Its now for the tenth year, that the library ranking for Germany is made for the Public Libraries and the sixth, that Scientific Libraries are ranked. The Label of this ranking is “Bibliotheksindex” or BIX, an its a instrument, that is made on the fundament of many indicators. The libraries are sorted in types (relating to Scientific Libraries) or population of town (Public Libraries). But I must’nt say much about the instrument, because the coordinator of the organizations, that are maintaining the BIX, the Kompetenznetzwerk, has written an introduction to BIX on eleven pages as PDF-File.
July 25, 2009
January 15, 2009
An index of library journals at “Fundgrube Internet” of BIB
The “Fundgrube Internet”, that means “treasure trove internet” is an web index of useful links for librarians. You’ll find it at the homepage of the “Berufsverband Information Bibliothek”, translated: “Association Information Library”. Some 400 links to library resources are listed, from which more than 130 links are to library journals. There are two categories, the first for german library journals (30 links) and the second is for international journals (at the moment 101 links). So, if you are searching especially for journals in English, the index could be helpful for this purpose.
September 8, 2008
DBS – German Library Statistics
The “Deutsche Bibliotheksstatistik (DBS)” – German Library Statistics is a data collection of 9.000 german libraries since 1974. Bruno Bauer, a librarian from Vienna, interviewed Ronald M. Schmidt, sustainer of the database at hbz, the regional academic library centre of Nordrhein-Westfalen (federal state of Germany). In the weblog medinfo you can find an abstract of the interview in English.
You can find the data 1999 until 2007 in an overview at hbz, especially with overall tables of the German Library Statistics, that contain main facts of Public and Academic Libraries in German and English.
March 30, 2008
When Librarians Rule the World
At the end of february, Mary Ellen Bates gave a workshop for the Initiative Fortbildung in Berlin. Bates provides business research to business professionals, and consulting and training services to the information industry and gives several high quality resources about online research at her homepage Bates Info, especially the famous newsletter “Tip of the Month”. She is one of those colleagues that are mentioned at the Internet Librarian Hall of Fame (archived webpage, the Bates-entrance is broken, but can be found here).
If you are interested in the program of the workshop in Berlin, you will find it as a PDF document at the homepage of Initiative Fortbildung. I’ve heard from participants, that the focus of the workshop was more research with special search engines, less the aspect of library 2.0.
March 3, 2008
Translation tools English – German
General translation tools or general dictionaries often fail in case of thematic vocabulatory, especially in such small thematic fields like librarianship. How can you find special glossaries in this field? The biggest tool is Bibliotheks-Glossar.de (“Library glossary”):
“This glossary contains about 90,000 technical terms and abbreviations about libraries, books and data processing. It is intended to be a resource for librarians and other users.”
If not satisfied, there is another opportunity: The University of Bochum offers a “compendium of Anglo-German acquisitions terminology”:
“The idea for this work, not just a translation of individual works, but also of common phrases used in our day to day work, came about as we are increasingly asked for material which can be only sourced outside of the UK. While the majority of correspondence is carried out in English, it is useful for us to have to have translations of whole phrases to hand when it is not, and to be able to communicate in both languages where necessary.”
On third range, there is a PDF-based “Bibliothekssprachführer” (German-English compendium of library terms) on the server of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München.
February 20, 2008
“Virtuelle Fachbibliotheken” as thematic portals for scientific research
The “Virtuelle Fachbibliotheken” (virtual scientific libraries) are a concept of the “Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft” (DFG, the central German Scientific Association). They are portals to the digital resources of several sciences . For many themes there are “ViFas” (overview, which are offering indices of links, electronic journals, databases and entrance for scinetific texts. Each “Virtuelle Fachbibliothek” has its own concept, so you must look each time how the resources are structured (Germany is a federal political system and so many things are aranged in different order, also the classifications …). Most of the ViFas are in German, but some are in English, for example the Middle East Virtual Library (MENALIB):
The Middle East Virtual Library (MENALIB) is an information portal for Middle East and Islamic Studies. It provides access to online information and to digital records of printed and other offline media and thus supports the concept of a hybrid library for Middle East and Islamic Studies.
