Compañera habla sobre el auge de los e-books para El Nuevo Día

LOS LIBROS digitales (e-books) no han tenido una aceptación abrumadora en Puerto Rico contrario a lo que ha sucedido en Estados Unidos, según conocedores de esta materia consultados por El Nuevo Día.

Más bien, los e-books en la Isla han tenido auge entre la comunidad uni- versitaria, dijo la bibliotecaria del Sistema Universitario Ana G. Méndez, Waleska Rivera.

"Este campo -aunque no es nuevo- está mayormente en inglés y en las universidades se trabaja con ambos idiomas", dijo Rivera, quien sostuvo que la Universidad de Puerto Rico y la Interamericana también tienen su colección de libros de texto y de referencia electrónicos.

Su uso en la comunidad universitaria ha aumentado un 35%, precisó la consultora de ventas de Gale Editores, que vende e-books, Leslie González.

Desde el 2002 hasta febrero de 2009, las ventas de los libros digitales se han más que triplicado en Estados Unidos, indica el Foro Internacional de Publicaciones Digitales, que agrupa a la industria editorial digital. De acuerdo con informes comisio- nados por el Foro cada cuatro meses, en el 2002 los libros digitales en Estados Unidos dejaron ganancias de $1.5 millones y para febrero de 2009 la cantidad sobrepasó los $15 millones.

Esa estadística es confirmada por la portavoz de Amazon, Cinthia Portugal, aunque por política de la empresa declinaron compartir sus cifras.

En Puerto Rico no hay estadísticas sobre la venta o el uso de e-books, dijo el consultor en tecnología, Wilton Vargas. Catalogó el mercado de e-books en Puerto Rico como un "natimuerto" lo que atribuyó al desconocim i e n t o.

La bibliotecaria Rivera opinó, por su parte, que el poco éxito del producto aquí se debe a otro factor. "Un pueblo que no lee", comentó. "El `boom’ es en Estados Unidos y en países europeos donde la gente acostumbra a leer", dijo basada en su experiencia con estudiantes.

Propietarios de varias li- brerías consultados difirieron. "Los estudiantes no son un recurso para medir el nivel de lectura en Puerto Rico", dijo el gerente de distrito de las tiendas Borders en Puerto Rico, Julio Reyes. "La tienda de Plaza Las Amé- ricas, desde que abrió en febrero del 2000, ha estado entre las primeras posiciones en ventas en comparación con todas las tiendas de Estados Unidos incluyendo Singapur e Inglaterra", precisó Reyes.

Añadió que antes de la apertura de esta tienda se hizo un estudio de mer- cadeo en la Isla por cinco años que arrojó que los puertorriqueños estudian más y tienen grados educativos más altos que en muchos estados.

Reyes dijo que no cree que los e-books que venden por internet gracias a un acuerdo con Sony y su lector digital llamado Sony Reader- sustituyan en un futuro al libro convencional, supuesto que es contemplado por Amazon, según Portugal.

Amazon lanzó este año la segunda versión de su lector digital de libros, Kindle, con 270,000 libros disponibles.

Y desde el 2006, Google ofrece gratis más de 500,000 libros digitales en su buscador.

Tampoco los libreros Alfredo Torres, propietario de La Tertulia, y Nuria Muñoz, dueña de Casttle Books, creen que los libros desaparecerán. Sus negocios no tienen disponibles e-books.

Torres dijo que la digitalización de libros de texto y de referencia hace mella sobre las ventas en las librerías.

"(Pero) la librería es un espacio so- cial. Veo los e-books como un cambio tecnológico importante, pero todavía hay generaciones que les gusta leer del papel", dijo el comerciante.

Los e-books, por otro lado, tienen sus beneficios, según la bibliotecaria del Sistema Universitario Ana G. Méndez: son más costo efectivos, están disponibles en todo momento para los estudiantes y la facultad, no se deterioran, dañan o se los roban como sucede con un libro impreso y lo pueden acceder múltiples usuarios. Además, dijo, son amigables con el ambiente ya que no utilizan papel.

