An interesting thing happened at my place of work (OhioLINK) today. We recently added links to our central catalog pointing to manifestations in Google Books. The way it was decided to set it up, though, was to only point to Google Books if the full text was available. We tweeted …

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.

The first …

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 …

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 …

OCLC has published the final report from the OCLC Review Board on Principles of Shared Data Creation and Stewardship and announced the formal withdrawal of the proposed Policy on Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records. In doing so, OCLC has reaffirmed the existence and applicability of the "Guidelines for the …

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 …

Reported by Zotero co-director Sean Takats, tweeted by CHNM director Dan Cohen, and noted on DLTJ by Rick, Thomson-Reuters' lawsuit against George Mason University has been dismissed. The details are sparse at the moment, but it would appear that the creators of Zotero have prevailed over the creators of EndNote …

Late last month, the University of Pittsburgh Press and Library System announced a joint effort to revive 500 titles with online and print-on demand access. I originally found this via a post on the Course materials, Innovation, and Technology in Education (CITE) blog. Since we have been ramping up discussions …

On Tuesday, the University of Michigan and Google executed an amendment to the original agreement that started Google's efforts to create a collection of scanned books. The amendment was publicized in a press release by the University of Michigan and described in a page that summarized the changes. That summary …