Library News, Reviews, and Views
OCLC has begun supporting demand-driven acquisition (DDA) through the WorldCat Knowledge Base. DDA pioneer and ProQuest subsidiary EBL will be the first ebook service to provide data, with sister company ebrary to follow soon. Interest in DDA is well established, but there are still challenges facing adopters of these programs.
ProQuest and OCLC have announced the launch of a data exchange program that will share metadata across OCLC’s Worldcat Local, ProQuest’s Summon service, and the full text of ProQuest Central and ebrary e-books, enriching discoverability for users of each of these services.
ProQuest on January 18 signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ebook Library (EBL), the companies announced today. They plan to merge EBLs platform with ebrary, which ProQuest acquired in January 2011. In a statement to the press, ProQuest CEO Kurt Sanford said that the company viewed EBL’s business models and acquisition tools as complementary to ebrary’s core platform technology, subscription service, and content selection.
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.
Begun back in 2001 by O’Reilly Media and Pearson Education, Safari Books Online was something of a pioneer. It now contains some 25,000 ebook and video titles from more than 75 publishers, with new publishers added regularly. Its main strength is its specificity: rather than try to cover every possible subject, Safari Books Online concentrates largely on technology, business, and especially programming, on a subscription basis.
Online digital library ebrary has launched two new subscription database products focusing on Employee Development and Human Resources. Featuring a selection of titles geared toward corporate libraries, the Employee Development database includes ebooks and digital resources covering topics including business communication, strategic thinking, and business creativity, while the Human Resources collection focuses on topics such as employee recruitment, diversity, retention and remuneration, training and development, and corporate culture.
It’s not every day that working in the library world has you consorting with royalty. But it does happen, at least for ProQuest’s Senior VP Rod Gauvin and Vice President of Publishing Mary Sauer-Games. The occasion was the launch of the digitized version of Queen Victoria’s personal journals, a collaboration between ProQuest, Oxford University’s Bodleian [...]
Three North Carolina State University (NCSU) librarians have been honored for developing the NCSU Libraries Mobile Scavenger Hunt. Anne Burke, Adrienne Lai, and Adam Rogers have been named the 2012 recipients of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) College Libraries Section (CLS) ProQuest Innovation in College Librarianship Award. Winners receive $3000, which is [...]
At the 2012 American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting, held January 20-24 in Dallas, LJ was on the exhibit floor taking a look at library tech companies’ latest wares. Here are a few of the highlights.
INFOdocket by Gary Price
