At ALA Midwinter, ALCTS sponsored a panel discussion about sharing library-created data inside and outside the library community, with a particular focus on cataloging data. I was honored to be ask to speak on the topic from the perspective of a consortial office. This is the first in a series …

A non-librarian colleague forwarded a link to an essay by Mark Pesce called The Alexandrine Dilemma. From the context of one of the comments, I think it might have been the text of a keynote given at New Librarians Symposium in Australia last month. It is a thought-provoking piece that …

The Google Book Search Settlement Agreement includes two points where library consortia come into play: discounts for institutional subscriptions and receipt of digitized books by members of a consortium. The Google Book Search Settlement calls such consortia "Institutional Consortia" and the definition of that phrase and the places in the …

The Associate Press reported on Monday evening that the court has given preliminary approval to the settlement negotiated between Google and book authors and publishers over the use of copyrighted materials in the Google Book Search Library project. In giving preliminary approval, Judge John E. Sprizzo authorized the publication of …

One of the very relevant aspects of the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement to libraries is the provision that allows for free public access to the full text of books in public and academic libraries. The Notice of Settlement summary says: "Google will provide, on request, 'Public Access' licenses for …

Update

On the Code4Lib IRC channel Thursday afternoon, Roy Tennant, Senior Program Officer at OCLC Programs and Research, said that there is absolutely no connection between the policy change and the Google Book Search settlement.

The Original Post

Two big and seemingly unrelated things came to light on Tuesday of …

Beyond the public pronouncements of the Google Books Settlement ((See the bottom of this earlier post on DLTJ for a complete list)) are the documents that form the meat of the agreement. The full text of the proposed settlement agreement is 141 pages plus another 162 pages of appendices. The …

Announced today was a settlement between Google and the plaintiffs -- the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and individual authors and publishers -- in the class action lawsuit about materials scanned for the Google Book Search application through the Google Book Search Library Project. This posting on DLTJ includes a …

Two papers were published recently exploring the quality of Google Scholar and Google Books.

Google Scholar

Philipp Mayr and Anne-Kathrin Walter, both of GESIS / Social Science Information Center in Bonn, Germany, uploaded an article to arXiv called "An exploratory study of Google Scholar." ((Judging from the citation listed on Philipp …