I have 6 books to hand which might be of interest to would-be reviewers.
I would welcome expressions of interest from members of this list.
The summary of the 6 titles immediately below gives the bare details.
Further details and a longer (publishers') description of each book appear
below my signature.
If you would be interested in reviewing one of these items for 'Ariadne',
< http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/ > , would you kindly contact me on
[log in to unmask] giving your name and contact details (including postal
address), your relevant experience, area of work/interest and organisation/
position where relevant.
The submission date for the reviews would be 20 January 2006.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any queries.
Summary of items for review:
1]
Delivering Digital Services
A handbook for public libraries and learning centres
David McMenemy and Alan Poulter
June 2005
2]
E-Metrics for Library and Information Professionals How to use data for
managing and evaluating electronic resource collections
Andrew White and Eric Djiva Kamal
November 2005
3]
Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture.
Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil, eds.
2004
4]
Managing Electronic Records
Edited by Catherine Hare and Julie McLeod
October 2005
5]
Developing the New Learning Environment:
The changing role of the academic librarian
Edited by Philippa Levy and Sue Roberts
October 2005
6]
The History and Heritage of Scientific and Technological Information Systems
Edited by Mary Ellen Bowden and W. Boyd Rayward
November 2004
Further details below*
Best regards,
Richard Waller
Editor Ariadne
UKOLN
The Library
University of Bath
Bath BA2 7AY
UK
tel +44 (0) 1225 383570
fax +44 (0) 1225 386838
email [log in to unmask]
web http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
web http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/
*
1]
Delivering Digital Services
A handbook for public libraries and learning centres
David McMenemy and Alan Poulter
Lifelong learning is currently a major concern of governments who wish to
see their citizens remain employable while the job market changes. Critical
to this are digital learning centres where learning is delivered through
internet access or via CD-based packages. Access to these turns public
libraries and community networks into 'multimedia neighbourhood superstores'
where print-based learning materials are enhanced by multimedia. The
multiplicity of sources of learning materials and experiences reinforces and
extends the traditional role of the librarian as mediator between the user
and their needs. To support and foster these activities frontline public
library and community network staff must be capable of offering user support
and advice in a much wider arena. This requires training in new knowledge
and skill sets.
This timely new book offers practical guidance and expertise for public
library and community network staff in setting up, running and developing an
effective digital learning centre based within the People's Network or in a
related community networking initiative. It has a holistic focus on the use
of ICT, taking staff beyond user training applications into areas of network
management, e-learning, digitization, web design and XML that staff face on
a day-to-day basis. Key areas covered include:
PC installation and maintenance
managing a network and coping with the security issues of internet
connection
understanding and supporting lifelong learning
digitization of local materials
managing websites and intranets: site design, metadata, XML
building local community portals
implementing e-government
social inclusion and service extension: assistive technologies
service issues: copyright, access
user and staff training.
This book will de-mystify this new area of development for all library and
information staff working in, or setting up, a PC-based digital learning
centre in information service settings within public libraries, community
networking centres, and school and academic libraries.
Facet Publishing, June 2005; 256pp; hardback; 1-85604-510-2; 39.95
2]
E-Metrics for Library and Information Professionals
How to use data for managing and evaluating electronic resource collections
Andrew White, Associate Director, Health Sciences Center Library, Stony
Brook University and Eric Djiva Kamal, Systems Administrator, Health
Sciences Center Library, Stony Brook University
Is your library getting every pound's-worth out of that thousand-pound
database? Should you re-subscribe to that pricey e-journal? Are your indexes
serving your users? Collection development and acquisitions librarians are
facing tough new questions. Unfortunately these were, for many, unanswerable
questions-until now.
White and Kamal show how to use e-metrics to measure library performance and
value in the digital age. Learn how to effectively use the electronic data
captured from various network activities to manage library collections,
budgets, and services. Using e-metrics, the authors identify expensive and
underused digital resources, visualise virtual user behaviour patterns, and
construct new collection development strategies.
Real-world examples demonstrate how to develop a locally established library
e-metric system and apply it with supplier usage statistics to critical
collection management and financial decisions. Practical tips and detailed
analysis illustrate the important application of e-metrics to help you
better serve your users and run an effective library.
Facet Publishing, November 2005 256pp paperback 1-85604-555-2 39.95
3]
Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture.
Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil, eds.,
Digital culture is often characterized as radically breaking with past
technologies, practices, and ideologies rather than as reflecting or
incorporating them. Memory Bytes seeks to counter such ahistoricism, arguing
for the need to understand digital culture-and its social, political, and
ethical ramifications-in historical and philosophical context. Looking at a
broad range of technologies, including photography, print and digital media,
heat engines, stereographs, and medical imaging, the contributors present a
number of different perspectives from which to reflect on the nature of
media change. While foregrounding the challenges of drawing comparisons
across varied media and eras, Memory Bytes explores how technologies have
been integrated into society at different moments in time.
These essays from scholars in the social sciences and humanities cover
topics related to science and medicine, politics and war, mass
communication, philosophy, film, photography, and art. Whether describing
how the cultural and legal conflicts over player piano rolls prefigured
controversies over the intellectual property status of digital technologies
such as mp3 files; comparing the experiences of watching QuickTime movies to
Joseph Cornell's "boxed relic" sculptures of the 1930s and 1940s; or calling
for a critical history of electricity from the Enlightenment to the present,
Memory Bytes investigates the interplay of technology and culture. It
relates the Information Age to larger and older political and cultural
phenomena, analyzes how sensory effects have been technologically produced
over time, considers how human subjectivity has been shaped by machines, and
emphasizes the dependence of particular technologies on the material
circumstances within which they were developed and used.
