Todd Samuelson

A qualitative assessment of the Kindle e‐book reader: results from initial focus groups

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess initial user perceptions and use of Amazons Kindle e‐book reader.Design/methodology/approach – Thirty‐six participants were provided with a Kindle e‐book reader and

Mind the Gap: Integrating Special Collections Teaching

100 to spend at Amazon. After one month of use focus groups were conducted to elicit user feedback about their experiences and overall first impressions.Findings – Analysis of the discussions indicates overall interest in the Kindle as a basic reading device for fiction. However, its use in an academic setting is limited due to content availability and licensing issues, graphic display capabilities, organizational issues, and its prohibitive cost.Originality/value – This is the first research paper of its kind to report on qualitative research conducted on user perceptions of the Kindle e‐book reader.

Empirical Bibliography: A Decade of Book History at Texas A&M

Instruction is a vital part of the academic librarian’s public services mission, but the teaching efforts of special collections librarians can be overlooked due to the culture and particularities of teaching in an archival setting. This article documents the challenges special collections librarians face in integrating their teaching program into that of general library instruction, and details several approaches taken at our institution to achieve effective collaboration while retaining the value of our individual strengths and differences.

Navigating the storm : IMPACT, eMOP, and Agile Steering Standards

A century ago , Ronald B. McKerrow argued that in order to understand books from the early modern period, a student or scholar should experience “all the processes through which the matter of the work before them has passed, from its first being written down by the pen of its author to its appearance in the finished volume.”1 Seeing the work “from the point of view of those who composed, corrected, printed, folded, and bound it” could yield invaluable perspec tives about a book’s authorship and the forces that continued to shape it through its material production—even more, perhaps, than other modes of academic inquiry. Though McKerrow’s suggestion appears eminently practical, even readily achievable, scrutinizing the implications of his proposition presents both logistical and conceptual problems. Whether

Book History in the Early Modern OCR Project, or, Bringing Balance to the Force

This article discusses two major initiatives tasked with developing tools to im- prove optical character recognition (OCR) or the mechanical keying of texts that are digitally available only as page images. The two initiatives are the IMProving ACcess to Text Project in Europe and the Early Modern OCR Project in the USA. Because of dealing with a multilayered problem like OCR technologies and having to collaborate with radically interdisciplinary and international team members, the two projects developed techniques that we call Agile Project Management, outlined in this essay with rationales for their use.