UK. The use of Twitter by library services was discussed in the Guardian (Flood, 2009). Behind the headline describing libraries promoting specific books, author events and closing times, it becomes clear that the principal (and not unimportant!) use is by librarians tweeting to other librarians.

Blogs have been much better used by librarians. These can be informative whether in terms of news or descriptions of services and some excellent examples exist. A good example of what issues are exposed comes from The Blogging Libraries wiki[9] . First created in 2006 and apparently not updated since, it contains links to excellent and interesting active blogs but also to the deceased and moribund. What is most difficult to establish is whether these blogs are popular with – or even useful to – users and how they integrate with user work habits.

Del.icio.us and shared bookmarks

The interest in social bookmarking is that these tools are, in effect user provided content. Easily the most popular of these is del.icio.us.[10] The Mélange blog[11] provides a wonderful example of its use. It shows the value of tag clouds, succinctly describes why social bookmarking is useful, provides links to good examples and displays many responses and comments.

Facebook

The wonderfully named Feral Librarian reviews the academic library experience of Facebook[12]. There are a large number of library Facebook sites. Although these are fashionable, it is again very difficult to discover whether these are valued by users. They appear in the main to provide a new channel for standard information on facilities and opening hours and are typically a new space for providing old information.

Podcasting

Huge numbers of universities have now developed podcasting as a method for delivering lectures. As a relatively recent phenomenon, many fewer have established reliable mandated routes for the long-term preservation of such material. Others have chosen to make material available through ItunesU[13] . This service from Apple provides a comprehensive solution to making current lectures available. What is much less clear is how material will be archived in the very long term and how rights will be managed.

Second Life

Many libraries have ’opened‘on Second Life[14]. They do seem valuable in offering reference services in particular, although one might easily see this as a way of exploring the use of e-books. However, there is a lingering worry that the original users have moved on and that spaces such as this are now largely occupied by the suits and the pornographers.[15],[16].(Collins, 2010) Whether and how libraries (and indeed their parent universities) disinvest in Second Life and move on may provide an instructive lesson in dealing with obsolescence.

Wikipedia

A great deal of intellectual snobbery surrounds whether this user created encyclopaedia is a tool which should be encouraged or not. Whatever the presumed merits of Wikipedia[17] compared with traditional encyclopaedias, it is much larger and much faster updated than they are. The huge number of hits makes it quite clear that it is a preferred starting point (at least) for researching new topics. In practice too, a study conducted by Giles and published in Nature (Giles, 2005) study shows it as only marginally worse than Britannica for the accuracy of its scientific information. The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three. Some libraries have responded imaginatively. When the Bodleian Library discovered inaccurate entries relating to some of its treasured special collections, it assigned staff not simply to correct the errors but to provide hotlinks through to relevant related material (Thomas, 2008). This imaginative approach is much more valuable than simply putting a library entry into Wikipedia, as many organisations have done.

It is clear that social networking popularly lumped together as Web 2.0 has had a profound effect on the ways in which users communicate and in how they seek information for whatever task is in hand. The danger for libraries is that as they move to occupy these spaces they find that users have moved on to the next space. What libraries must really do is to try and develop a more theoretical or philosophical understanding of their role in supporting users in such environments, irrespective of the particular product at hand. For the moment the approach seems to be to treat these as new spaces for providing traditional information rather than new ways of communicating.

Aggregation of content

Libraries have always acquired content which is distinguished because of the collections which are formed, rather than necessarily the value of individual items. The Internet has allowed the possibility of aggregating content from numbers of collections and sources to provide meta collections. Libraries can then add value through the provision of federated searching, metadata tagging and linking to tools such as Google Maps which can enrich the underlying sources. A large number of projects have dealt with aggregation, usually of content, but also of skills, in ways which attempt to combine resources to meet the needs of users. Each is appropriate in its own context although many motivations are displayed. The key consideration in each is the way in which value has been added and to what extent. The following are good examples of quite different approaches.

The Europeana Project[18] is fairly overtly a political project and a response to the dominance of Google. Its key goal is to be multi-lingual. It brings together over six million cultural objects and appears to use size as its defining goal and is organised by the museum, archive and library community.

Project Nines (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship)[19] involves the (largely American) scholarly community which has peer reviewed over 600,000 objects brought together from 118 sites for nineteenth century scholarship and aims to:

• Serve as a peer-reviewing body for digital work in the long 19th-century (1770-1920), British and American;

• Support scholars’ priorities and best practices in the creation of digital research materials;

• Develop software tools for new and traditional forms of research and critical analysis.

It arguably has strong content but is weaker on information management skills.

Project Bamboo[20] focuses on tools rather than content and involves both the support and academic communities. It aims to be a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organisational effort that brings together researchers in arts and humanities, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to tackle the question: How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services? The project is mapping out the scholarly practices and common technology challenges across and among disciplines to discover where a coordinated, cross-disciplinary development effort can best foster academic innovation.

