OCLC Research has released Single Search: The Quest for the Holy Grail .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This report highlights successful strategies in providing a single point of access to library, archive and museum collections. . . .

To address this desire, OCLC Research facilitated a working group of nine single search implementers through discussions about the opportunities for, and obstacles to, integrating single search access across an institution. Members of this group told their stories, identified issues, and acknowledged similarities and differences in their approaches. This brief report summarizes those discussions and highlights the emerging practices in providing single search access to an institution's collections. The goal of the report is to foster successful single search implementations by sharing the experience of the working group with those who are just beginning to plan single search implementations

| Digital Scholarship |

Ithaka S+R has released Funding for Sustainability: How Funders' Practices Influence the Future of Digital Resources.

Here's an excerpt:

With support from the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance, Ithaka S+R conducted a study to examine the ways that both public and private funding bodies in academic and cultural heritage sectors are defining sustainability and encouraging the digital resources they help to create to endure and continue to provide value well beyond the term of the grant. The project explored the funding practices of over 25 funders that support various forms of digital resources, and included over 100 interviews with more than 80 programme officers, foundation directors, project leaders and other experts. Our goal was to gain an understanding of how funders think about the long-term viability of the digital resources they support, and the policies and practices they have put in place to encourage successful outcomes.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

A preprint of Lynn Sillipigni Connaway, Timothy J. Dickey, and Marie L. Radford's paper "'If It Is too Inconvenient I'm Not Going after It:' Convenience as a Critical Factor in Information-Seeking Behaviors" is available from OCLC Research.

Here's an excerpt:

In today's fast-paced world, anecdotal evidence suggests that information tends to inundate people, and users of information systems want to find information quickly and conveniently. Empirical evidence for convenience as a critical factor is explored in the data from two multi-year, user study projects funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The theoretical framework for this understanding is founded in the concepts of bounded rationality and rational choice theory, with Savolainen's (2006) concept of time as a context in information seeking, as well as gratification theory, informing the emphasis on the seekers' time horizons. Convenience is a situational criterion in peoples' choices and actions during all stages of the information-seeking process. The concept of convenience can include their choice of an information source, their satisfaction with the source and its ease of use, and their time horizon in information seeking. The centrality of convenience is especially prevalent among the younger subjects ("millennials") in both studies, but also holds across all demographic categories—age, gender, academic role, or user or non-user of virtual reference services. These two studies further indicate that convenience is a factor for making choices in a variety of situations, including both academic information seeking and everyday-life information seeking, although it plays different roles in different situations.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

The Cornell University Library has adopted a policy of not signing e-resources licenses with nondisclosure clauses.

Here's an excerpt from the policy:

To promote openness and fairness among libraries licensing scholarly resources, Cornell University Library will not enter into vendor contracts that require nondisclosure of pricing information or other information that does not constitute a trade secret. All new and renewed licenses submitted with nondisclosure clauses will not be signed but henceforth will be referred to the Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Resources and Special Collections for further negotiation. . . .

It has become apparent to the library community that the anticompetitive conduct engaged in by some publishing firms is in part a result of the inclusion of nondisclosure agreements in contracts.¹ As Robert Darnton recently noted, by "keeping the terms secret, … one library cannot negotiate for cheaper rates by citing an advantage obtained by another library."² For this reason, the International Coalition of Library Consortia's "Statement of Current Perspective and Preferred Practices for the Selection and Purchase of Electronic Information" states that "Non-disclosure language should not be required for any licensing agreement, particularly language that would preclude library consortia from sharing pricing and other significant terms and conditions with other consortia."³ The more that libraries are able to communicate with one another about vendor offers, the better they are able to weigh the costs and benefits of any individual offer. An open market will result in better licensing terms.

Read more about it at "Cornell U. Library Takes a Stand with Journal Vendors: Prices Will Be Made Public."

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

Sarah Rhodes has published "Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive's Examination of URL Stability" in LLRX.com.

