Exact Editions Blog

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

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

Google Catalogs seems to be neglected. I checked it out earlier today and could not find a single Catalog with a 2008 publication date. I did find one catalogue with £ prices, and I had not realised that the Catalogs service ever included any British catalogue companies (we have catalog vendors and catalogue companies depending on where we are?).

Google Catalogs was launched in 2001, and uses rather similar technology to Google Book Search. I doubt that it was a … Keep Reading

Berkshire Publishing have launched a shop using the Exact Editions platform and our e-commerce solution. So their customers can now license their major reference titles online, either for individual use or for institutional subscriptions.

The Berkshire ‘home page’ on our system has a look and feel which reflects the publisher:

All the text in the reference works is searchable, and to an extent the books are also viewable for free in the shopping environment. The limitation is that the … Keep Reading