Contributors. Judith Babbitts, Scott Curtis, Ronald E. Day, David Depew,
Abraham Geil, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, Lisa Gitelman, N. Katherine Hayles,
John Durham Peters, Lauren Rabinovitz, Laura Rigal, Vivian Sobchack, Thomas
Swiss.
"Memory Bytes is an important contribution to the growing body of
scholarship taking the current moment of media change as an incitement to
re-examine earlier moments in media history. The range of media, historical
periods, and disciplinary perspectives is spectacular, representing
interdisciplinary collaboration and conversation at its very best."-Henry
Jenkins, coeditor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular
Culture.
"Anyone who teaches courses in digital culture or media studies knows
how difficult it is to find scholarly essays on new media that consider
these developments in relation to social and technological precedents.
Memory Bytes fills this gap."-Brian Goldfarb, author of Visual Pedagogy:
Media Cultures in and beyond the Classroom.
Lauren Rabinovitz is Professor of American Studies and Cinema at the
University of Iowa. She is the author of For the Love of Pleasure: Women,
Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago and Points of Resistance:
Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943-1971 and
coeditor of Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical
Essays, also published by Duke University Press. Abraham Geil is an
instructor in media history at the New School University in New York City.
Facet Publishing, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 344 pp. Index. $79.95
(cloth), ISBN 0-8223-3228-0; $22.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8223-3241-8
4]
Managing Electronic Records
Edited by Catherine Hare, Manager of the Community of Science, and Julie
McLeod, Programme Leader for Records Management courses at the School of
Informatics, University of Northumbria
Bringing together for the first time the views, experience and expertise of
international experts in the RM field in the public and the private sectors,
this book covers the theory and practice of managing electronic records as
business and information assets.
It focuses on the strategies, systems and procedures necessary to ensure
that electronic records are appropriately created, captured, organized and
retained over time to meet business and legal requirements. In addition to
chapters covering principles and research and developments, there are case
studies relating to practice and lessons learned.
The chapters are written by a fully international line-up of contributors.
Key chapters include:
issues and challenges: setting the agenda
metadata matters
change management: people issues
technologies for electronic record-keeping
standards and models
business continuity, risk management and the role of records
digital preservation
legal issues
ethical issues
research
projects and developments
looking to the future.
This book explore issues and address solutions, not only for records
professionals but also for information, IT and business administration
specialists, who, as key stakeholders in managing electronic information,
may have taken on key roles in managing electronic records in their
organization. It will also be a key textbook for Records Management courses.
Facet Publishing, October 2005 272pp hardback 1-85604-550-1 39.95
5]
Developing the New Learning Environment:
The changing role of the academic librarian
Edited by Philippa Levy and Sue Roberts
The academic librarian's role is changing rapidly. Increasingly the
boundaries are blurring between librarians' jobs and those of learning
technologists, information technologists, educational developers, skill
support specialists and indeed academic staff. New collaborations and
partnerships between staff with different professional backgrounds are
emerging as part of the effort to enable active and independent learning
amongst an increasingly diverse student community. Library and information
professionals are becoming involved in the development and support of new
modes of blended and distributed learning, including the development of
e-learning approaches and resources, and new strategies for information
literacy education.
In this environment of rapid change the academic librarian needs to stay
informed and embrace the new job opportunities emerging: this essential book
will capture and critically discuss the librarian's changing learning
support role in an education context providing guidance and practical
support. Written by acknowledged experts across a broad range of roles in
the new academic environment, this book will challenge thinking in this area
as well as being practical and practice-based. The following key areas are
covered:
The policy framework;
Pedagogies for a changing environment;
New literacies and learning;
Key issues in the design and delivery of learning and teaching;
Thinking differently about learning support;
New academic teams;
Responding to the e-learning imperative;
Information literacy education in practice;
Inclusion: impact on practice;
Managing learning support services;
Visioning the future of learning support;
Emerging professional identities and practices.
This book will be essential reading for practitioners at every level within
the higher education and further education sectors, including information
specialists, learning support professionals, academic liaison co-ordinators
and subject specialists, academic service managers and heads of library and
information services. It will also be a valuable resource for all other
professionals involved in the delivery of learning support, and for students
of LIS and of education.
Facet Publishing, October 2005; 256pp; hardback; 1-85604-530-7; 39.95
6]
The History and Heritage of Scientific and Technological Information Systems
Edited by Mary Ellen Bowden and W. Boyd Rayward
Emphasis for the second conference on the history of information science
systems was on scientific and technical information systems in the period
from the Second World War up through the early 1990s. These proceedings
present the papers of historians of science and technology, information
scientists, and scientists in other fields on a wide range of topics:
informatics in chemistry; biology and medicine; information developments in
multinational, industrial, and military settings; biographical studies of
pioneering individuals; and the transformation of information systems and
formats in the twentieth century.
Information Today, Inc. for Chemical Heritage Foundation and American
Society of Information Science, November 2004 300 pp/softbound ISBN
1-57387-229-6
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