NEWS Globe Theatre celebrates donation from SAGE founder
Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London recently celebrated a donation of £1 million by SAGE founder and executive chairman Sara Miller McCune for its fundraising campaign to build an indoor Jacobean theatre for entertainment, education and research. The theatre, which has
committed a further £1.7million to the project, hopes that it will raise the majority of its £7 million target by January 2012, to enable construction works to begin later that year. ‘The indoor theatre will enable the Globe to present theatre performances across 52
weeks of the year, within yet another beautiful and rarely- seen theatre space. I know it will also prove an invaluable arena for Globe education programmes and further
research into Shakespeare theatres,’ said Neil Constable, chief executive of the Globe. McCune added: ‘I am enormously pleased to support the work of Shakespeare’s
Globe and its education- oriented initiative. This will enable future generations to experience the incredible acting and production values that allow the Bard’s work to teach and entertain us all. It enriches lives in wonderful ways and opens hearts throughout the world.’ Designs for the indoor theatre are based around a set of plans discovered in the 1960s in the collection at Worcester College Library in Oxford. The designs show a small, 17th-century, indoor theatre with a U-shaped galleried auditorium embracing a platform stage.
Study reveals interlibrary loan practices in academia
Interlibrary loans in academic libraries have increased by 14 per cent over the past three years, and libraries spend an average of $3,500 a year on related shipping charges. These are some of the key fi ndings of a survey by Primary Research Group into interlibrary
loans in 75 academic libraries in the USA, the UK and Canada. The study also found that the mean turnaround time for articles borrowed was 3.03 days and that more than three quarters (77.33 per cent) of the interlibrary loan units of the institutions surveyed
New system helps institutions make sense of usage statistics
Cardiff University has developed the fi rst generic system in the UK to help education institutions assess the popularity and use of their electronic resources viewed via access management software. The JISC-funded RAPTOR project, led by Cardiff’s information services directorate, allows institutions to view usage statistics from different access management systems, with a particular focus on federated access systems. The RAPTOR system automatically analyses the log fi les created by an institution’s access management systems to display information about the resources that users have accessed.
The system has been designed to be easy to install and confi gure, to appeal to institutions with limited technical expertise or resource. It should also be easy to use for the non-technical staff who may require this information, believes the team behind RAPTOR. RAPTOR will also provide UK-wide statistics for the JISC Monitoring Unit on the take-up of federated access management across the UK. RAPTOR could also be applied in the USA, Europe, and beyond. Potential partnership opportunities between Cardiff and other institutions are already being identifi ed to further develop the system.
4 Research Information JUN/JUL 2011
have not performed workfl ow studies to review practices and staffi ng.
In addition, the study looked at the impact of e-books, digital repositories and distance learning programmes on interlibrary loan practices. The report covers
developments in consortia, state networks, the negotiation of interlibary loan contract terms with information providers, work fl ow studies, automation, fee structure and other issues in interlibrary loan in a higher education setting.
Paper about user feedback in digital libraries wins award
The winners of the De Gruyter Saur IFLA Research Paper Award 2011 are Erin Thomas, Grace Costantino, Bianca Crowley and Rebecca Morin with their paper entitled ‘Heeding the Call: User Feedback Management and the Digital Library’. The fi rst three authors are from the Smithsonian Institution Libraries and Rebecca Morin is from the California Academy of Sciences, all in the USA. Using the example of the collaborative Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the paper is said to give a timely view of how users’ views and feedback can be
captured and integrated in order to improve the quality and comprehensiveness of digitisation projects. The authors write: ‘In adopting issue tracking software, a small, decentralised staff is able to leverage user feedback, transforming it into an essential component of daily workfl ow and empowering users to determine ongoing BHL activities.’
The jury was impressed by the quality of the paper and the insight it gave into an innovative approach to encourage and utilise user involvement in digital library collection development.
www.researchinformation.info
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