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With eBooks having taken off in the past few years I was curious about the current status of Project Gutenberg, the original resource of online books. Starting in 1971 with the Declaration of Independence Gutenberg initially relied on manually typing in royalty free books into a text format. The project is still continuing, but the founder died last year and as of July 8th the archive is only 40,000 books, an almost miniscule number compared to the digitization efforts of Google.

If you don't already know what 2 factor authentication is - it's the use of a second out of band communication channel that is used in addition to your password. In the case of Google it means that when you go to log in they will send you a text message with a 6 digit numerical code that you'll type in as well. This means that would be hackers would need to not only know your password but also have physical access to your phone.  I've already enabled this feature for Google apps @mobiusconsortium.org - if you'd like to enable it for your account (it takes like 10 minutes to get set up and fix your applications) just let me know. 

THOMAS is the website the Library of Congress uses for keeping an online record of bills. As the author notes it's not easy to get a picture of what Congress is working on by looking at one bill at a time. It's possible to get a more overall picture by downloading the data and number crunching it, but it looks like the site will not allow bulk downloads of data, only scraping information by way of scripts.

"Libraries' most devoted e-users aren't choosing using the web over coming to the library in person. Rather, they are choosing to do both."

"Approximately 400 to 600 libraries worldwide have switched to a patron-driven system for purchasing new works, and that number is likely to double over the next year and a half, according to Joseph Esposito, a digital publishing consultant who has spent the last nine months studying the implications of PDA with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation."

The ALA Digital Content and Libraries Working Group published an "Ebook Business Models for Public Libraries" report August 8. You can read more about the process, or jump right to a PDF download of the report.

This project is moving along...

The Bexar County Bibliotech Library shows both the optimism but also the problems of an all-digital. 10,000 books is a very small collection, and the library is using a vendor's platform app to supply materials. As one of the people in the article mentioned, this was also done before in 2002.

An outsider view of how Overdrive presents itself as a corporate entity to those not in the library profession, and apparent plans to expand into the school library market.

Trinity College Library in Dublin, Ireland, now offers for free the influential Book of Kells, to be viewed online. There's even an iPad app for this!

Penguin Group announced that on Tuesday, April 2, they will begin allowing libraries to purchase and lend ebook titles the day that hardcover editions are released.

Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen recently returned from a trip to North Korea and discuss the role of the Internet in repressive countries.

Since ALA President Maureen Sullivan threw down the proverbial gauntlet to publishers and they've picked it up, there's been a lot of inspired responses.  Jamie LaRue has a radical one himself-- circumvent the publishers, and ask the authors how they'd like their electronic books to be distributed. It's a bold proposition (posing the question, "Are publishers necessary?"), but certainly a way for libraries to work with authors to maximize their profits.

And why would they do it?  Probably because as it stands, it doesn't work as intended. As people realize that what they're doing isn't buying content so much as leasing it, it's interesting to see how their attitudes have changed towards DRM. 

I'm very heartened by this development, and by the implication that libraries are taking control of their own metadata in order to make the items within their collections more findable, and more easy to integrate with other mediums.

I found this interesting as it covers many of the links we're seeing in our electronic resource records (dx.doi.org) Pat of the larger Handle System the DOI is essentially a stable link for resources and citations.

Do you need some help finding something to read for professional development? This blog lists current journals and features one article from each.

The Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC) is a project that aims to bring together online resources and archival materials on historical person, to basically allow a researcher to know where all the records are to understand a person. What I found in the prototype is that it resembled a catalog of sophisticated authority records. This could be useful for someone needing quick information or seeing how a historical figure fits in context, but I question if in the end it doesn't repeat information found almost as readily in other resources such as Wikipedia.

"Everyone's buzzing about Pinterest, a new social media tool that connects people through the things they like-but for a growing number of users in classrooms and media centers, it's fast becoming a powerful resource where teachers and students share images, store lesson plans, read about current events, watch video clips, and collect their favorite apps."