I'm trying to overcome a ridiculous urge to make everything here perfect; I need to just post some stuff already.
I subscribe to OCLC's Research feed, which you can find with other OCLC RSS Feeds here. Just recently, recorded presentations, papers, and slide shows from the 2010 Annual RLG Partnership Symposium: "When the Books Leave the Building: The Future of Research Libraries, Collections and Services" showed up in my reader.
While a number of presentations are interesting, I was especially fascinated by Adrian Johns' paper As our Readers Go Digital. (I only read the paper; I didn't watch the recorded presentation.) Johns pointed out, among other things, that some of the content he is now able to read outside the library (thanks to digital copies and his e-book reader), like political pamphlets from the 1670s, were originally meant to be read outside the library in coffee houses and other active locations. It's not new that books are leaving the building; they left long ago. From that perspective on books and information already belonging outside the library, Johns presented some possibilities for how librarians can support reading and academic culture. I really enjoyed his essay and added his book, The nature of the book : print and knowledge in the making, to my "to-read" list.
