Next JIBS workshop: A&I: RIP? (Manchester, 13th November)

The next JIBS user group event and AGM will be held in Manchester on Friday, 13th November 2009. The topic:

A & I: RIP?

As institutional budgets come under increasing pressure, will abstracting and indexing services survive, and do they deserve to?

Services such as Science Direct report that the majority of links to their articles come from Google or Google Scholar. Do our academics, researchers and students simply want Google Scholar attached to a huge PDF dump? If so, why spend valuable funds on anything else?

This JIBS debate will examine the issues and also consider if new services like Summon will challenge Google.

For more information the event and a booking form please see http://www.jibs.ac.uk/events/workshops/airip/programme.htm

The debate and lunch are FREE to members of organisations that are JIBS members and 50 GBP to non members. To find out if your Institution is a member, please see http://www.jibs.ac.uk/aboutus/jibs-members.php

Accessibility for users.

Geraldine Smith, Learning and Teaching Librarian at the Open University, has agreed to be the JIBs disablity advisor. She fulfills this role at the OU as well, and is a member of CLAUD. JIBs met with Geraldine, and Caroline Moughton, chair of CLAUD, in April. As a result of that meeting, TechDis have been approached by CLAUD to discuss some national standards and guidelines for assessment of the accessibility of resources,

Geraldine has created a page on the Open University Library web site, with her accessibility advice for different databases, having tested them with JAWS.
It is an open page as far as the advice is concerned.

http://library.open.ac.uk/help/access/index.cfm?id=7007

MIMAS

MIMAS have a transition of services to new hardware slated for August - October and the MIMAS Marketing Programme envisages the launch of the new MIMAS logo also in October.

Services moving to new hardware include Copac, Zetoc, Landmap, Intute and the Archives Hub.