Vía: Períodico El Nuevo Día Electrónico
Domingo, 26 de abril de 2009

Actividad Sistémica/ Día del Bibliotecario Photoshow

Conferencia en línea sobre RDA

Here's some cool news from the RDA-L list: The Technical Services Interest Group of the Canadian Library Association (CLA) will provide a free webcast of what looks to be an awesome line-up for their RDA pre-conference: From Rules to Entities – Cataloguing with RDA . Jane Schmidt writes:

There is no need to register for, or have a username and password for the webcast of the RDA pre-conference. It is being provided for free and hosted on a free service on the web. All you have to do is go to this URL at 9am on May 29th when it will be broadcast live.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/from-rules-to-entities%3A-cataloguing-with-rda

It will also be archived there for future reference. It is not interactive, and we can make no guarantees that it will be of a high quality, only that we will do our very best. I am also asking everyone to bear in mind that I am not an AV professional, but am just playing one for this occasion!

Power point slides will be available for reference at the following location:

http://tsig.wikispaces.com/Pre-conference+2009

Vía: Cataloging Futures

Presentación RDA hacia un nuevo horizonte...

RDA hacia un nuevo horizonte..., presentación realizada en la Actividad Sistémica para el Personal Bibliotecario del SUAGM como parte de las actividades que se llevaron a cabo en la Semana de la Biblioteca. La misma se realizó el viernes 17 de abril de 2009 en el Hotel La Concha de San Juan. La misma logro exponer los cambios, trabajo y esfuerzo que se realizan para mejorar los servicios bibliotecarios como parte del Plan de Trabajo del Cómite de Catalogación del SUAGM.

Miembros del Comité de Catalogación del SUAGM que estuvieron a cargo en la preparación de la presentación:

Gabriel López Pacheco
Carmen Lydia Montañez
Veronica Delgado Betancourt
Dra. Neida Soliván Rolón
Melva Rivera Caraballo
Carmen Nereida Ayala Reyes
Marilia del Rosario Siaca Rodríguez
Norayma Celpa Gómez

RDA hacia un nuevo horizonte

View more presentations from decolecciones.

¿Cuán grande es la Biblioteca del Congreso?

I want to preface this post by reiterating one of our general disclaimers up front, to wit: “This blog does not represent official Library of Congress communications.” Because this post will edge slightly closer to “editorializing” than most of my previous posts.

Working in the Office of Communications as I do, I’m aware of the lion’s share of news coverage about and references to the Library, whether via Lexis-Nexis, Google News, or any number of other monitoring services to which we have access. This is a rough approximation — and perhaps a bit hyperbolic — but I would guess that somewhere between a quarter and a third of the general references I see to the Library are along these lines: “Our servers can store the equivalent of the Library of Congress,” or “our network is fast enough to download the entire Library of Congress in a millisecond.” You get the drift.

So it begs the question, just how “big” is the Library of Congress, in terms of our content, but especially if one tried to equate it to the digital realm?

I won’t go into any of the specific claims that are being made, but they’re easy to find out there in the ether, and suffice it to say that the Library would stand behind very few if any of them. There are certain things we can quantify, but far more that are purely speculative.

For instance, we can as of this moment say that the approximate amount of our collections that are digitized and freely and publicly available on the Internet is about 74 terabytes. We can also say that we have about 15.3 million digital items online.

Some may be tempted to extrapolate that those digital items represent a precise percentage of the nearly 142 million items in the Library’s physical collections, and then estimate some kind of digital corollary. But comparing digital and physical items is apples and oranges, at best. A simple example of that fallacy would be represented by a single photograph online depicting several physical objects.

Another source of digital estimates is likely based on the number of books and printed items in our collections, which is currently about 32 million. One could attempt to establish the average length of those items (pages, words, characters, etc.) and extrapolate the digital equivalent of those 32 million physical items.

