Category: Legal
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MURALS – closed-source screencasting?
The other week a colleague pointed me towards a website called MURALS, which appears to be a collection of library-related screencasts you can buy for your library. I have a few problems with the site. There's no information about who's putting these together. Not a huge deal, but it would be nice to know. It's…
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EBSCO’s Response to Gale’s Open Letter and Customer Questions
I received the following information from EBSCO this morning – a link to 3 PDF documents addressing some of the brouhaha over their ALA Midwinter announcement of exclusive magazine content. The URL indicates that may be a temporary location, so here are direct links to local copies: EBSCO's Response to Gale's Open Letter ICOLC Questions…
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EBSCO Content Clarification and a Mea Culpa
This morning I received the following email from Susan at EBSCO Publishing (published with permission): Hi Paul, At ALA, EBSCO had a customer luncheon where we mentioned that our databases will have some newly unique content relative to other full-text database vendors. There are many unique full-text publications in our databases. These can be due…
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EBSCO exclusive content
Last Saturday EBSCO held a luncheon at ALA in which they dropped several interesting bits of information. First, in all EBSCO products they'll be switching the default from date to relevancy ranking sometime in the Summer of 2010. You'll still be able to change this in the Admin interface, but something to be aware of. …
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The ABCs of e-book format conversion: Easy Calibre tips for the Kindle, Sony and Nook
TeleRead has a great post on The ABCs of e-book format conversion: Easy Calibre tips for the Kindle, Sony and Nook. It’s written by one of the developers of Calibre, a program for managing ebook collections, and as such touts Calibre as pretty much the perfect tool for handling your conversion needs. What’s really nice…
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Have my book-buying habits changed?
Teleread has a great post in which the author reports on his/her experiences with the Sony PRS-505 ebook reader after one year of use. I particularly wanted to point out the section of the review entitled "Have my book-buying habits changed?" because it mirrors my experience reading and buying books for the iPhone. I used…
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Baker & Taylor Acquires Blackwell North America and James Bennett
A little news from the world of Collection Development and Acquisitions – just received word that Baker & Taylor (YBP) has acquired BNA! Also as part of the deal, Blackwell U.K. will acquire Baker & Taylor’s Lindsay and Croft business in the U.K. Full press release.
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ACTA – Quite possibly the biggest threat to your internet to date.
There's been a lot of traffic about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in the last week or so, but not nearly enough. In a nutshell, instead of proposing legislation through transparent and traditional channels (Congress, Parliament, etc), member countries seem to be pushing to enact legislation via an international treaty which has so far been…
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Copyright Watch: Keeping a Global Eye on Copyright Law
New site launched by the Electronic Frontier Foundation today: Copyright Watch. "Working with academics, libraries and copyright monitors from across the world, Copyright Watch brings together the most recent copies of laws from as many countries as we could find. And with that global team, we'll be tracking new proposals, consultations, and freshly passed regulations:…
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Politician suggests Public Library should drop p-books in favour of e-books to save money
From TeleRead comes the story of a politician with an interesting idea, but who hasn’t explored the economics of ebook publishing. E-books for libraries pushed by economy-minded Los Angeles councilman.