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
Category: libraries Page 37 of 40
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
When a book is in the library, the library catalogue is a key part of its context. This is even more true for digital books, where there is little opportunity for users to find out about the books except through searching the catalogue.
Last week we realised that we could enable a small change which helps digital books to appear in a better context in the library catalogue. The goal is to help librarians to include a link in the … Keep Reading
Peter Brantley runs a newsgroup to which he feeds interesting links (interesting to the bunch of publisher, web 2.0-type people that go onto the Reading 2.0 list he curates). Peter mentioned my Digital Book Pricing blog on Friday, and there followed a burst of highly opinionated and expert views, about 30 emails by my count, some of them lengthy and thought-out. Some of these postings may go on to the web, in which case I will link to the record. … Keep Reading