What is interesting here is that a national library is imaginatively developing real services which show how library services are complementary to, and can be enhanced by, crowdsourcing approaches.
The latter they associate with a centrally managed model, often with dedicated funding.
There were 'field studies' at several libraries, contextual interviews based on these, interviews with library staff, and followup workshops where earlier results were used to shape questions. Interestingly, the main Google search engine is not included.
What is interesting here is that a national library is imaginatively developing real services which show how library services are complementary to, and can be enhanced by, crowdsourcing approaches.
How does spend break down across administration, learning management, library, and so on? The academic library community does not have non commercial alternatives in a similar way.
The location of the user, which Google recognizes, helps determine what is presented.
Does this mean no libraries have these books?
He raises other interesting topics and this discussion is a part of a projected series of posts which will be well worth following. I am submerged in several assignments and will not be able to look at it myself for a little while. People were asked to record impressions in the notebook and to respond to the statements. I found it strange that the report's focus is one potential answer to this set of issues, rather than the issues themselves and a range of possible answers. It will be based on a database of people and organisations with records contributed from a variety of sources including the Australian Name Authority File.
These are wide-ranging and it is instructive to see what they think is important or advisable.
In the notebook were pasted various 'provocative' statements. In some cases it was not clear to them what staff had to offer, or they did not want to disturb staff who were sitting at workstations. Because Sakai exists, it is is suggested by some, Blackboard is more responsive to standards issues and the hope is that it may lead Blackboard to lower prices.
What proportion of, say, Peoplesoft's revenues are accounted for by higher education? The importance of national, publicly funded bodies in developing services and policy is much greater in a UK, and broader European, setting than it is in the more decentralized US.
They reported little support for a 'subscription-based software development corporation'. Users tended not to turn to librarians for support in the search phase; they are most likely to ask for assistance in the retrieval phase. The report notes that the 'vast majority' of users will state that Google has a 'sparse selection of literature'. We will watch to see what impact this has on traffic to library services.
Often used in a neutral business sense, it is not surprising - given what may be at stake - that sometimes discussion of sourcing is shot through with political preferences or emotional attachment. The study took an ethnographic approach, using a variety of qualitiative techniques to try to build up a rich picture of library perceptions and expectations. This is their favored response.
It will be interesting to see if they prove popular enough to be given higher billing. The former they associate with volunteer community-oriented activities like Linux and Apache.
But turn off the snapshots: not only were they excruciatingly slow, they ended up as empty PDFs.
to get back to the main point, my answer at the time can be summed up pretty simply.
org does not behave like this now.
Moodle is a strong player also in the learning management space.
The field studies were organized around a 'cultural probe' where library users were given a notebook, a camera, a scissors and gluestick. User reviews were seen as less useful than expert reviews.