June 20, 2003

The June D-Lib is out and is, as usual, full of interesting articles. The two I'd like to highlight are:

  • "Google Meets eBay: What Academic Librarians Can Learn from Alternative Information Providers" by Anne R. Kenney, Nancy Y. McGovern, Ida T. Martinez, and Lance J. Heidig. This is a very interesting and perhaps even important article. It does a comparason between the answers given by academic reference librarians to the researchers on the Google Answers service. Guess what? The results are mixed. The methodology employed is rather simplistic and the conclusions (more than) a bit controversial but it's certainly worth taking a close look at this article.
  • "Trends in Use of Electronic Journals in Higher Education in the UK - Views of Academic Staff and Students"by Karen Bonthron and 12 others. From the abstract: "Results indicate that academic staff incorporate electronic journal usage into their working patterns in different ways than students and that these differences may affect attitudes towards support services (library Web pages, Virtual Learning Environments) designed to promote electronic journal usage. Disciplinary differences also need to be considered." Well worth reading.

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