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Standards are being developed in five primary areas of e‐book development: e‐book formats, digital audio formats, digital rights management languages, digital rights management systems, and distribution and promotion. Each of these standards has technological, economic and social aspects. This article describes some key e‐books standards and discusses how these aspects are shaping the emerging e‐book products.

The paper performs a thought experiment on the concept of a record based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records and library system functions, and concludes that if we want to develop a functional bibliographic record we need to do it within the context of a flexible, functional library systems record structure. The article suggests a new way to look at the library systems record that would allow libraries to move forward in terms of technology but also in terms of serving library users.

The purpose of this paper is to assess initial user perceptions and use of Amazon's Kindle e‐book reader.

Thirty‐six participants were provided with a Kindle e‐book reader and $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.

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.

This is the first research paper of its kind to report on qualitative research conducted on user perceptions of the Kindle e‐book reader.

The 1998 International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) document “Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records” (FRBR) has inspired a family of models that view bibliographic resources in terms of multiple entities differentiated with regard to meaning, expression, and physicality. The purpose of this paper is to compare how three FRBR and FRBR-like models have been expressed as Semantic Web vocabularies based on Resource Description Framework (RDF). The paper focusses on IFLA’s own vocabulary for FRBR; RDF vocabularies for Resource Description and Access (RDA), an emergent FRBR-based standard for library cataloging; and BIBFRAME, an emergent FRBR-like, native-RDF standard for bibliographic data.

Simple test records using the RDF vocabularies were analyzed using software that supports inferencing.

In some cases, what the data actually means appears to differ from what the vocabulary developers presumably intended to mean. Data based on the FRBR vocabulary appears particularly difficult to integrate with data based on different models.

Some of the RDF vocabularies reviewed in the paper could usefully be simplified, enabling libraries to integrate their data more easily into the wider information ecosystem on the Web. Requirements for data consistency and quality control could be met by emergent standards of the World Wide Web Consortium for validating RDF data according to integrity constraints.

There are few such comparisons of the RDF expressions of these models, which are widely assumed to represent the future of library cataloging.

This chapter aims to help librarians understand the underlying rationale for Resource Description and Access (RDA) and recognize the great potential of the Semantic Web for libraries.

It explains the linked data model and Semantic Web technologies in basic, informative terms, and describes how the Semantic Web is constructed. Semantic Web standards and technologies are discussed in detail, including URI, RDF, and ontologies. The study also traces the development of RDA and some of the major library Semantic Web projects. The authors explore how RDA shapes bibliographical data and prepares it for linked data in the Semantic Web. In addition, this study examines what libraries in the United States and the rest of the world have achieved in implementing RDA since its release.

RDA is the correct approach libraries should take.

This is the first and only chapter that covers the development of RDA in other countries as well as in the United States. It is highly informative for anyone who wishes to understand the RDA and Semantic Web and their relevance to libraries in a short period of time.

To share information and insights from the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting. Several contributors reported on different aspects of this meeting. Design methodology/approach –A report of the conference.

Summary of discussion forums, work of ALA's Divisions, and conference lore.

A working meeting to plan for the annual conference in June 2007. This meeting attracts the current leadership of the different divisions in ALA who are holding discussion groups and committee meetings as there are no official programs at Midwinter.

Conference reports on many current trends in scholarly communication issues to information professionals in academia, access, and intellectual property issues related to a range of library environments and the state of the art in technology.