Library News, Reviews, and Views
Wednesday, May 8, 2013, 2:00-3:00 PM ETEvery book has a story. Peak behind the scenes…learn the secrets, curiosities, and fun facts about two essential reference series from Gale. Register today to reserve your spot in this informative session brought to you by Gale, Cengage Learning. Archive now available!
Gale Cengage today announced a licensing agreement with the Smithsonian Institution to distribute Smithsonian assets into the library and academic space. Though it originally grew out of a public RFP issued by the Smithsonian to digitize its Smithsonian Magazine and Air and Space magazine resources, it has grown into something much more ambitious in scope.
The eMOP project led by Texas A&M will use page images from ProQuest’s Early English Books Online and Early European Books, Gale Cengage’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and other sources to create a database of early typefaces used in English books and documents, and then train optical character recognition (OCR) software to read these documents.
Frank Menchaca, executive vice president of publishing for Gale Cengage Learning, discusses digitization projects and the company’s new college courses for public libraries as part of a series of Q&As leading up to “The Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond,” LJ’s third annual ebook summit on Wednesday, October 17.
Web developers should prioritize mobile websites over desktop websites, librarians need to design more relevant instructional materials for their users, and the field of experience-based transformational development could have a major impact on the future of educational tools. These were just a few of the topics discussed during the “Top Technology Trends and LITA Awards Presentation,” session last Sunday during the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012, 3:00 – 4:00 PM ET In 2003, Gale Cengage Learning changed the landscape of primary source digitization for research with the release of Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Taking on digitizing the 19th Century presented new issues and concerns, with publishing in Great Britain alone exceeding more than 10-fold that of the previous century. Without the guidance of a widely accepted bibliography, how should resource cultivation begin? Beyond the documents, researchers have changed. As long ago adopters to electronic resources, today’s researchers require more tools and functionality than ever before.
With the guidance of an elite, globally focused advisory board, Gale Cengage Learning is proud to announce the release of Nineteenth Century Collections Online. Please join us for an overview of the scope and focus of the program, and a tour of this exciting line of archives. The archive is no longer available.le!
On January 21, 2012, at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in Dallas, LJ met with reference publishers, database aggregators, and public and academic reference librarians to discuss recent events and issues in the library world. It had been an exciting week. In protest against the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), which would have effectively forced online sites to police user-generated content, online reference giant Wikipedia had “gone dark” for a day.
The blackout was fresh in everyone’s mind and inspired some soul-searching about overreliance on this resource by patrons and librarians alike. But the group covered lots of other topics, too, from debates over patron-driven acquisition (PDA) and how to get reluctant students and faculty into academic libraries, to innovative ways to measure usage and get marketing help from vendors. The following comments are highlights of the conversation.
INFOdocket by Gary Price
