Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Their Impact on Academic Library Services: Exploring the Issues and Challenges

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“2012 was a year of rapid change for education with the advent of MOOCs—Massive Open Online Courses—available for the world to use to learn for free. But what does this mean for the role of the librarian? How has the landscape in education changed, and what are the issues and challenges that librarians now face? This article reviews the position of libraries in the emergence of MOOCs and the role that a librarian could undertake within the research, production, and presentation of MOOCs.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2013.851609

MOOCs: The Challenges for Academic Librarians

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“Over the next few years, librarians at many Australian universities will participate in the creation of local Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). This article aims to prepare librarians for this task. It begins by summarising the development of the MOOC concept and then moves on to review the growing literature on MOOCs and librarians. It concludes by looking at possible developments relating to copyright.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048623.2013.821048

Student Reading Practices in Print and Electronic Media

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“This paper reports a diary-based qualitative study on college students’ reading habits with regard to print and electronic media. Students used a form to record information about their reading practices for twelve days, including length of reading event, location, format used, and the purpose of reading. Students tended to use print for academic and long-form reading and to engage with it more deeply. Although electronic resources were sometimes used for academic purposes, students often used them for shorter and nonacademic reading. Students found electronic media convenient, but most of them did not wish to switch to electronic media for their academic reading.”

URL : http://crl.acrl.org/content/75/5/705.abstract

Don’t Fear the Reader: Librarian versus Interlibrary Loan Patron-Driven Acquisition of Print Books at an Academic Library by Relative Collecting Level and by Library of Congress Classes and Subclasses

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“Recently, a great deal of literature on patron-driven acquisition (PDA) has been published that addresses the implementation and results of PDA programs at academic libraries. However, despite widespread worries that PDA will lead to unbalanced collections, little attention has been paid to whether patrons’ and librarians’ purchasing differ significantly. This study analyzes librarians’ and PDA patrons’ acquisitions at an academic library by relative collecting level and by subject (that is, Library of Congress class and subclass) to determine whether concern over patrons’ collecting are warranted.”

URL : http://crl.acrl.org/content/75/5/684.abstract

The impact factors of open access and subscription journals across fields

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“We have compared the 2-year and 5-year impact factors (IFs), normalized impact factors (NIFs) and rank normalized impact factors (RNIFs) of open access (OA) and subscription journals across the 22 major fields delineated in Essential Science Indicators. Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2012 has assigned 2-year IF to 1,073 OA and 7,290 subscription journals and 5-year IF to 811 OA and 6,705 subscription journals. Overall 12.8% of journals listed in JCR are OA, but a higher percentage of journals are OA in 9 fields, including multidisciplinary (31%), agriculture (19.1%) and microbiology (19.1). Overall 2-year IF is higher than 5-year IF in a bout 31.5% journals in both OA and subscription journals. But among physics journals , two-thirds of OA journals and 58% of sub-scription journals have a higher 2-year IF. For multidisciplinary journals the mean RNIF is higher for OA journals than subscription journals. Higher proportion of subscription journals had mean
RNIF above 0.5: 361 of 1,073 OA journals (33.6%) and 3,857 of 7,280 subscription journals (52.9%) had a 2-year mean RNIF above 0.5 and 277 of 811 OA journals (34.2%) and 3,453 of 6705 (51.5%) subscription journals had a 5-year mean RINF above 0.5. Moving to OA has proven to be advantageous to developing country journals; it has helped a large number of Latin American and many Indian journals improve their IF.”

URL : http://www.currentscience.ac.in/cs/Volumes/107/03/0380.pdf

Scholarly communication, scholarly publishing and university libraries. Plus ca change ?

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“The scholarly communication and research evaluation landscape is locked into historical paradigms which inadequately reflect the opportunities of the digital era. Why hasn’t the Internet disrupted the practices and the economics of scholarly publishing? The article traces how university library budgets have become dominated by a small number of multinational publishers and attempts at scholarly communication change have only had limited impact, despite the opportunities for increased global distribution of research scholarship. Open access initiatives are assessed in relation to future scholarly communication change in which university libraries play an increasing role in campus scholarly ecosystems.”

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/1885/11944