blog.rightreading.com

This interesting standoff between Rupert Murdock’s big publishing conglomerate and a little public library could be a bellwether for future digital book disputes. The SSC Library is boycotting HarperCollins. It is part of a consortium of 60 Nebraska libraries that purchase e-books for library patrons. Until recently the libraries could allow an unlimited number of patrons to check out these materials (just as they do with printed books). But HC changed the terms of the library purchases, now allowing a maximum of 25 check-outs — less than half of one check-out per library. HC says unlimited check-outs could hurt its e-book business, library director David Mixdorf says the new policy “hits on us pretty hard.” It will be interesting to see how this shakes out.

One benefit: patrons may be reading better books during the boycot.

*

LINK: KTIV.com

Image via El Bibliomata’s photostream.

These days I’m using Zotero to keep track of my references (and what a pain it was transferring references from BibMe, which doesn’t support the standard BibTex format). I’ll make a post about Zotero when I get a chance. Right now I just want to rant about what a crappy job librarians are doing these days with bibliographic information. With Zotero I can enter an ISBN and download book information, but for many books I go to WorldCat, which gathers records from a variety of libraries, and Zotero can also extract those records. But, either way, I nearly always have to edit the result. It seems whoever is entering the records in the library databases can’t tell a subtitle from a publisher, or doesn’t know how to format publisher names, or gets mixed up about dates and authors and editors and other elements. Working with WorldCat this way has been an eye opener about librarians’ lazy or inept data entry. Shouldn’t they be trained to do these things correctly?

Folks online are getting too damn helpful.

Pophangover thinks it has the list. But I’m pretty sure we can do much worse. Click the image to check out their bottom ten.

Readers of this blog are probably tired of this topic, but I have been spending a lot of time on this project, so it occupies my attention. I’ll try to restrain myself in the future, I promise (sure I will). This is the first building nearly complete, though still wanting siding. The second building is now almost as far along, though as yet without books since I haven’t installed doors.

.

I’m back from my short vacation, which was spent not being a tourist somewhere but rather working on my second library building. Even though I didn’t go away I found the computer did not call to me. I enjoyed working outdoors and not sitting in front of a screen.

Below you can see progress on the second building, looking through eastward to the first, which is mostly completed except for the siding and finishing up the roof fascia.

Read more »

Want to store your library information on the web? Want to be able to computer search some of the content? Entering ISBN numbers too much trouble? Try this tip from Google employee Matt Cutts.

.