If you work at an academic library, especially a school which emphasizes publication, then the issue of Institutional Repositories is critical to understand.

Even if you don’t fit the above, these repositories, combined with Open Access, will strongly effect librarianship, and the way your library accesses resources.

An excellent introduction to IRs can be found in Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite (Pdf), by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. (found via Resource Shelf)

Also worth reading is Today’s Digital Information Landscape by Eric Lease Morgan (mentioned here previously), which has a section on institutional repositories.

Wikia, the search engine designed around the concept of wikis, has been launched in alpha.  This means that a) it isn’t going to work as well as anyone wants, and b) no fair comparing it to Google et. al., except in the theoretical.  In fact, we usually wouldn’t see software until the beta stage of development; this shows how much Wikia will rely on users.

There isn’t all that much to see yet, but the idea of an annotated search engine where the users provide feedback about the search results, which will then be used to improve future results, is tantalizing.  Search 2.0 anyone?

via Open Access News