New Largest Prime Number Discovered.

The end of the year 2005 is approaching and with it another Largest Prime Number has been announced. Sharon Gaudin of Datamation on December 28 announced the discovery. "The number, which is expressed as 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1, is a 9.1 million-digit figure. It was discovered by a team of researchers at Central Missouri State University." This is also the largest Mersenne prime number ever found. A Mersenne prime number is characterized for having as the exponent of 2 a prime number (in this case 30,402,457).

Academic Libraries and their place in Higher Education.

The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) a major source of news and information about American colleges and universities has dedicated several articles during the last months of 2005 to matters related to libraries and information technology. This is an indication of the interest created on campuses by current issues related to information systems and institutions (like scitech libraries) and it is in accord with the last two previews topics presented in this forum.

The December 16 edition of CHE has a special report on Information Technology by Andrea L. Foster: "Wikipedia, the Free Online Encyclopedia, Ponders a New Entity: Wikiversity?"

In the December 12 edition the topic is Google with and article by Siva Vaidhyanathan
"A Risky Gamble With Google".

The Information Technology supplement of December 9 features the topic The Library of the Future with two main articles. The first one by James G. Neal, "Anxious Times," and the second by Deanna Marcus, "Different Bytes for different Likes".

Early in the Fall (September 30) Open Source was another hot topic in information technology that was presented. The following articles appeared in this issue:
"5 Challenges for Open Source" by Jeffrey R. Young; "Is Open-Source Software a Solution to Spam?" by Vincent Kiernan; "Sakai Project Offers an Alternative to Commercial Course-Management Programs" by Jeffrey R. Young; and
"Technology Used to Trade Pirated Music Could Help Faculty Members Share Teaching Tools" by Dan Carnevale.

CHE is available by paid subscription, but some articles are freely available. Also, the articles mentioned in this report can be found in full-text databases such as the EBSCO’s Academic Search Premier.

DASER 2 Summit.
http://www.daser.org/

The DASER 2 Summit: Challenge and Opportunities: Digital Libraries, Institutional Repositories, and Open Access took place 2-4 December 2005 at College Park, MD.
DASER which stands for Digital Archives for Science & Engineering Resources was a conference organized with the support of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIST), Scientific and Technical Information Systems Special Interest Group (SIG STI), and the Potomac Valley Chapter (PVC), in cooperation with the Special Libraries Association, Sci-Tech Division. This conference brought an important group of information professionals to discuss issues concerning the changes that science and technical libraries are undergoing. Among them: the “Impact of OA on the future of STM libraries; Institutional repository models: what works and what doesn't; Publisher-library collaboration strategies, now and in the near future; Institutional repository object issues--theses, datasets, learning objects, etc.; User needs and patterns related to digital libraries.”

The program schedule with abstracts including PowerPoint presentations from most of the contributors are available at: http://www.daser.org/program.html

OCLC Report. Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005).
http://www.oclc.org/reports/2005perceptions.htm

Libraries have had an significant role in the dissemination, archiving and organization of scientific and technical information. It is important for both the library and the scientific community to pay attention to how the perceptions of the scientific library is changing. The report produced this month by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center, Dublin, Ohio, USA) - a major player in the information industry - brings some interesting revelations about how people see libraries in today's technological environment. This lengthy report covers the results taken from many types of library users and it has international coverage.

SciTech Forum has two major purposes: 1. to identify and comment about significant scientific and technological advances and discoveries in the physical sciences, mathematics, engineering and technology fields. 2. to recognize the important role scientific and technical information has in the creation of new knowledge and new technologies for that reason SciTech Forum also comments on scitech information systems and institutions.