Here's an excerpt:

In analyzing a single sample of these original URLs at annual intervals, the prevalence of link rot was 8.3% in 2008, within zero to twelve months of the content being harvested. One year later, twelve to twenty-four months after the content was harvested, link rot in the same sample was found to have jumped to 14.3%. In the most recent analysis, in 2010, link rot was found to be 27.9%. In other words, link rot increased from about one in every twelve archived titles in 2008, to one in every seven titles in 2009, and finally to about one in every 3.5 titles in 2010.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

RIN and the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL) have released One Year On: Evaluating the Initial Impact of the Scottish Higher Education Digital Library (SHEDL).

Here's an excerpt:

SHEDL was formally established as a ‘bloc’ purchaser for the nineteen Scottish HEIs by SCURL, the Scottish Confederation of University & Research Libraries, in 2008. Its first three licences, comprising over 1,500 online journals published by the American Chemical Society, Cambridge University Press and Springer, came into effect in January 2009.

This report presents the findings of an evaluation of changes to usage and cost-per-use since SHEDL was established. This report cannot show long-term trends, since it covers only the first year of SHEDL’s existence. Nevertheless, it provides an overview of the initial changes that have followed the introduction of the three SHEDL licences.

| Digital Scholarship |

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Indiana University Bloomington and NISO a $349,000 grant for "Developing a Generalized and Sustainable Framework for a Public, Open, Scholarly Assessment Service Based on Aggregated Large-Scale Usage Data."

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing associate professor Johan Bollen and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) will share the Mellon Foundation grant designed to build upon the Metrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources (MESUR) project that Bollen began in 2006 with earlier support from the foundation. Bollen is also a member of the IU School of Informatics and Computing's Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS) and the IU Cognitive Science Program faculty. "We are very pleased to receive this generous support from the Mellon Foundation for planning the future of the MESUR project," said Bollen, the project's principal investigator. "The initial work on MESUR received a great deal of positive attention. We believe that there is tremendous potential in this area of research for improving the availability, rapidity and quality of scholarly assessment and this grant will help enhance the impact of MESUR and place it on a path toward viability as a public resource."

The new funding for "Developing a Generalized and Sustainable Framework for a Public, Open, Scholarly Assessment Service Based on Aggregated Large-scale Usage Data," will support the evolution of the MESUR project to a community-supported, sustainable scholarly assessment framework. MESUR has already created a database of more than 1 billion usage events with related bibliographic, citation and usage data for scholarly content.

The project will focus on four areas in developing the sustainability model—financial sustainability, legal frameworks for protecting data privacy, technical infrastructure and data exchange, and scholarly impact—and then integrate the four areas to provide the MESUR project with a framework upon which to build a sustainable structure for deriving valid metrics for assessing scholarly impact based on usage data. Simultaneously, MESUR's ongoing operations will be continued with the grant funding and expanded to ingest additional data and update its present set of scholarly impact indicators.

"This is a tremendous opportunity to serve the community and we are pleased to be partnering with Dr. Bollen on this project," said Todd Carpenter, managing director of NISO and co-principal investigator. "The project will require the coordinated and engaged participation of the full spectrum of stakeholders in scholarly communications and NISO is uniquely positioned to act as a neutral third party in bringing together these parties to obtain consensus and a successful outcome."

ARL has released Evaluating E-Resources, SPEC Kit 316 .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published Evaluating E-resources, SPEC Kit 316, which re-examines the ways in which ARL member libraries have (re)structured themselves to identify the availability of new e-resources in the market; evaluate them as candidates for acquisition; decide to acquire/purchase the e-resources; evaluate them prior to their renewal to determine their continued utility; and publicize or market the new e-resources. Nearly identical questions were posed regarding purchases/licensing by consortia and by individual libraries, enabling comparisons in process to be made.

By the March deadline, responses had been submitted by 73 of the 124 ARL member libraries for a response rate of 59%. The survey results indicated that both consortia and libraries deploy large amounts of staff resources to build e-resource collections and that identification and assessment activities are conducted as communal activities among consortia staff and librarians from across the organization.

