Fruitful discussion with Frances Haugen on the Library Gang Podcast (50 mins). She is an impressive spokes person for Google Book Search. She spoke well about Google Mobile and Catalogues and metadata (deep waters here). There were places where she had to be very careful about what she says (not allowed to talk about the Settlement before the judge’s ruling this summer). She stressed that they really have a lot to do now to make the Settlement work. There … Keep Reading
Category: libraries Page 36 of 39
A week ago there was a report in the Library Journal that the publishers and Google were going to settle their copyright dispute very soon now. No further news on that so far — and if there was going to be a friendly settlement the Frankfurt Book Fair would have been a good place and a good time to smoke the pipe of peace. My own hunch is that Google will gain more by prolonging this argument than by settling … Keep Reading
Is a phrase I dislike, almost as much as “leaving money on the table”. I tend to shudder when these phrases are used because bitter experience tells me that ‘low hanging fruit’ really only comes to us when we have put in a lot of effort. You need to be able to reach the fruit for it to be low-hanging: make sure that you are tall enough to reach it! Goose bumps from ‘money on the table’ for a slightly … Keep Reading
It will soon be the first anniversary of our Institutional Shop, which we announced in November 2007. Institutional sales still form a relatively small proportion of our sale of subscriptions, but they have been an encouraging source of new business.
The system for making an institutional sale is completely automated, and web based. A number of institutions have bought their subscriptions and setup their IP-address based accounts with no intervention or action on our part. We knew that university … Keep Reading
The Exact Editions platform now uses the Shibboleth system for federated sign-on to web services. The system is Open Source and much used in the British academic universe, amongst others. Here is a video from JISC explaining some of the advantages (warning: the vides is a little bit ‘corporate’).
Federated services are always a good idea on the web? Such shared technologies all depend on trust….which is becoming ever more important in the web as services are layered on top … Keep Reading