Direct Requests from Information Wants To Be Free

2.0 and don’t even know it | Information Wants To Be Free

Great post from Meredith over at Information Wants To Be Free about an innovative idea for getting books posted direct from Amazon to distance students for their requests. It's worth reading the post and the comments as well as it seems the idea isn't unique. An innovative way to deal with the problem of delivering information to distance students and I'd be interested to know how many other places are doing something similar.

OA, public libraries and distance learning

Many thanks to Heather Morrison who has taken the time to write a comprehensive comment on yesterday's post about open access articles. She has included some interesting links and a reference to her blog The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics which has been added to my Blogllines subscription for updates on the open access world. I've also read a few posts recently about distance learning and how students can feel a little abandoned by their institution and library service when studying from afar. I wonder whether this is an issue that public and academic libraries should be looking at together in more detail? We tend to focus on offering support for Open University students but distance learning seems to be an increasingly popular option for other HE institutions. I'd be interested to know how easily distance learners access library services, both remote access and locally and whether public libraries could do more to help with this.

This week seems to be my random thought week, please feel free to add your random thoughts to the mix!