There is a strong and somewhat surprising correlation between the ways in which research libraries use consortia to acquire and evaluate e-resources and the ways in which they directly acquire and evaluate e-resources. There is also a strong correlation in the ways in which these libraries are acquiring and evaluating highly specialized and multidisciplinary e-resources. Yet, despite considerable and widespread involvement of staff, the survey uncovered weaknesses in the procurement processes, policies, and procedures. These shortcomings not only open the potential for wasted staff time and poor decision making, they also carry potential legal ramifications, due to the nature of contractual licensing. The findings of the survey should be considered a call for concerted communication, organization, and action among those responsible for the acquisition and assessment of e-resources in ARL libraries.

This SPEC Kit includes documentation from respondents in the form of e-resource selection policies, e-resource request and evaluation procedures, descriptions of library and consortia e-resource selectors, job descriptions, and promotional methods.

The table of contents and executive summary from this SPEC Kit are available online at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/spec-316-web.pdf.

JISC has released User Behaviour Observational Study: Scholarly Digital Use and Information-Seeking Behaviour in Business and Economics.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The report covers the digital usage and information seeking behaviour of tens of thousands of business/economics/management students, researchers and academic staff. The intention was to inform and provide a context for the small-scale but detailed observational and interview studies undertaken by Middlesex University researchers for a JISC funded User Behaviour Observational Study (Business and Economics). Much of the data were mined from CIBER’s Virtual Scholar research programme and has not been previously published in this form. New data was also obtained from the studies CIBER are currently conducting, especially from the JISC national E-book Observatory project and the RIN funded E-journals study. Log data, the main source of information on usage and information seeking, covers a period of more than five years and the questionnaire data represents more than 5000 people so this probably represents the biggest and most comprehensive usage data set ever assembled on the subject. E-books and e-journals are covered and usage at the three JISC User Behaviour Observational Study case study institutions—LSE, Middlesex and Cranfield, are highlighted A whole variety of analyses are featured including: volume and, patterns of use (in terms of visits and page views), dwell time (session and page times), type of content viewed (PDF, abstracts etc), number of pages viewed in a session, methods of navigating towards content, age of material viewed, and number of searches conducted, names of titles used, user’s organization, age and gender, hardcopy v digital preferences, viewing/reading behaviour.

The Canadian Research Knowledge Network, which has 73 academic institutions as members, has completed three-year license agreements worth $140 million with 14 scholarly publishers. It is estimated that over $40 million was saved compared to institutional licenses for comparable content.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Despite major financial constraints and uncertainty worldwide, CRKN continues to meet its goals of providing high-impact content for over 850,000 university researchers and students across the country. “This achievement signals CRKN’s contribution to a fertile research environment in Canada, and ability to maintain advantageous terms and price predictability in spite of turbulent economic conditions,” states Deb deBruijn, Executive Director. “Through strong arrangements with vendors, member participation in these national agreements has been largely maintained from the previous period, and has even grown on some agreements, across all sizes of universities.” Please refer to the Backgrounder for publishers, products and participation levels.

CRKN members have taken advantage of new flexibility offered in the renewal as multiple agreements have been unbundled by CRKN, allowing members to tailor their participation in each separate agreement. Members’ return on investment is high through these agreements. A conservative estimate reflects savings of between 15% to over 50% within the national agreements compared to institutional prices for comparable content, representing savings of over $40 million over a three-year period. In addition, members derive value through superior price protection with caps on annual increases set below market norm, expanded usage terms through the CRKN model license agreement, and the most strategic influence with publishers regarding future services and developments. . . .

In keeping with the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) Statement on the Global Economic Crisis and its Impact on Consortial Licenses, CRKN seeks to work with strategic partners that demonstrate flexibility, competitive pricing models, and delivery of long-term value. Vendors with whom CRKN works have shown their commitment to members by providing flexible payment terms, making cost containment a priority, and developing forward-looking ways to add value to the relationship. For example, several vendors will now provide support for Shibboleth, an open-source implementation for identity-based authentication and authorization, and will also participate in the recently-implemented Canadian Access Federation, which will provide federated access management services for identity providers (including universities and libraries) and service providers (such as publishers).