Abstract

This radiography of the state of digital media in 2009 pays special attention to the situation in Spain and references to the international situation. The main points are: the crisis of the media, major ups (La información.com and Factual) and downs (Adn.es and Soitu.es), the return to pay-for-content, the conflict between newspapers and Google, the relationship with Facebook and Twitter, “link journalism”, developments in digital newspaper archives and reading devices for news.

Abstract

The design and characteristics of a new open source content aggregation program, AXYZ, are described. Several features of the program standout, including the processing engine of syndication channels, monitoring capability of information recovery in real time, possibility of configuration of the aggregator behavior, automatic content classification, and new models for representing information from relational interactive maps. On the other hand, the aggregation program is designed to manage thousands of syndication channels in the RSS format. It also provides statistics that can be used to study the production of any information producer and the impact of the information published in other sources. The AXYZ modules are capable of comparing the relationship between news or information from different sources and the degree of influence which is detected by patterns.

Abstract

Despite the investment of economic and human resources made by Spanish public libraries to create digital collections while continuing to play their traditional role as mediators between users, technology, and reading, there are conditioning factors that make it difficult for e-book lending to be integrated as yet another service within those provided by libraries and to be fully accepted by readers. With the aim of identifying the elements underlying the slow consolidation of digital lending, a literature review was carried out to determine the state of the art, mainly in both the USA and Spain, the e-book market aimed at Spanish public libraries is analyzed, the technological difficulties involved in lending and downloading for users are presented, and the influence of the measures adopted by the publishing sector and public administrations are examined. The need to make license commercialization models more flexible, simplify digital rights management systems, and decouple collections from electronic lending platforms, as well as avoid the dispersion of library resources across various interfaces, is highlighted.