Listen: 26:28

Alison Head, who is spending time with us at the LiL as she simultaneously is a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center—she is the co-diorector of Project Information Literacy at the Univ. of Washington’s Information School—spoke with us about a new study she’s done with Michael Eisenberg [pdf] about what students are actually doing with their electronic companions when in the library during “crunch time” (two weeks before exams). Are they multitasking? Are they playing games or Facebooking instead of studying? Are they managing their devices, or are their devices managing them?

In this interview, Alison explains that answers are of course complex, but that overall, The Kids are managing well…and that this may give some hints about the future of libraries.

The CBC radio show Spark has posted the unedited version of an interview they did with me last week about ShelfLife and LibraryCloud. A much shorter version of this will air soon.

Read more of "ShelfLife and LibraryCloud on CBC"

Michael Jensen explains why the National Academies Press decided to make its material openly available.

Read more of "Michael Jensen on NAP's decision to publish for free"

Eric Frank is the president and co-founder of Flat World Knowledge, Inc., which publishes peer-reviewed online textbooks available under Creative Commons license. He explains his business.

Read more of "Eric Frank on open textbooks"

Avi Warshavsky builds online textbooks for Center for Educational Technology in Israel. He talks about whether textbooks have a future.

Read more of "Avi Warshavsky on the future of textbooks"

Listen: 20:46

(Also in ogg)

The way we search for information on the web has antecedents in the way search works in traditional libraries and research journals. There’s metadata, and there’s also a sense of allowing the content that is most cited to float to the top.

So why the library of the future still being waylaid?

Read more of "Library Lab/The Podcast 009: What Libraries Want"

Snippets of recent happenings in the Lab

Read more of "Weekly Roundup: recent LIL happenings"

The Royal Society—publisher of the first peer reviewed scientific article in history—has announced that its entire archive (which goes back to 1665) and all future issues will be available online for free. Here’s the searchable index.

Read more of "Royal Society goes open access"

The Association of College and Research Libraries has signed the Berlin Declaration. The ACRL is a division of the American Library Association, and has 12,500 members (which is about 20% of the ALA’s membership). The Berlin Declaration was written in 2003 and encourages open access publishing. [via American Libraries Magazine, and a hat tip to David Curry.]

Read more of "ACRL supports open access declaration"

There’s a blog about the library of works being accumulated by the Occupy Wall Street folks. The list of titles is a LibraryThing.

Read more of "Occupy Wall Street: The Library"