Assuming one could do that with any degree of accuracy — and that’s a big assumption — it overlooks the fact that those 32 million books represent only about one-quarter of the entire physical collections. The rest are in the form of manuscripts, prints, photographs, maps, globes, moving images, sound recordings, sheet music, oral histories, etc. So how does that other three-quarters of the Library equate digitally? Can one automatically assume the digital resolution at which all maps or photographs, for instance, would be scanned? Those are major wildcards indeed.

And then there are our motion pictures, videos and sound recordings alone — around 6 million items stored at our new Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Va. What is their digital equivalent? Most people who record television programs onto a computer or DVR know that a hard drive with hundreds of megabytes or even a terabyte or more can quickly fill up.

One more thing we can quantify or at least estimate: The folks at the Packard Campus say that when their systems are fully online, they expect to be able to digitize between 3 and 5 petabytes of content per year. (That is to say, 3,000 to 5,000 terabytes, for those who are playing at home. Put another way, a single petabyte stored on CD-ROMs would create a stack of discs more than a mile high.) And even at that rate, it would still take decades to digitize the existing content.

So at this point, we’re talking about potentially mind-boggling amounts of data — we’re into the territory of angels and heads of pins. And while it is a bit of a tangent, it points to the continued importance of libraries as places (and librarians) when too many people assume that “everything is online.”

While it is certainly flattering that the Library of Congress is used as a typical benchmark against which others measure their content or data capacity, we would do well to take these claims with at least a shaker of salt. We are far “bigger” than many of them might think.

Vía: Library of Congress Blog

ALA’s Core Competences of Librarianship

The Core Competences of Librarianship define the knowledge to be possessed by all persons graduating from ALA-accredited master’s programs in library and information studies.

The Presidential Task Force on Library Education has gathered together the drafts of the Core Competences resulting from the work of various bodies in response to the first Congress on Professional Education and, following extensive consultation and redrafting, presented them in the current form to the Executive Board, who approved them at their fall 2008 meeting.

The final statement was approved and adopted as policy by the ALA Council on January 27, 2009 during the 2009 Midwinter Meeting in Denver, CO.



Final version
Approved by the ALA Executive Board,
October 25th 2008

Approved and adopted as policy
by the ALA Council, January 27th 2009



This document defines the basic knowledge to be possessed by all persons graduating from an ALA-accredited master’s program in library and information studies.



Librarians working in school, academic, public, special, and governmental libraries,and in other contexts will need to possess specialized knowledge beyond that specified here.


CONTENTS

1. Foundations of the Profession
2. Information Resources
3. Organization of Recorded Knowledge and Information
4. Technological Knowledge and Skills
5. Reference and User Services
6. Research
7. Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning
8. Administration and Management

A person graduating from an ALA-accredited master’s program in library and information studies should know and, where appropriate, be able to employ:

1. Foundations of the Profession

1A. The ethics, values, and foundational principles of the library and information profession.

1B. The role of library and information professionals in the promotion of democratic principles and intellectual freedom (including freedom of expression, thought, and conscience).

1C. The history of libraries and librarianship.

1D. The history of human communication and its impact on libraries.

1E. Current types of library (school, public, academic, special, etc.) and closely related information agencies.

1F. National and international social, public, information, economic, and cultural policies and trends of significance to the library and information profession.

1G. The legal framework within which libraries and information agencies
operate. That framework includes laws relating to copyright, privacy, freedom of expression, equal rights (e.g., the Americans with Disabilities Act), and intellectual property.

1H. The importance of effective advocacy for libraries, librarians, other library workers, and library services.

1I. The techniques used to analyze complex problems and create appropriate
solutions.

1J. Effective communication techniques (verbal and written).

1K. Certification and/or licensure requirements of specialized areas of the profession.

