Tuesday 28 October 2008

IQity Blog

I'm introducing you to IQity Blog. The main focus of this blog is on Education Technology.
This week the IQity bloggers are attending the National School Boards Association: NSBA's T+L Conference in Seattle and you can follow through their posts the latest news from the presenters.
The IQity Blog latest post are:

P.S.: Link to this blog is available through "Useful Blogs".

Monday 20 October 2008

IFLA Report, May 2008: Access to Libraries and Information

Access to libraries and information: Towards a fairer world (IFLA/FAIFE World Report V. 7)
This is the 4th in a series of reports from IFLA/FAIFE on the state of intellectual freedom around the world. In this report, representatives from 116 countries provide information about intellectual freedom issues in their country. An encouraging sign is that this report contains reports from a number of countries that were not represented in prior reports.
In addition to providing basic statistical information related to libraries, including details about Internet access, the report provides information at the country level about anti terrorism legislation, freedom of information laws, violations of freedom of access to information as well as violations of freedom of expression. In addition to the country reports, several commissioned articles are part of the report as well. These provide extended background information on topics related to intellectual freedom, such as censorship in Arab countries, the USA Patriot Act and its impact on libraries, and the role of libraries in fighting corruption in Russia (Current Cites)

Library Management Systems Study: March 2008

Although published earlier this year, this report is just beginning to get attention outside the United Kingdom. While some would say that there is little new in this report, the value of this report is that it provides an additional perspective; one that confirmations what we see happening in North America is, in fact, a global phenomenon.
In the report, we find that like the US and Canadian LMS markets, the UK market is dominated by four vendors with relatively little product differentiation among the various systems. Libraries are slow to adapt ERMS (Electronic Resource Management Systems) and remain unconvinced of the value of federated search products. Additionally, libraries are not using the information they gather about user preferences in ways that help enhance the position of the library as their patron's first choice for resource discovery.
Finally, local OPACs are losing ground as preferred information discovery systems with the end result being the potential for the traditional LMS to become just a back-end system to other, more global and encompassing, resource discovery systems (Current Cites)