Category: Books
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ARL White Paper on Interlibrary Loan
Stephen Abram points to a recently-released white paper on interlibrary loan, from ARL. You won’t find any actual numbers in this 4 (barely)-pager, but you will find some interesting trends. ILL for returnables (books) is generally up, according to statistics from several sources, but ILL for non-returnables is generally pretty far down. There are some…
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Librarian 2.0 – Interviews on the future of libraries
A couple of months ago Will Sherman, writing for DegreeTutor.com, interviewed me as part of a series on the Future of Libraries. Will came to the attention of the library world earlier this year with his good piece, 33 Reasons Why Libraries and Librarians are Still Extremely Important. The series of interviews with Librarians and…
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Setting them free
I did some searching on Google News and it doesn’t look like this story was widely-distributed, so here’s a link to my local paper’s version. Unfortunately my local paper’s website sucks and this link will most likely disappear within the week, so read it quickly if this interests you. The article profiles three authors who’ve…
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POD Friday!
Couple of really interesting developments in the print-on-demand world today: Amazon has partnered with four (soon to be more?) libraries to digitize public domain books and then sell them in paper to consumers.See coverage from: The Centered Librarian ACRLog Chronicle of Higher Education Original Press Release The New York Public Library appears to be the…
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Google Book Search vs Live Search Books
Stephen Leary at The Reflective Librarian has an interesting post in which he compares the shifting number of results he gets over time with Google Book Search. Live Search Books (MSN) provides stable results, but neither service actually allows you to see the results after a certain point. I tried to leave him this comment,…
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Buy O’Reilly Books by the Chapter
Yesterday Tim O’Reilly posted about a new option for O’Reilly books – buy them by the chapter for $3.99 each! Keeping in mind that many of O’Reilly’s offerings are techie references, this might just work well for them. Personally, $3.99 is a little steep for me to consider it, but personally, I don’t buy songs…
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Google Book Search and Exclusivity
I haven’t gotten around to listening to the NPR segment referenced in this post, but Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing points out that Google has stated in writing that none of the contracts they have with libraries to scan their collections are exclusive, meaning the libraries are free to work with other partners and/or work on…
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Ex Libris e-book focus group
Via my library’s Collections and Acquisitions blog, Ex Libris announces an e-book focus group. Follow the link for more information, but “the ultimate goal of this effort is to provide the academic and research library market a set of solutions to the challenges presented by e-books.” Technorati Tags: ebooks, Ex_Libris
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Google Book Search: is it Good Enough?
Good post at the American Historical Association blog called Google Books: What’s Not to Like? In it, a historian points out three big things not to like: Poor Scan Quality, Faulty Metadata, and Truncated Public Domain. Well-supported with examples, it gets even more interesting in the comments where people point out that crappy though it…