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From http://www.oclc.org/reports/perceptionscollege.htm –

College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources examines the information-seeking habits and preferences of international college students. This report is a companion piece to the December 2005 OCLC Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources report.

The 396 college students who participated in the survey range in age from 15 to 57 and are either undergraduate or graduate students. The college students were from all of the six countries included in the survey (Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, United Kingdom and the United States). Responses from U.S. 14- to 17-year-old participants have also been included to provide contrast and comparison with the college students, as these young people are potential college attendees.

With all-new graphs and additional analysis of how college student data compare to that of total respondents, this report is a subset of the original Perceptions report and provides findings from the online survey in an effort to learn more about:

• Library use
• Awareness and use of library electronic resources
• The Internet search engine, the library and the librarian
• Free vs. for-fee information
• The “Library” brand

This report looks at these questions from the point-of-view of college students and 14- to 17-year-olds. In the original study, we found that college students are more aware of and use libraries’ information resources more than other survey respondents. In addition, the more educated the respondents, the more they continue to use libraries after graduation. Awareness does not always translate into high usage.

Overall, respondents have positive, if outdated, views of the “Library.” Younger respondents—teenagers and young adults—do not express positive associations as frequently. These findings, and more, are valuable insights for anyone seeking to know more about the library usage and perceptions of college students and young people.

This subset of the original Perceptions report is appropriate for provosts, deans and academic library administration. Read the report online or order a print copy using the links at the right, then use our feedback form to tell us what you think.

I'm eager to print this puppy out and read through it.  It may be eye-opening to read about what users actually think rather than the typically confident proclamations about users needs in the off-the-cuff, hand-wavy, evidence-bankrupt way that many (most?) tend toward.  I'm as guilty as the next guy or gal, but that doesn't make it any more acceptable.

The unAPI plug-in for WordPress has moved to the following location: http://www.lackoftalent.org/michael/blog/unapi-wordpress-plug-in/

Technosophia is now compliant with unAPI-revision 3.  Cruise around and let me know if you turn up any bugs.

 

So I'm finally on del.icio.us. If anyone wants to recommend bookmarks for me (or vice versa), here I am:

Peter Murray has written a series of pieces about the Fedora digital repository system over at the Disruptive Library Technology Jester blog.

In the first piece, On the Need for a General Purpose Digital Object Repository, it is argued that having a unified repository simplifies management of information systems or "silos."  For instance, there needn't be duplication of workflows or synchronization of content if a number of an organization's repositories, digital libraries, electronic journals, course management systems and so on are all built atop a robust institutional repository.  A unified repository is useful if one desires a search across previously disparate digital projects or collections, if one wishes to eliminate redundancies in coding, if one intends to have a particular object, collection of objects, or part of an object shared across different systems — e.g., a journal article repurposed in a course management system and deposited into an open archive.  With an open, flexible repository, like Fedora, such a configuration is possible assuming your organization, unit, or consortium has someone to devote to managing and customizing the repository. 

An advantage of using the Fedora system, as outlined in Why Fedora? Because You Don't Need Fedora, is that due to modular design and adherence to more or less open standards, one is not necessarily wedded to Fedora for the foreseeable future.  Items in a Fedora repository are serialized as XML objects, either in the Fedora-METS or FOXML format.  While some of this information is copied into a relational database system and an RDF triplestore for speed and convenience, it is all intact within the serialized XML objects which reside in a predictable directory hierarchy on the local filesystem.  There are at least two advantages to this design:

1. Should Fedora experience a catastrophic system glitch, one may rebuild the entire system via a built-in utility (cleverly named "fedora-rebuild") that goes through the objects on the filesystem and restocks the database and triplestore.  And assuming that the administrator of the system is worth his salt, there should be regular full backups of the filesystem, so the entire repository should be rebuildable.  As Peter notes, a simple copy of the filesystem on which the XML objects reside is a fine practice in a larger digital preservation strategy.
2. If one decides to move away from Fedora to the Next Best Thing™, it should be relatively simple to migrate content from Fedora into the new system because of Fedora's storage of all objects (and associated metadata, files, and disseminators) to the filesystem as serialized XML.  All one needs, perhaps, is a set of funky XSLT scripts to massage the objects into a format that works with the new system and voila.  (That is a gross oversimplification, but the point remains that open standards, simple file operations, and XML markup do make for more orderly migrations than black boxes, complex datastores, and loose coupling of information.)
3. Having one's objects stored as XML on the filesystem also opens up opportunities to see how tools which act thereupon might be glued into the repository infrastructure.  One such example might be for an XML-aware search engine (such as amberfish, Lucene, or Zebra).  Since you've got low-level access to these files, it would be fairly simple to tack on a search & indexing system that is independent of your choice of repository.

The third piece, Thinking about Our Fedora Disseminators, highlights Fedora as a repository system that's put real emphasis on digital preservation.  While other repository systems allow for preservation of an object and its metadata, Fedora grants one the ability to preserve the behavior of digital objects and the datastreams thereof, a potential approach to the issue of format migration/emulation.  Through a dissemination abstraction (the "behavior definition") one might apply the same abstract behaviors to items in different formats, saving one the time of defining redundant behaviors.  My explanation is rather vague and incomplete, so I would encourage you to read Peter's third piece in detail.  The point is that "for each record, the application simply asked the repository to deliver a thumbnail of the object. And the repository, regardless of media type, delivered one." 

Taken together, Peter makes a strong case for Fedora as a fine back-end for a unified, multi-purpose repository.  Unlike other repository systems that focus more on the front-end, Fedora focuses on being the plumbing, the "digital library operating system" as Ron Jantz calls it.    Were I not already a Fedora enthusiast, I would find it quite difficult not to consider Fedora (or something like it, such as LANL's aDORe Archive) at MPOW.  Now if someone can send me some hints on drumming up institutional support…