“The challenge of creating an effective and appropriate library collection has been further tested by the recent advent of what Clayton Christensen has termed “disruptive technology.” In his well-known study, The Innovator’s Dilemma,Christensen explores the impact of technological change on the business and other communities. For Christensen, technology can either be sustaining or disruptive. Sustaining technologies improve the performance of products and continue to make them valuable to the consumer. Disruptive technologies, on the other hand, initially underperform in the marketplace, but have a tendency to improve their quality at a rapid rate and eventually replace the established technology. The result, as Henry Lucas noted, was that the customer benefited greatly from “more choice, more flexibility, more options.” For libraries, the availability of electronic books (ebooks) that can be accessed outside of the traditional catalog via a patron-driven or demand-driven process (DDA) is indeed disruptive to the entire fabric of established collection development procedures.”
Future of the Research Library: Heather Joseph on Open Access
Toward Improved Discoverability of Scholarly Content: Cross-Sector Collaboration Essentials
“By way of follow-up to earlier work in understanding and improving discoverability of scholarly content, this article reports on recent data and reflections that led to clearer definitions of discovery and discover-ability, as well as deeper cross-sector collaborations on standards, transparency, metadata, and new forms of partnerships. Recent advances in discoverability are also described – from enhanced library-based web-scale searching to serving researcher needs through the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) registry. The article points to a 2014 SAGE white paper that presents in greater detail opportunities for wider collaboration among libraries, publishers, service providers, and researchers in the interest of furthering discovery, access, and usage of scholarly writings and creative work.”
URL : Toward Improved Discoverability of Scholarly Content
Alternative URL : http://collaborativelibrarianship.org/index.php/jocl/article/view/282
Publish or Perish 2014
Factors affecting the adoption of e-books by information professionals
“One of the innovations that information technology has presented within information organizations is the phenomenon of e-books. This study seeks to explore information professionals’ attitudes towards e-books adoption. The current study uses the Technology Acceptance Model, a well-known theory for explaining individuals’ technology behaviors (Davis, 1989; Venkatesh and Morris, 2000), as well as personal characteristics such as motivation and cognitive appraisal as theoretical bases from which we can predict factors that may influence information professionals adopting e-books within their organizations. An empirical study was conducted in which 169 participants took part. Using structural equation modeling, we confirm that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, personal innovativeness and other personal characteristics, are predictors of behavioral intention to use e-books. Results highlight the importance of individual characteristics when considering technology acceptance. Implications for research and practice are discussed.”
URL : http://lis.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/22/0961000614532120.abstract
Open-access repositories worldwide, 2005-2012: Past growth, current characteristics and future possibilities
Statut
“This paper reviews the worldwide growth of open-access (OA) repositories, December 2005 to December 2012, using data collected by the OpenDOAR project. It shows that initial repository development was focused on North America, Western Europe and Australasia, particularly the USA, UK, Germany and Australia. Soon after, Japan increased its repository numbers. Since 2010, other geographical areas and countries have seen repository growth, including East Asia (especially Taiwan), South America (especially Brazil) and Eastern Europe (especially Poland). During the whole period, countries such as France, Italy and Spain have maintained steady growth, whereas countries such as China and Russia have experienced relatively low levels of growth. Globally, repositories are predominantly institutional, multidisciplinary and English-language-based. They typically use open-source OAI-compliant repository software but remain immature in terms of explicit licensing arrangements. Whilst the size of repositories is difficult to assess accurately, the available data indicate that a small number of large repositories and a large number of small repositories make up the repository landscape. These trends and characteristics are analyzed using Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) building on previous studies. IDT is shown to provide a useful explanatory framework for understanding repository adoption at various levels: global, national, organizational and individual. Major factors affecting both the initial development of repositories and their take up by users are identified, including IT infrastructure, language, cultural factors, policy initiatives, awareness-raising activity and usage mandates. It is argued that mandates in particular are likely to play a crucial role in determining future repository development.”
Free-riding, cooperation, and ‘peaceful revolutions’ in copyright
Modern copyright law is based on the inescapable assumption that users, given the choice, will free-ride rather than pay for access. In fact, many consumers of cultural works – music, books, films, games, and other works – fundamentally want to support their production. It turns out that humans are motivated to support cultural production not only by extrinsic incentives, but also by social norms of fairness and reciprocity.
This article explains how producers across the creative industries have used this insight to develop increasingly sophisticated business models that rely on voluntary payments (including pay-what-you-want schemes) to fund their costs of production.
The recognition that users are not always free-riders suggests that current policy approaches to copyright are fundamentally flawed. Because social norms are so important in consumer motivations, the perceived unfairness of the current copyright system undermines the willingness of people to pay for access to cultural goods.
While recent copyright reform debate has focused on creating stronger deterrence through enforcement, increasing the perceived fairness and legitimacy of copyright law is likely to be much more effective.
The fact that users will sometimes willingly support cultural production also challenges the economic raison d’être of copyright law.
This article demonstrates how ‘peaceful revolutions’ are flipping conventional copyright models and encouraging free-riding through combining incentives and prosocial norms. Because they provide a means to support production without limiting the dissemination of knowledge and culture, there is good reason to believe that these commons-based systems of cultural production can be more efficient, more fair, and more conducive to human flourishing than conventional copyright systems.
This article explains what we know about free-riding so far and what work remains to be done to understand the viability and importance of cooperative systems in funding cultural production.”
URL : Free-riding, cooperation, and ‘peaceful revolutions’ in copyright
Alternative location : : http://eprints.qut.edu.au/70343/