Category: Books
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Books of enduring scholarly value
I found a link to this video on the TeleRead blog. It's a 4:00 overview of how Cambridge University Press and Cambridge University Library are partnering to both bring back OOS press titles and to digitize library titles in a print-on-demand operation. Nothing we haven't seen before, but a nice look into how some are…
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When is a book alive, and what if you have the dead version?
My head’s spinning a little right now. Just had a visit from someone in our DocDel dept. who was trying to track down a chapter from the 2nd revised edition of Encyclopedia of Biopharmaceutical Statistics, which our catalogue says we have through Ebrary. Except that the cited chapter had a publication date of 2006, while…
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After Losing Users in Catalogs, Libraries Find Better Search Software
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about next-generation catalogues. While the article provides a pretty good background of the issue (IMHO), the comments provide an excellent summary of librarian psychology. What’s only touched upon briefly in the article is the ability for these new “web-scale index searching” tools to search so much more…
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Putting your money where your mouth is
Last week I wrote about indie publishing innovator MCM's challenge to TV viewers in the US to watch the US premiere of his cartoon, Rollbots. Well the results are in, and it looks like he'll be donating nearly $10,000 to the EFF!!! In addition, and perhaps even more significant, he'll be relinquishing all copyright claims…
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Support a publishing innovator by watching TV
I’ve mentioned MCM before. He’s the author of The Pig and the Box, and a true innovator in the world of independent publishing. I’ve been fascinated reading his blog posts over the past year as he explores one interesting idea after another for publishing via crowd sourcing, PDF, print, epub, donations, sponsorship, releasing work under…
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Tune In September 2: The Google Book Scanning Project–Issues and Updates
Educause Live presents:Topic: The Google Book Scanning Project—Issues and UpdatesDate: September 2, 2009Time: 1:00 p.m. EDT (12:00 p.m. CDT, 11:00 a.m. MDT, 10:00 a.m. PDT). International participants: You may wish to visit this external time-conversion website to calculate the start time in your time zone.Duration: 1 hour For about five years, Google has been scanning…
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iPhone apps for textbooks and another library catalogue
Yesterday brought two interesting iPhone apps to my attention. The first is iUSask, the University of Saskatchewan iPhone application, which includes a category for searching the OPAC. This is touted as "the first iPhone application of its kind in Canada for University Students." I played with is a bit yesterday and unfortunately wasn't very impressed. …
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RenewBot vs Library Elf
Fight! (I looked, but couldn't find a picture of a robot fighting an elf) I just discovered RenewBot, which will automatically renew your library books X # of days before they come due, where X is set by you. First two months are free, then if you want to continue it'll cost $2.99 per year…
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Many libraries are lending Kindles
While we wait to see if BYU will reinstate their Kindle lending program, take a look at the list of libraries that are still lending them put together by iReaderreview. I's not just a list; there's a fair bit of supporting content in the post. Kindle, Libraries