The University of Texas has chosen a more traditional approach combined with a novel attitude to born digital material, as a way of meeting institutional academic goals. It is a rare example of collection building combined with web tools ranging from Google maps to video clips of interviews (Heath, 2009). It has a clear set of priorities:

§ Bulk harvesting of human rights sites from the World Wide Web (WWW)

§ Custom harvesting of human rights themes from Internet

§ Preservation and disclosure of born-digital documentation

It applies archival principles ranging from selection to dark archiving of material relevant to outstanding trials, e.g. in Rwanda and it relates the collection quite explicitly to the mission of the institution.

Libraries as place

Although there is a strong and growing literature on digital and hybrid libraries, librarians remain curiously (perhaps sentimentally?) fond of the concept of library as place. It can be a place to promote enduring values (Weise, 2004); it is ’the centerpiece for establishing the intellectual community and scholarly enterprise‘ (Freeman, 2009); and a place to see and be seen while working privately (Gayton, 2008).The positioning of the physical library in the student environment is clearly articulated, although researchers and academics long since having abandoned the library as a place of first resort, in favour of the Internet. Yet very little thought has been given to the cost of that physical environment. Possession of a library is an unquestioned and therefore uncosted part of the infrastructure of being a university. Very little thought has been given to the cost of running libraries – beyond staffing budgets. But this is beginning to surface as an issue if only in the light of green agendas which have become fashionable as institutional budgets have come under pressure. In most organisations it is the practice to top-slice utility bill costs from the corporate budget, before sub-allocating to departments. Libraries are unusual in that they tend to occupy a whole building and so attributing utility costs to them is quite straightforward if very unusual (Law, 2009). The results are surprisingly large and should lead us to consider exactly why we spend so much on preserving materials, particularly those materials commonly held elsewhere.

Ironically, universities will tend to be places where there is a broad spectrum of ecological sophistication and where academic departments work on sustainable design and operations. Yet practices as simple as materials recycling and attempts to move to carbon neutral footprints remain far removed from library orthodoxy. Some work is beginning on this area and it is to be expected that the green movement in libraries will grow as budgets decline (Mulford and Himmel, 2009; Green Library, 2010).

Virtual libraries

While Libraries as place remain close to the heart of most information professionals, at least some have followed a quite different route, moving towards a virtual library. One of the earliest adopters of this was the University of Phoenix, which has had an online campus since 1989 (Jackson, 2010) and an online library since the mid-1990s. With some 37,000 online journals, almost 30,000 e-books, 114 databases and 20 million articles, it can rival any traditional library in terms of its content. Other libraries have since embraced this route in whole or in part, but what Phoenix has perhaps principally done is to show both that libraries without place are viable, but also that they do need professional management and staffing.

Conclusion

As the many examples used in this chapter show, librarians have the capacity and the curiosity to embrace and employ the latest digital tools and services.. Rethinking the concept of service is also well within the competence of libraries. The science fiction writer William Gibson famously declared that the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. Each of the applications and tools described in this chapter has been adopted, embraced and enthusiastically championed by many librarians. What is less clear is that this has been done as part of an overarching philosophical redefinition of what libraries should be, who they should serve and how, rather than a well intentioned and enthusiastic attempt to modernise an existing product. The fear must be that most libraries are trying desperately to cling to outmoded notions of what customers really want, and are being ever more inventive and efficient in so doing; for there is another, but much less palatable, future for libraries. The story is often told of the end of the typewriter. In 2000, the President of Smith-Corona, at the closing of the company’s very last plant, gathered together the remaining employees and told them that on that day, the company had the highest quality product, with the lowest defect rate, greatest customer satisfaction levels and lowest return rates it had ever produced. And then he told them that they had ‘perfected the irrelevant’ (Roner, 2009). Libraries too run that risk. There is a wealth of imagination, innovation and inquisitiveness within the library profession. The real challenge is whether the innovators and early adopters can inspire their colleagues to embrace these developments as central to the future of the profession and not have them seem the ephemeral and transient gewgaws of an eccentric fringe.

References

CIBER (2007) Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future. London: CIBER, 2007. [Online] http://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/googlegen.pdf

Collins, Barry (2010) Whatever happened to Second Life? PCPro [Online] http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/354457/whatever-happened-to-second-life/print

Flood, A. (2009) ‘Libraries tap into Twitter’. The Guardian. 24 June, 2009. [Online] http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/24/libraries-twitter

Freeman, G. T. (2005) The Library as Place: Changes in Learning Patterns, Collections, Technology, and Use. CLIR Report No. 129. [Online] http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub129/freeman.html

Gayton, J. T. (2008). ‘Academic libraries: "Social" Or "Communal?" The nature and future of academic libraries.’ Journal of Academic Librarianship, 34(1), 60-66.

