NISO voting members are currently considering two new work items: a statement of best practices for the physical delivery of library resources and formalizing the NLM journal article DTD de facto standards. The Physical Delivery and Standardized Markup for Journal Articles proposal documents are openly available for download.
In June, a new service that speeds access to life sciences literature reached a milestone. Called PubGet, it is a service that reduces the number of clicks to the full text of an article, and the milestone was activating the 50th institution using its service. Using its own proprietary "pathing …
Over the weekend, the folks at Duke University coordinating the development of the OLE Project Design Final Report released a draft for public comment. Weighing in at 100 pages (don't let that put you off -- there are lots of pictures), it represents the best thinking of a couple dozen individuals …
Image capture of NPR Tech Team Twitter account.
All day today, the staff at NPR's Digital Media team have been preparing to launch a new version of their website, and we've been able to follow along via tweets on the NPRTechTeam Twitter account. It looks like it was a marathon …
My place of work has moved to office space in downtown Columbus. If you have saved contact information for me, please update it. Those connected to me via Plaxo will get updated information automatically.
These Parts Have Changed
Work address: 35 E. Chestnut St, 8th Floor, Columbus, OH 43215-2541
Phone …
As a youth I remember intently studying the troubles of others -- what they did when they got into trouble and how they got out of it. If the saying "You Learn From Your Mistakes" was so true, I wanted to be able to learn from the mistakes of others. I …
As libraries feel the need to join the social media landscape to meet a segment of their user population already there, it is useful to step back and get acclimated. There is a pace of information flow that is unlike anything else in the physical world, and a minor incident …
New legislation was introduced in the U.S. Senate last week to support the publication of federally-sponsored research results under open access terms. Sponsored by Senator Lieberman …
A few weeks ago, a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed Adam Smith, Google's director of product management, about the Google Book Search settlement and posted the interview in audio form. The page isn't dated, but guessing from metadata in the URL it was somewhere around the publication …
A controversy is starting to pick up in the business librarian community -- primarily in the U.K. it would seem -- regarding the licensing demands of Harvard Business Press (HBP) for the inclusion of Harvard Business Review articles in EBSCOhost. HBP content in EBSCOhost carries a publisher-specific rider that says use …
There will be two programs at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago where aspects of the Open Library Environment Project will be discussed. The participants in the design phase of the project encourage you to attend one or both of them to …
I had the pleasure of presenting on a panel at the Ohio Student Success Assessment Summit this morning on the topic of textbooks and open educational resources. Specifically, I was talking about the plans and desires of the University System of Ohio to help faculty help students with the escalating …
It has been a wild few weeks in search engines -- or search-engine-like services. We've seen the introduction of no fewer than three high-profile tools ... Wolfram|Alpha, Microsoft Bing, and Google Squared ... each with their own strengths and needing their own techniques -- or, at least, their own distinct frame of reference …
I continue to be astonished by how efficient the used textbook market has become. This week, at the end of the spring quarter at Ohio State University, a drive-thru textbook buy-back service popped up on the site of a long-closed gas station. It is a tent on a parking lot …
The sand is really starting to shift under the traditional textbook providers as the open course content movement shows signs of, well, movement. Already this year there are two events that point to shifts in how instructors and students can shortcut the complex ecosystem of textbooks as we know it …
Earlier today, OCLC posted the recording [Flash] and presentation slides [PDF] from Jennifer Younger's presentation to the Members Council updating them on the progress of the Review Board of Shared Data Creation and Stewardship. Although the work of the Review Board is not yet complete, they are recommending the "policy …