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 …

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 …

Although my day-to-day work takes me farther away from working with digital collections in general and JPEG2000 specifically, I still have a Google News search set up looking for hits on JPEG2000 topics. An entry appeared yesterday that gives some interesting insight into how motion JPEG2000 is being used in …

Last Friday, Andrew Pace (Executive Director of Networked Library Services for OCLC) was interviewed by Richard Wallis of Talis on OCLC's recent announcement of a cloud-based library management service. As part of that conversation, Richard and Andrew touched on the ongoing debate on the OCLC record use policy. Below is …

In roughly a week, the OCLC membership through the Members Council will hear of the preliminary findings from the Review Board of Shared Data Creation and Stewardship. The Review Board was tasked with formulating recommendations in response to the community's objections to the proposed Record Use policy. The charter for …

Via a post and an interview on the O'Reilly Radar blog, Google announced limited support for parsing RDFa statements and microformat properties in web page HTML coding and using those statements to enhance the relevance of search results as so-called "rich snippets". In looking at the example review markup outlined …

Today was to be the deadline for objecting to, opting out of, and/or filing briefs with the court on the Google Book Search Settlement. That was the plan, at least, when the preliminary approval statement from the court was issued last year. That deadline changed, and that is part …

The American Library Association (through the Association's Washington Office and the Association of College and Research Libraries Division) and the Association of Research Libraries filed a brief [PDF] with the court in support of the Google Book Search Settlement while asking the judge to "exercise vigorous oversight" over details the …

FriendFeed went live yesterday with changes to the user interface and back-end systems. The changes were moderately positive, taken as a whole, but there are aspects of the new user interface that I don't like -- the color scheme, the removal of the service icons, and the (over)-use of whitespace …

Last week, OCLC announced a "strategy to move library management services to Web scale." With this move, OCLC is rebranding "WorldCat Local" to include functions typically associated with an integrated library system. From the press release:

OCLC plans to release Web-scale delivery and circulation, print and electronic acquisitions, and license …

New York Judge Denny Chin recently issued two rulings in the Google Book Search settlement. In the first, he ' the request by the Internet Archive to intervene as a defendant in the lawsuit (and thus, presumably, be on firmer founding to guide aspects of the settlement). In his response, Judge …

Earlier this month, Ohio State University Libraries launched the OSUL Labs area. (Congratulations and kudos to Eric Schnell and the others at OSU that have taken this step to "include customers as active participants in the development and/or testing of new …

I usually don't post about the act of blogging itself (I wonder how many middle-aged blogs have a similar post), but the confluence of a couple of things caused me to look at DLTJ with a critical and curious eye. The first was the work by David Pattern in Measuring …

We are starting to see objections to the Google Book Search Settlement this month in advance of the May 5th deadline set up by the court. The first comes from the consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog (found by way of the American Libraries news feed). They have submitted a letter …

A recent issue of Nature published an article by Declan Butler called "Technology: The textbook of the future" included a paragraph about OhioLINK's exploration of digital textbooks:

Ongoing tests of CourseSmart e-textbooks by the University System of Ohio show that they reduce costs -- the average US student forks out some …