DPLA Dev team looking for collections.
“In the meantime, we’re continuing to look for collection metadata we can make accessible through the platform’s API. The ideal collection metadata (for our nefarious purposes) would be completely unencumbered, would attach both at the level of the collection and of items, and would point at an interesting variety of media types. If you’ve got some lying around, let us know. In fact, you can be the first person to try our email address: dev@dp.la. And if that doesn’t work, for now use my address: self at evident.com.”
From the DPLA Dev team blog.
ALA to meet with Ebook-shy companies to discuss library lending.
“The leaders of the American Library Association (ALA) will meet at the end of this month with top executives from Macmillan, Simon & Schuster (S&S), and Penguin publishing houses, which all do not allow libraries to circulate their ebooks (in Penguin’s case the prohibition is on new releases only). ‘We asked for it and we got both the CEOs of Macmillan and S&S to be at our meetings along with a number of senior staff of these companies,” said Molly Raphael, the president of ALA. “I think they are at least interested in having some kind of dialogue, but I don’t know what it means. We’ll find out more when we go,’ she said.”
From Michael Kelly’s article for Library Journal, “ALA Midwinter 2012: ALA To Meet With Top Executives of Macmillan, Simon & Schuster and Penguin on Ebook Lending”
Gale announces ambitious project to digitize global 19th century history.
“‘One of the important elements of Nineteenth Century Collections Online is that most of the content has never before been digitized, and a great deal of the content has never been captured for microfilm or been otherwise made available outside the source institution,’ said Jim Draper, vice president and publisher, Gale. ‘This archive is opening up rare and important materials to a world of researchers, no matter their location.’”
Press release via TeleRead.
Kent Anderson writes on the shortcomings of traditional approaches to Ebook lending.
“Attempting to live life the way they’ve always lived it — by preserving check-outs, throttling supply, and creating queues for e-books — publishers and libraries are only cementing their place in the past. One idea toward a different outcome? Perhaps instead of a library simply telling a patron that a book isn’t available, work with Amazon to create a consignment approach. The patron could have the book on their device for a week without charge and read up to 50% of the book in that time. If the e-book is returned to the library in that time, they can pick up where they stopped and it’s all still free. If not, they can buy the book (and the library gets a percentage of the sale), or they can wait it out.”
Via TeleRead.