Yet another new (June 2009) Research Information Network research report, The UK’s Share of World Research Output : an investigation of different data sources and time trends (PDF link)…

“we have noticed that the figures provided in various reports for the UK’s share of the world’s production of scientific publications vary enormously. That a seemingly straightforward figure should show such volatility perplexed us, and so we asked Grant Lewison and colleagues in the CIBER group at University College London to analyse the published figures, and explain the differences between them.”

The UK’s Research Information Network has just published (June 2009) a new report, Creating Catalogues: bibliographic records in a networked world (Direct PDF link). It gives an…

“overview of the whole process of bibliographic record production for printed and electronic books, and for scholarly journals and journal articles [ and the ] motivations and business models” […] “We find that there would be considerable benefits if libraries, along with other organisations in the supply chain, were to operate more at the network level but that there are significant barriers in the way of making significant moves in that direction.”

Of course if someone built a better works-out-of-the-box open source automatic citation parser and harvester, especially one that was able to hook into a browser addon and thus harvest from every page a scholar views…

The British government-aligned think-tank Demos launched a new pamphlet on the 23rd, The Edgeless University : why higher education must embrace technology (PDF link). ‘Edgeless’ here means the Mandelsonian policy idea that UK higher-education must cross borders, speak many languages and generally become less insular — willing to set up partnership campuses in Europe and beyond, “exploring new ways of accrediting learning”. Technology is touted as the way to press on toward that goal, it seems. All very well (unless it’s the dreaded Moodle), but where’s the money to do so, at a time when huge cuts to libraries and to “investment in the management and curatorship of vast amounts of data and knowledge” seem to be looming into view?

A short new report M-Libraries: information use on the move (PDF link, 1.2Mb) on mobile-phone use and university libraries. It places a question-mark over the popular idea that there’s a tech-savvy ‘Twitter generation’ of undergraduates out there, clamouring for mobile access to the latest edition of Journal of Proctology as they skateboard down the corridors.

Library users at the University of Cambridge and the Open University, both in the UK, were surveyed via a short online survey (a total of 2306 respondents). Despite it being an online survey at two very strong universities — and therefore presumably attracting more tech-savvy students than otherwise — there are some discouraging results for the academic use of mobile devices.

The number of student who say they “never read an e-book” or “never read a journal article” on their mobile are very high (between 86%-94%). From this survey the report concludes that, even if funding permitted, it is…

“not worth libraries putting development resource into delivering content such as eBooks and ejournals to mobile devices at present.”

There’s a newly published UK report, available online, Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World.