Gibb, F. (2009) (2009) ‘Lord Judge calls for jury system that caters for computer generation.’ The Times. October 21^st 2009. [Online] http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article6882947.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=989864

Giles, J. (2005) ‘Internet encyclopaedias go head to head’. Nature 438(900-901) [Online] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html

The Green Library (2010) http://thegreenlibraryblog.blogspot.com/

Heath, F. (2009) Human Rights: The Challenge of Documentation in the Digital Age. [Online] http://digital.casalini.it/retreat/retreat_2009.html

Ithaka (2009) Faculty Survey 2009. [Online] http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/faculty-surveys-2000-2009/faculty-survey-2009

Jackson, A. (2010) The University of Phoenix Library and eLearning Materials Provide Vast Resources Anytime, Anywhere for Working Learners. [Online] http://www.phoenix.edu/uopx-knowledge-network/articles/case-studies/uopx-library-elearning-resources-anytime-for-working-learners.html

Kakutani, M. (2010) ‘Texts without context.’ The New York Times Books Section March 21^st 2010. [Online] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/21mash.html?scp=1&sq=kakutani&st=cse

Kelly, B. (2008), "Web 2.0 and Social Networks for Museums, Libraries and Archives: An Introduction." [Online] http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/briankelly-71604-web-2-0-social-networks-museums-libraries-ukoln-mlaeastengland20080701-web20-education-ppt-powerpoint/

Kesselman, M.A. and Watstein, S.B. (2009) ‘Creating opportunities: embedded librarians.’ Journal of Library Administration. 49(4) 383-400.

Law, D. (2009) ‘An awfully big adventure: Strathclyde's digital library plan.’ Ariadne (58) [Online] http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/law/

Law, D. (2006) ‘Back to basics: A-literacy, the Boolean gene, convergence and the long tail.’ Electronic Library, 24(6) 729-731.

Mobile Libraries Blogspot (2010) Library Digital Collections? There’s an App for That. [Online] http://mobile-libraries.blogspot.com/2009/06/library-digital-collections-theres-app.html

Mulford, S and Himmel, N. (2009) How Green is My Library? Santa Barbara, Ca: Libraries Unlimited.

Nicholas, D. (2009) ‘What is beyond books and journals? Pointers from CIBER’s Virtual Scholar programme.’ Beyond Books and Journals: 3rd Bloomsbury Conference on e-publishing and e-publications.[Online]June 25^th-26th 2009. [Online]

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/e-publishing/e-publishing2009/

OCLC (2006) College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources: A Report to the OCLC Membership. Dublin, OH: OCLC.

RIN (2010a) Ensuring a Bright future for libraries http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/using-and-accessing-information-resources/ensuring-bright-future-research-libraries

RIN (2010b) E-journals: their use, value and impact http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/e-journals-their-use-value-and-impact

Roner, Lisa (2009) The 10 most common (and dangerous) forecasting mistakes. Eyeforpharma. March 5th, 2009. [Online] http://social.eyeforpharma.com/story/10-most-common-and-dangerous-forecasting-mistakes

Schwartz, J. (2009) As Jurors Turn to Web, Mistrials Are Popping Up. New York Times, March 17^th 2009. [Online]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/us/18juries.html?_r=2

Shirky, Clay (2009) Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable. [Online] http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

Sidorko, P. and Yang, T. (2009) ‘Refocusing for the future: meeting user expectations in a digital age.’ Library Management. 30(1/2) 6-24.

Somma, Ryan (2010) The Decline and Fall of Second Life Ideonexus [Online] http://ideonexus.com/2010/01/05/the-decline-and-fall-of-second-life/

Thomas, Sarah (2008) ‘I’ve looked at life from both sides now’. Fiesole 2008. March 27^th-29^th, 2008. [Online] http://digital.casalini.it/retreat/retreat_2008.html

Weise, F. (2004) ‘Being there: the library as place.’ Journal of the Medical Library Association. 92(1) 6–13.

[1] http://pope2you.net/

[2]http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/about_judiciary/roles_types_jurisdiction/lord_chief_justice/index.htm

[3] http://maps.google.co.uk/

[4] http://theridiculant.metro.co.uk/2010/02/ten-word-wiki-for-when-wikipedia-is-just-too-long.html

[5] http://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/shirkys-newspaper-ideas-applied-to-libraries/

[6] http://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/

[7] http://www.oclc.org/worldcatapi/default.htm

[8] http://www.worldcat.org/devnet/wiki/Services

[9]http://www.blogwithoutalibrary.net/links/index.php?title=Welcome_to_the_Blogging_Libraries_Wiki

[10] http://delicious.com/

[11] http://angelacw.wordpress.com/2007/06/04/delicious-libraries/

[12] http://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/our-library-facebook-page/

[13] http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/what-is.html

[14] http://secondlife.com/

[15] . http://ideonexus.com/2010/01/05/the-decline-and-fall-of-second-life/

16. http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/354457/whatever-happened-to-second-life/

[17] http://www.wikipedia.org/

[18] http://europeana.eu/portal/

[19] http://www.nines.org/

[20] http://projectbamboo.org/