Skip to content

Category: News

Round Up

Published by Iris on Thursday, December 14th, 2006

I’ve been oddly busy lately. I can’t exactly figure out what’s been taking up all my time, but what with one thing and another I’ve been getting behind on my blog reading. Consequently, I’ve got a tremendous backlog of “to read” posts piling up.

But tonight I made my way through a few of them, and here are some of the more current posts that caught my eye:

And now on to some of the older reading…

Comments closed
Open Book Cover Images?!?

Open Book Cover Images?!?

Published by Iris on Thursday, December 14th, 2006

The amazing people who actually contribute to NGC4lib (as opposed to pure lurkers, like me), got tired of talking about license agreements, money, license agreements… oh yeah, and license agreements when it came to getting book cover images into library catalogs. So they’ve decided to create an open database of book cover images.

At first, when they put together a wiki page to think about the project and then started thinking about how to match images with books, I figured it would be like most of the other discussions that happen on listservs: it would unearth a whole bunch of interesting questions, start a plethora of interesting discussions, and then die a slow and painless death.

But then Tim Spalding from LibraryThing and Rob Styles from Talis both offered to host the database. Spalding is checking to see if he’d be able to contribute his hundreds of thousands of user-generated images to the database, and everyone is talking about easy ways for libraries to contribute new images to the database. This could happen, folks! And if it does, I would LOVE to add images from it to our catalog.

[Update: Since this remains my most frequently visited blog post, I thought I’d just mention here that as of 8/7/2008, LibraryThing is offering free user-generated book cover images to libraries and bookstores. See the LibraryThing blog post for details.]

Technorati tags: , , ,

5 Comments
Thomson (of Thomson Gale) No Longer in the Education Business

Thomson (of Thomson Gale) No Longer in the Education Business

Published by Iris on Friday, October 27th, 2006

Thomson Gale is probably one of the most recognized names in library and reference resources, but the day before yesterday Thomson Corporation announced that it would be selling off it’s Thomson Learning business as of January 1st, 2007. Here’s what they say:

The Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC) today announced a realignment of operations to sharpen its strategic focus on providing electronic workflow solutions to business and professional markets and better position the company for future growth. As part of the realignment, which becomes effective January 1, 2007, Thomson intends to sell its Thomson Learning businesses, including those serving the higher education, careers, library reference, corporate e-learning and e-testing markets. (From their Oct. 25th Press Release)

They’re splitting Thomson Learning into three parts, and the bidding for the higher education part has not yet started.

Technorati tags: , ,

2 Comments

Endeca Making More Inroads Into Libraries

Published by Iris on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

Search and discovery is changing rapidly in libraries. Last January the North Carolina State University Libraries overlaid their ILS with an Endeca-powered search interface (here’s their catalog, and here’s their announcement from last January). This caused quite a bit of talk about dis-integrating out library systems and was a key feature in my research into the future of the catalog (see my list of related posts below).

Since then the NextGen Catalog listserv has undertaken to plan out the catalog of the future and WorldCat has gone open-access and web 2.0-ish.

And last night, ResourceShelf alerted me to the fact that McMaster has just overlaid their catalog with Endeca (Endeca press release here and McMaster’s news item here). If this trend continues I see three possible futures for our catalogs: our ILS vendors will improve their search interfaces, third party search vendors will get better and better at working with MARC and library ILSs, or (best of all) both the previous two will happen and libraries will have a real choice in search and discovery systems and functionality for the first time.

Related posts:

Comments closed