The Guardian has a special supplement on libraries today. It covers several areas including new ideas on the library space (Learning Grid, Information Commons, Saltire Centre etc.), information literacy (focussing on the recent UCL report for JISC and the BL), the impact of web 2.0 and digitisation projects.
Overall this is a great window for JISCs work in the area of libraries. As someone on the inside I found it a bit high level and lightweight, but I guess that is to be expected?
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Owen – the aim, as far as I understand it, was to be high level (think I’d get shot for saying lightweight though!) and aimed at a wider audience than JISC would usually speak to.
None of its exactly groundbreaking to those in the know but if we are honest thats not exactly many people!
I think that’s fair. In a way I’m disappointed that the Guardian journalists didn’t dig a bit more – some comment on topics like the publisher reaction to e-books, the cost of digitisation, the entry of commercial entities (like Google and MS) into ‘library’ space would have been interesting to see.
I was suprised they didn’t pick up on some of the criticism of the UCL ‘Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future’ report that I’ve seen online.
I agree that this is a good way to reach a wider community, and at least brings the issues into the light – it’s a start!
I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw some of those things picked up in the ‘real’ bit of the Education Guardian in the coming months. I think they see this sort of thing as research in many ways and will pick up the threads in their ‘day jobs’.