The Lamar Soutter Library has launched the Journal of eScience Librarianship. The first issue's "full-length papers" are: "DataONE: Facilitating eScience through Collaboration" "An Assessment of Needed Competencies to Promote the Data Curation and Management Librarianship of Health Sciences and Science and Technology Librarians in New England" "Tiers of Research Data Support Services" | E-science and Academic Libraries Bibliography | Digital Scholarship | [Via DigitalKoans under a Creative Commons LIcense]...

While not exactly news, it’s fun to look at a conversion-of-an-e-reader-skeptic story every now and then. Here’s one from Florida International University Medical Library Digital Access Librarian Bohyun Kim. Despite the digital nature of Kim’s job title, she had never really been tempted to get an e-ink e-reader device—mainly because she already had an iPad. But when she checked out a Kindle loaded with e-books from the university lending library, she found she enjoyed the experience more than she expected. And although the lighter weight and less eyestrain-inducing screen were nice, what she really liked was the way there...

From an Article by Michael Kelley at Library Journal: Librarians’ passionate advocacy of our titles is vital to our efforts  and we remain committed to keeping our ebooks available in the library channel,” said Josh Marwell, Harper’s president of sales. Marwell said that the 26-loan cap remains a work in progress, but no other business model has emerged in the past year that makes more sense to the company. [Clip] The Municipal Library Consortium of St. Louis County (MLC), which consists of nine independent community libraries in Missouri, has now changed its mind about the boycott it approved last year. “A couple of months ago we started purchasing...

  “Seward’s Folly” was what the skeptics dubbed America’s 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million. No one had found gold in the Klondike by then. And yet America was buying a distant territory twice the size of Texas. Secretary of State William Henry Seward faced doubts aplenty on Capitol Hill. Almost 145 years later, along with others from a workshop of the Digital Public Library of America, I walked into a slightly chilly vault at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., and beheld some actual paperwork from the Alaska transaction. Not just George Washington’s signature of loyalty to...

Tired of all your usual e-book sources?  Don't overlook the Internet Archive!  From the title we see to the left of this post to the over 3 million available other texts for your use, the Internet Archive offers a multitude of free reading!  From history and literature to goverment records and genealogy, this a great resource that you consider next time you are looking for something new to read.  Let's talk more about what you can expect to find there. While the main site is easily available at www.archive.org, you will probably want to go directly to the reading resources found...

Hundreds and hundreds of visitors have read LibraryCity‘sproposal for the sale of OverDrive to public libraries or a related nonprofit. The idea drew favorable reaction fromThad McIlroy, a prominent publishing consultant, and it even made an ALA newsletterand Reddit. Still not convinced of the possibilities? Well, consider that 39 percent of U.S. public libraries don’t offer downloadable e-books. Check it out for yourself. Ironic, isn’t it? Rockford, Illinois, is ODing on e-books, while many U.S. communities are so cash-strapped or e-backwards that they lack any. Or maybe not quite so backwards. Remember, with OverDrive as a middleman, many public librarians might not feel quite as comfortable with e-books as they would...

So, Penguin has now dropped out of the Overdrive library service. Yikes! It strikes me that all of these 'legacy' publishers who are panicking because Amazon or Apple or Google or Indie Everyman are going to crush them to bits are taking an entirely wrong approach here. What if, instead of clinging to the way things were done before, they actually innovated? What if, instead of locking things down ever further and driving people away from their goods, they opened things up and brought them in? I think an ebook rental service, run in conjunction with the existing Overdrive architecture, would...

Why did Penguin terminate their contract with OverDrive? Here’s what we’ve learned from an INFOdocket source. We are told that publisher contracts with OverDrive allow them to store and serve library end users ebooks. That’s it. OverDrive does NOT have permission to first authorize the lending of an ebook to a library end user and then forward the request for actual distribution and tracking of the title to Amazon.com or ANY other retailer. Similarly, in most situations*, publishers do not permit retailers to lend ebooks directly to end users. Finally, in November and again yesterday we noted an LJ article (November 23, 2011) that...

One of the giants of the book trade has unwittingly reinforced LibraryCity‘s argument that public libraries or a nonprofitshould buy the OverDrive distribution service. Penguin said it would stop selling new books to OverDrive‘s library side. In another OverDrive-related development, former librarian Andrew Strong, a library activist in Rockford, IL, told local officials they should consider advocating both an OverDrive purchase and a true national digital system. And he cited a current Rockford library manager’s enthusiasm for the OverDrive-related idea. Penguin’s dissing of OverDrive and public libraries is hardly alone among publisher, as you can see from this sign from Sarah “Librarian in Black” Houghton, the acting director of the San...

With yet another publisher announcing today that it’s dropping out of the library eBook market, I decided to put up a new sign in our library in a few different spots to raise public awareness.  The sign lists which publishers won’t do eBook business with libraries and provides contact information for the publishers in question.  I’ve posted about the issue on our library blog and pushed it out on our Twitter account and Facebook page.  And here’s a direct link to a downloadable copy of my sign on Google Docs. It’s not fancy, but feel free to take it, modify it, use...

Max Kaiser has published "Putting 600,000 Books Online: the Large-Scale Digitisation Partnership between the Austrian National Library and Google" in the latest issue of LIBER Quarterly. Here's an excerpt: In a public-private partnership with Google, the Austrian National Library is digitising its historical book holdings. Some 600,000 volumes from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries will be digitised and made available free of charge. The project demonstrates that public-private partnerships can be successful in enabling our heritage institutions to provide large-scale access to their holdings, provided that such partnerships are not exclusive and free access is ensured. The article outlines the preparatory phase...

UPDATE: Penguin Group Terminating Its Contract with OverDrive (by Michael Kelley, LJ) “In a stunning development, Penguin Group has extricated itself from its contract with OverDrive, the primary supplier of ebooks to public libraries. ‘Looking ahead, we are continuing to talk about our future plans for ebook and digital audiobook availability for library lending with a number of partners providing these services,’ said Erica Glass, in a prepared statement. Penguin is negotiating a “continuance agreement” with OverDrive, which will allow libraries that have Penguin ebooks in their catalog to continue to have access to those titles.” From an E-Mail to OverDrive Partners Starting tomorrow (February 10, 2012),...