2. Information Resources

2A. Concepts and issues related to the lifecycle of recorded knowledge and
information, from creation through various stages of use to disposition.

2B. Concepts, issues, and methods related to the acquisition and disposition of resources, including evaluation, selection, purchasing, processing, storing, and deselection.

2C. Concepts, issues, and methods related to the management of various collections.

2D. Concepts, issues, and methods related to the maintenance of collections,
including preservation and conservation.


3. Organization of Recorded Knowledge and Information

3A. The principles involved in the organization and representation of recorded knowledge and information.

3B. The developmental, descriptive, and evaluative skills needed to organize recorded knowledge and information resources.

3C. The systems of cataloging, metadata, indexing, and classification standards and methods used to organize recorded knowledge and information.

4. Technological Knowledge and Skills

4A. Information, communication, assistive, and related technologies as they affect the resources, service delivery, and uses of libraries and other information agencies.

4B. The application of information, communication, assistive, and related technology and tools consistent with professional ethics and prevailing service norms and applications.

4C. The methods of assessing and evaluating the specifications, efficacy, and cost efficiency of technology-based products and services.

4D. The principles and techniques necessary to identify and analyze emerging technologies and innovations in order to recognize and implement relevant technological improvements.

5. Reference and User Services

5A. The concepts, principles, and techniques of reference and user services that provide access to relevant and accurate recorded knowledge and information to individuals of all ages and groups.

5B. Techniques used to retrieve, evaluate, and synthesize information from diverse sources for use by individuals of all ages and groups.

5C. The methods used to interact successfully with individuals of all ages and groups to provide consultation, mediation, and guidance in their use of recorded knowledge and information.

5D. Information literacy/information competence techniques and methods,
numerical literacy, and statistical literacy.

5E. The principles and methods of advocacy used to reach specific audiences to promote and explain concepts and services.

5F. The principles of assessment and response to diversity in user needs, user communities, and user preferences.

5G. The principles and methods used to assess the impact of current and emerging situations or circumstances on the design and implementation of appropriate services or resource development.


6. Research

6A. The fundamentals of quantitative and qualitative research methods.
6B. The central research findings and research literature of the field.

6C. The principles and methods used to assess the actual and potential value of new research.

7. Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning

7A. The necessity of continuing professional development of practitioners in libraries and other information agencies.

7B. The role of the library in the lifelong learning of patrons, including an
understanding of lifelong learning in the provision of quality service and the use of lifelong learning in the promotion of library services.

7C. Learning theories, instructional methods, and achievement measures; and their application in libraries and other information agencies.

7D. The principles related to the teaching and learning of concepts, processes and skills used in seeking, evaluating, and using recorded knowledge and information.

8. Administration and Management

8A. The principles of planning and budgeting in libraries and other information agencies.

8B. The principles of effective personnel practices and human resource development.

8C. The concepts behind, and methods for, assessment and evaluation of library services and their outcomes.

8D. The concepts behind, and methods for, developing partnerships, collaborations, networks, and other structures with all stakeholders and within communities served.

8E. The concepts behind, issues relating to, and methods for, principled,
transformational leadership.

Para mantenerse al día sobre el acontecer de la EGCTI, visite: http://egcti.upr.edu

Ya nos encontramos en Facebook, visitenos e ingrese en Egctiana UprBlog y en la comunidad de la Escuela Graduada de Ciencias y Tecnologías de la Información.

Saludos cordiales,
Luisa Vigo-Cepeda,
egctianauprblog@gmail.com

Vía: EGCTIANABlog

DECLARACIÓN DE PRINCIPIOS INTERNACIONALES DE CATALOGACIÓN

Declaracion de Principios Internacionales de Catalogación Febrero 2009
(Español)

A series of five regional IFLA
Meetings of Experts on an International Cataloguing Code (IME ICC) took
place from 2003 to 2007. They produced a Statement of International Cataloguing
Principles that was published in February 2009.

Vía: Cataloging Futures