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
Tim Spalding of the Library Thing has announced an ambitious project to develop “the Open Shelves Classification (OSC), a free, “humble,” modern, open-source, crowd-sourced replacement for the Dewey Decimal System.” The comments on his posting show that this is a topic which can arouse an emotional response ….. bad temper, hurt feelings, wounded pride.
Tim is a shrewd and industrious character, but I wonder whether his project is not somewhat Quixotic. Dewey, with all its limitations, was meeting a challenge … Keep Reading
There is an entertaining and instructive piece about libraries The Library in the New Age and their exciting future, from Robert Darnton (distinguished historian of print and librarian at Harvard) in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. A lot of his focus is on Google and Google Book Search, but the conclusions of the article are surprisingly conservative: “Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library. Stock it with printed matter.” It is as though … Keep Reading
For years I have been on the Liblicense list, which is widely read by university librarians and academic publishers. It is a big list with several thousand adherents, but librarians are not particularly vocal (that comes with needing to be quiet in the library — yeah, I know, very feeble joke) and many publishers sign up to the list but keep their heads down (because they dont want to be exposed as money grasping scoundrels — even more … Keep Reading
Powered by