Decline in borrowing of humanities monographs

15 Saturday Jan 2011

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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Are Students in the Humanities Making Less Use of Printed Books? A Longitudinal Study at the University of Queensland Library (January 2011)…

“The rapid growth of electronic journals (and especially of resources such as JSTOR) has provided a convenient alternative to the monograph, and one that is accessible from any computer” … “students are using them heavily, and we suspect that this has a lot to do with their accessibility.”

“If we suspect that one factor in the decline in borrowing of humanities monographs is the inconvenience of the print format for today’s students, we should do everything that we can to increase our holdings of e-books in the humanities, as more such works become available.”

The other possibility, for popular books required for a course, is that the nerdy students already have them in pirated ebook format, which would account for a marginal drop in print access. Perhaps the Web-savvy ones are also viewing enough pages on Google Books / Amazon Look Inside to satisfy their needs. Yet I wouldn’t rule out on-demand piracy in future — with the advent of things like the Ion Book Saver, will the class nerd simply convert an essay-required book in 15 minutes and email it to the rest of the class?

Ion Book Saver

14 Friday Jan 2011

Posted by in My general observations, Spotted in the news

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The new Ion Book Saver, a $150 non-destructive book scanner for the home or office. You have to flip the pages manually, although it seems it’s far faster than a traditional flatbed scanner. Sadly the device only seems to be available from big retail stores in the USA, and not via Amazon or in the UK. It’ll be interesting to see if these become available to the UK privately, via eBay sellers, and at a reasonable premium.

I’d also like to see a video of how it copes with a fat hardback and a tight spine. The device lifts up via the handle, but doesn’t appear to have the weight or clips needed to keep pages flat in such circumstances. Still, it looks useful for quickly digitising a lot of old ephemera such as newsletters and magazines. Paper journals, too. The device saves to .jpg or .pdf on the slot-in SD card.

Ion — if you can send me a review device I’ll happily give it a detailed review here at the JURN blog 🙂

Reciprocal links

13 Thursday Jan 2011

Posted by in JURN blogged, My general observations

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A few reciprocal backlinks, for those linking to JURN recently:—

Princeton University library links JURN on its Online Reference Shelf.

The Royal Library of Denmark links JURN on its main Humanities page.

The Library of the Universite Paris-Sorbonne links JURN.

Linked on the Journals page at Southern Cross University, Australia.

Linked on the Journals page at Lulea university, Sweden.

Linked on the Journals page at Singapore Management University.

Postcolonial Space journal has added the JURN search box to its courses website.

The state of ICT teaching in the UK

12 Wednesday Jan 2011

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Leading videogame guru David Braben (Elite, Lost Winds, leading light of UK trade body TIGA) confirms that ICT teaching in UK schools is dire…

“every kid I talk to says ICT is dull. They hate it. The majority is learning how to use certain MS [Microsoft] tools and how to find the on and off switch.” … “That is such a far distance from what I’m talking about, where self-driven learning happens. I think it was very well meaning to try and make ICT universal but I think it’s backfired.” He called for computer science teaching that “actually taught programming and all the things which are exciting about it.” The problem was particular acute, he felt, for those children who could not use PCs at home. “For those who didn’t have access to computers it just confirmed the fact that they weren’t interested.”

His comments follow reports that the Royal Society are setting up an investigation into why ICT teaching is so poor…

“Since 2006 there has been a 33 per cent fall in pupils taking ICT GCSEs, and numbers taking A-levels in ICT have fallen by a third in six years. The number of candidates taking A-level Computing has fallen 57 per cent in eight years. … “ICT and Computer Science in school seem to turn these young people off. We need school curricula to engage them better if the next generation are to engineer technology and not just consume it.”

Part of the problem apparently lies in the failure to recruit quality teachers, which has led to a dumbed-down curriculum that any 2:2 can teach by rote. A mildly-obsessive techie nerd — someone with the drive to keep pace with the ever-evolving world of ICT, and just the sort of person you want in front of a class of bright kids — would rightly run a mile from teaching ICT in British schools. A deeper part of the problem seems to be that our secondary education system and its follow-on ‘youth training’ & unemployment-handling routes are still deeply stuck in a ‘mass industrial’ / ‘mass retail’ / ‘mass secretarial’ mindset about the world of work.

15 years of hand-wringing reports, committees, and failed initiatives have failed to make a dent in the national picture. But if there is to be real reform, perhaps via ‘serious games’, then let’s hope that intensive search literacy is put at the heart of it.