MOBIUS Libraries

"One Big Six publisher is, to its credit, on the record saying it is granting ownership. That bears repeating: a Big Six publisher says it is granting ownership. Librarians should do everything possible to test the limits of this ownership and to identify specific vendor practices (or clauses) that may undermine it."

Logan College of Chiropractic University has finally released how much the president and his family are paid. If you remember, several months back, another Chronicle article mentioned hints of nepotism. What's totally outrageous is that the president at Logan is the 2nd highest paid president in MO, with only Wash U being higher paid. I have concerns over the impact this can make on Logan as a whole.

An interesting article covering some of the many problems in in developing consistency and open standards among discovery services. Notably the article mentions the Open Discovery Initiative and also talks about indexing concerns and resource coverage.

A victory for fair use, with scanned materials that are used in the HathiTrust. The HathiTrust repository use materials scanned from the Google Books but he access is more restrictive, allowing full text searches only with the copyright holder's permission--but does allow full text for readers with print disabilities. A Federal judge ruled this is covered by fair use, while related lawsuits against Google continue.

An interesting promotional approach considering the popularity of zombie movies and TV shows like "The Walking Dead." I also found it humorous they got in the mood by watching the Michael Jackson "Thriller" video.

Print dies: Newsweek to go all-digital. The magazine will be subscription-based and available on e-readers.

Literary neuroscience, anyone?

Researchers found a nearly linear relationship between time of sharing of the resource and the percentage lost, with a slightly less linear relationship between time of sharing and archiving coverage of the resource. From this model we conclude that after the first year of publishing, nearly 11% of shared resources will be lost and after that we will continue to lose 0.02% per day.

"Our online history is disappearing at an astonishing rate, creating a black hole for future historians. "

An interesting blog for a conference that took place in Telluride, Colorado, last month which looked at risk and rewards and encouraged innovative thinking. Some of the presentation resources are available here: http://rsquaredconference.org/program/resources

SUNY Potsdam is intending to cancel subscriptions to the American Chemical Society's journals as they would consume 10 percent of the library's acquisitions budget. The article looks at one of the biggest problems facing academic libraries and serials, namely journals they are required to carry because of accreditation or approval, yet they either can't afford or carry to carry to the detriment of other departments they try to serve.

I would say this article is focusing more on headlines and making noise than something actually about to happen. The story is about a case going to the Supreme Court where a student from Thailand was studying at Cornell University and found that his textbooks made by Wiley were substantially cheaper in his home country. He began buying books there and reselling them in the U.S. on Ebay, making over $1.2 million. Wiley accused him of copyright infringement, and the student responded this was protected under the first sale doctrine. What is at stake is how this doctrine may be redefined; what is unique is not that the goods were made in foreign country, but owned and marketed by a U.S. company who sought to restrict sales of those items in the U.S.

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.

Most exciting article I've read about responsive web design!

When I read the first part of the article I thought "Oh e-books and other electronic resources. That's cool." But then I read on-I just couldn't believe the books were "lost" where have all the books gone? Very interesting article and some of the comments brought up other good points too.

I posted something about this a couple weeks ago and then found this. Very interesting. We'll see how it plays out, but feels very 1984.

Via Wikipedia: skeuomorphism is when a product imitates design elements functionally necessary in the original product design, but that becomes ornamental in the new product design This tumblr blog has lots of really amusing examples.

"Either the books must go, or they must swallow us up. I calculate that, take the whole world over, from eighty to one hundred thousand books appear every year; at an average of a thousand copies, this makes more than a hundred millions of books, the majority of which contain only the wildest extravagances or the most chimerical follies, and propagate only prejudice and error. Our social condition forces us to hear many stupid things every day. A few more or less do not amount to very great suffering in the end; but what happiness not to be obliged to read them, and to be able at last to close our eyes upon the annihilation of printed things!"

This one is just for fun on Friday, but makes a lot of good points.

Interesting.  I wonder what an open-source textbook will be like, or what can be done with it.  Also, the article seems to assume that the information in the textbooks is under the same license.