Anonymous Patron writes “Best Practices of Academic Library Technology Directors is a Market Research Report for sale from a company called “Research and Markets.”
This study is based on interviews with IT directors and assistant
directors of leading college and university libraries and consortiums,
including The Research Libraries Group, Vanderbilt University, the
University of Texas, Lewis & Clark College, Salt Lake Community College, the
University of Washington, the California Institute of Technology, Hutchinson
Community College and Australia’s Monash University.
Anonymous Patron writes “Best Practices of Academic Library Technology Directors is a Market Research Report for sale from a company called “Research and Markets.”
This study is based on interviews with IT directors and assistant
directors of leading college and university libraries and consortiums,
including The Research Libraries Group, Vanderbilt University, the
University of Texas, Lewis & Clark College, Salt Lake Community College, the
University of Washington, the California Institute of Technology, Hutchinson
Community College and Australia’s Monash University.
Among the many topics covered are: investment in and maintenance of
workstations, implementation of wireless access, policies towards laptops in
the library, digitizing special collections, establishing digital
depositories, preserving scholarly access to potentially temporal digital
media, use of Ebooks, services for distance learning students, use of url
resolvers, web site development and management, use of virtual reference,
investment in library software, IT staff size and staff skill composition,
range of IT staff responsibilities, use of outsourcing, relations between
Library and general University IT staff, uses of PHP programming, catalog
integration with the web, catalog enhancement software and services, web
site search engine policies, use of automated electronic collection
management software, technology education and training, development of
technology centers and information literacy, library printing technology and
cost reimbursement, and other issues of concern to academic librarians.”
Not impressed with report on public libraries
This same company, Primary Research Group, also published a “Best Practices of Public Library Information Technology Directors” (ISBN 1-57440-073-8).
It is 87 pages long, but only because they double-spaced throughout the entire book and used 14 point type for headings to create even more empty space.
In addition, the overall summary the authors write leaves a lot to be desired, there is no identification of the “best practices” in each area of technology or a tabular overview / summary of the products that the libraries use – this might be overlooked for infrastrucutre products, like routers, switches, SANs, firewalls, filtering systems, etc. but they do not even list the ILS of each system. Both of these features would have been very helpful.
In addition, there is no quick demographic survey that compares the libraries so without reading each of the profiles it is hard to know exactly how big the LSA of each system is, how many branches, etc. Considering that you can easily build this off of the NCES web site, I was disappointed to see that it was not included.
Numerous typos (beginning in the table of contents and continuing throughout the report) also makes me question the overall quality. Not worth the $$$ we spent.