At 4.36am on Saturday 4th September, a magnitude 7 earthquake struck near Christchurch, New Zealand. How it affected the libraries here is an overwhelmingly large topic, but Kathryn Greenhill kindly responded to my plea for some questions to prompt me in writing about it. 1. Do you remember where you were when the earthquake hit? [...]

This event sneaked up on me this year and was almost over before I noticed. 18-24th of October. “A global event, now in its 4th year, promoting Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research.” — http://www.openaccessweek.org/ If you missed it too, here are just a few links I found of interest in [...]

The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Library recently gave students the chance to win $1,000 in the UTS LIB:Flicks 2009 competition. Students submitted short videos (less than 2min) to promote UTS Library services and resources to new undergraduate students The winners were announced the other day at a premier event held in the Library and [...]

We’ve had a few posts about repositories lately, and here’s another one. Research repositories are playing a major role in furthering open access to research papers, but of course they are not the only factor in the open access movement. SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library [...]

Although there is some inaccuracy, it is good to see reporting on the work Australian universities are undertaking in research repositories and the open access movement. Access remains an open secret by Bernard Lane | The Australian If you are wondering about the innacuracy..Fedora was not developed by the University of Queensland. UQ developed Fez [...]

The Live Search team at Microsoft recently announced that they are winding up their Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects. “Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content [...]

This week the new-look ARROW Discovery Service was launched featuring faceted browsing, tag clouds and access to more statistics such as the most popular authors and institutions.  The ARROW Discovery Service includes metadata records harvested from institutional research repositories across Australia and from the Australasian Digital Thesis Program. Faceted searching enables results to be refined [...]

The Australian Society of Authors has published a report on Educational Publishing in Australia. The report is based on a survey of educational writers carried out in 2007 and early 2008 and states that since 2000, writers’ conditions have deteriorated due to onerous contractual conditions from a smaller pool of publishers. The impact of digital [...]

Librarians in research and academia are keeping a close eye on changes to Research Assessment under the new Government. Michael Jubb from the UK based Research Information Blog has a post about how the new Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), replacing the Research Quality Framework (RQF) compares to what’s happening in the UK – [...]

In today’s Higher Education supplement there are two articles, here and here, dealing with the replacement to the now defunct RQF process. The replacement is called Excellence in Research for Australia, and will be jointly crafted by the Australian Research Council and the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.  These also relate to the [...]