Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/54894
"Business libraries have been quicker to embrace digital collections, because a large portion of what business stu- dents need is available in electronic form." Content providers are also fueling the trend by developing ways to make digital content more accessible. For example, ebrary, a content services provider in Palo Alto, California, has launched a system that allows librarians to order digital titles more easily; it also allows users to save their searches and receive automatic updates when new titles appear that match their interests. Even so, most agree that the The library will be similar to one the foundation opened in June for scientists in Iraq; plans also are in the works for digital libraries that will serve Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Madagascar. These projects were funded by a $5 million grant from the U.S. State Department, which also will support conferences and training in these areas. n FUND FOR SOCIAL MEDIA The biggest players on the Web— including Facebook, Amazon, and Comcast—have created a fund of $250 million to invest in social net- working startups. The fund, which will be called the sFund, will be managed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), the same venture capital firm to back former startups like Google and Amazon. The fund, availability of electronic content and the capabilities of e-readers are still ahead of most students' willingness to use them. The Baker Library at Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts, says industry analysts, promises to fuel competition in an already grow- ing social networking universe. n TOWSON TARGETS ENTREPRENEURS TowsonGlobal, the business incuba- tor at Towson University in Mary- land, has created the Entrepreneurs Portal, an online resource for those who would like to start their own businesses. The portal will draw from a variety of sources, such as the Small Business Administration and the Service Corps of Retired Executives, to help potential entre- preneurs write business plans, pitch to investors, and secure funding. The school also plans to use the por- tal as a resource for a new business plan competition it will hold this spring. The site is located at bit.ly/ EntrepreneursPortal. is waiting to see where e-book trends are going before making the full leap into digital content, says Lydia Peterson, Baker's con- tent manager. "We certainly have been mak- ing the shift to e-journals wherev- er it makes sense for us to do so," she says. "We have not jumped as wholeheartedly into the e-book world, however." The reason, says Peterson, is simply that library users still prefer to read longer texts on paper, not on screen. The transition to digital will be most difficult for dedicated research libraries, says Frick. "It is probably too early for most academic libraries to offer access only to electronic collections," says Frick. "Whereas journals and reference collections are mostly available online, recently published monographs, for the most part are not, and they remain critical for teaching and research." CLIR has released a report that includes the article, "Can a New Research Library Be All Digital?" It is available at www.clir.org/pubs/ reports/pub147/pub147.pdf. n z BizEd JANUARY/FEBRURY 2011 63 JANUSZ KAPUSTA/GETTY IMAGES