Overheard at IFLA
Posted On Aug 29 2006Okay, so I heard it second hand–I was nowhere near Seoul, Korea, for the 72nd IFLA conference (I’ve only been to IFLA once. . .when it was in Boston) when Sungdae Ahn, vice president and general manager of EBSCO Information Services-Korea, said, “Service, not content, is the new king.” While she might not have been the first to use that phrase, I’m not quite sure what I think of it. I will give EBSCO their props for creating some pretty innovative services for the content that they already govern. A partnership with WebFeat has increased metasearch access for EBSCO A-Z …
MetaMeta
Posted On Jul 28 2006A colleague of mine likes to joke about something he calls “MetaMeetings” …meetings about meetings. Organizations (especially academic ones, it seems) like to have those. So I was wondering what a blog post about meta stuff should be called. There are many meta things happening out there. EBSCO has announced that eight new publishers have added journal content to MetaPress, their electronic content management and hosting service. This got me thinking about institutional repositories, a topic I have been able to mostly avoid (beyond hating that horrible name). When I have turned my attention to it, I am always surprised …
Good E-books Done Well
Posted On Jul 12 2006So the pace has not been exactly hectic, yet. Apologies. My plan is to post to this blog once per week, but after four straight weeks of travel in June, the best-laid plans… Anyway, enough excuses. What’s up in the library business? In the past, I have bristled at publishers putting up their own e-book storefronts. After all, even Elsevier would not open a brick and mortar store next to Barnes & Noble. My main complaint has been the unduly hydrophobic manner in which publishers have dipped their toes in the e-book pool: proprietary formats, proprietary hardware and software, online …