British Library puts numbers on the switch to digital publishing of research findings, projecting that "by the year 2020, 40% of UK research monographs will be available in electronic format only, while a further 50% will be produced in both print and digital. A mere 10% of new titles will be available in print alone by 2020."

The report calls this a "seismic shift", although it feels more like day-to-day reality for publishers like us in the middle of the transition.

Google was a big subject at the AAUP meeting in Philadelphia. I asked a couple of questions in one session about territory rights and the Google Print program. However the main action was in the very well-attended session addressed by Tom Turvey, a Google Senior VP entitled "Online Opportunities". UP publishers in general seem very keen on Google Print, but the doubts creep in when it comes to Google's Library digitization project. To this newcomer to the American university press scene, it looked like the strong reaction from publishers reflected as much about university presses' deep but difficult relationship with their libraries as it did their relationship to Google. At base, presses believe that libraries shouldn't be in the business of digitizing of in-copyright material, no matter what the safeguards put around the resulting files.

I also heard one publisher saying that the growth of Google and Google Scholar would mean the end of libraries. "Who needs them if everything is online and open access, and you search Google to find it".

Very interesting article about remembering the Karayuki-san, the Japanese prostitutes who worked in Singapore in the early years of the 20th century. The piece takes the perspective of young Japanese women working in Singapore. It interviews Kazuo Sugino, the head of the Japanese Association in Singapore. If you don't know about the Karayuki-san, you must read our book, by James Warren.

The Guardian reports on an ill-advised and hastily-implemented "de-accessioning" program
at The Octagon library at Queen Mary, University of London, in Mile End, east London.

'This is a crass display of philistinism,' said one staff member. 'There are books dating back to the 18th century, there are first editions, there are copies of Voltaire.'

Another lecturer looking through a skip said: 'This is sacrilege. Look at all these books that are being thrown away without any thought. It is shocking.'

That's American Association of University Presses. Yesterday was spent in a very useful and enjoyable discussion of fund-raising for university presses. Discussion centred around the various types of fund-raising that presses do, from title subventions and project funding to raising funds for endowments. Many different best practices were discussed, and picked apart. Those attending the round-table included press directors from Texas, Duke, the Getty, Amsterdam, Missouri, NYU, Rutgers, Texas A&M and others. Also present were development officers, both those employed by their presses or those employed by university development offices, and assigned to their university presses on some part-time basis.

NUS Publishing has been advocating that NUS support an institutional archive to allow and encourage scholars to self-archive their research work. The benefits of archiving pre-publication versions of papers is to 1) to make original research available easily and quickly, without overly-restrictive copyright barriers to use of material for education purposes, this as a supplement to the traditional journal publication system, and 2) to gather in a single searchable database the research work of the NUS community. A recent research project, published as Open access self-archiving: An author study, surveys authors to understand self-archiving from an author perspective. Clearly authors are ready for archiving, and they archive because they know it is the best way to get impact for their research.

Written by Olivo Miotto, this extension is hosted on the website of the Institute of System Science at NUS. As the webpage says:

If you're an NUS researcher or student, you're probably familiar with this scenario: you search for a journal paper, you find the link (e.g. from PubMed) to the paper, only to find out that you need a subscription to get the full text. NUS has the subsciption (often) but you still need to log in. The savvy ones know that you can append '.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg' to the journal's host name to do this. This extension does the host name appending for you, so it belongs to the category 'dead simple but really useful'. If you find yourself at a journal site, you can right-click and select 'NUS Library Proxy' from the menu. The page will be reloaded via the NUS Library Proxy, so you can have full text access if NUS subscribes to the journal.