One of our primary goals as a publisher and information solutions provider is to enable advancement in research. Doing that effectively requires that we not only understand and anticipate researchers’ fundamental needs and behaviors, but that we find innovativeways to improve theirworkflows.....Read more

While libraries have been inundated with talk of Web 2.0 technology, social media and the Internet, we’ve failed to notice the mobile revolution taking place. According to Taiwan's Market Intelligence Center (MIC), the number of global mobile users hit 2.3 billion in 2006 and will reach 3 billion by 2010.....Read more

MD Consult is the flagship online reference service from Elsevier’s Health Sciences division. Originally a joint venture between W.B. Saunders, Mosby and Lippincott, MD Consult brings reference books, journal articles, Clinics, drug monographs and patient handouts together into one convenient online service — delivering trusted medical information to help physicians make better treatment decisions and improve patient care. This fall we’re extending the service and launching MD Consult Mobile.....Read more

During the 2009 SLA Annual Conference, Doyle Friskney, the associate vice president of information technology and the chief technology officer at the University of Kentucky, gave the talk "Commons, Chaos and Clouds in My CIs: Implications for Higher Education” about smartphones and cloud computing and ramifications in universities. Here, Doyle follows up on that talk and gives additional thoughts about how mobile access is changing the role of academic libraries.  ....Read more

Building on the authoritative scholarship of the past is a critical component of progress in academic study. How can researchers identify authoritative, trustworthy sources for their research? CrossRef, the not-for-profit organization of publishers that makes reference linking in scholarly content possible, is creating tools to help researchers identify what content can be trusted. Two programs, CrossCheck Plagiarism Screening and the soon-to-bepiloted CrossMark program, address this need from different angles.....Read more

The UCSF Patient Health Library is a new library created in response to the demand from patients and their friends, family members and partners at UCSF Medical Center at Mount Zion who wanted access to medical information.....Read more

In recent decades, some borders defining traditional disciplinary research activities have been dissolving. Indeed, the borders between some disciplines have increasingly dissolved. As these boundaries blur or melt, research libraries have to respond to these changes.....Read more

Various members of the publishing and research community are collaborating to develop an open, independent identification system for scholarly authors which would become the industry standard. ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) aims to create a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers and an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID and other current author ID schemes.....Read more

Over the last 6 years, Monash University has revitalized its research strategy to position the university to contribute to Australia and the international community through focusing on solutions for issues of local and global consequence. During that time, the university’s research funding has increased by approximately 80% and Higher Degree Research (HDR) students by more than 30%.....Read more

Library Connect interviewed Odile Ouwe Missi Oukem, PhD, and Appolinaire Djikeng, PhD, about their project to develop a health information library network in Cameroon. Odile is located at the project’s hub, the Chantal Biya International Reference Centre for Research on HIV/AIDS Prevention and Management (CIRCB) in Yaoundé-Messa, Cameroon. Appolinaire is located at the BecA-ILRI Hub in Nairobi, Kenya.....Read more

Library Connect interviews Conrad Wolfram, Director of Strategic & International Development, Wolfram Research, Oxford, UK. The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is an instructional applet website with more than 5,000 knowledge spaces.....Read more

At Makerere University in Uganda, finding ways to share knowledge and information throughout a country with limited Internet access is nothing less than an institutional priority. Maria Musoke is the University Librarian at Makerere and Albert Cook Medical Library, Uganda’s major Health Sciences library. She travels regularly with a team of doctors, nurses and midwives to train rural health workers, inform community members, and influence health outcomes.....Read more

Macquarie University’s goal is to join the ranks of the world’s top 200 research universities, and its new library plays a major role in that undertaking. “Our university's strategic plan has reaffirmed the library as the intellectual heart of the campus,” says Maxine Brodie, University Librarian. “We’re unique among large universities in Australia in only ever having had a single campus library because of our focus on the interdisciplinary nature of research and learning.”....Read more

In pondering the future of academic libraries and, in particular, their traditional collections, I found it doubly ironic that I was asked to write this article. The first irony is that my institution is building a major library building on campus, one that will hold several million volume equivalents, providing for 20 years’ growth of our print collections. This flies in the face of common wisdom that physical libraries and collections are a thing of the past.....Read more