The Toronto Globe and Mail has a very good article on the decision by Thomson to auction off its Thomson Learning division. Interestingly, the company says that one of the reasons for the sale is that so much of the TL business is still in print publishing as opposed to electronic information, and print just does not fit its future goals. Of course, Thomson Gale is a huge electronic publisher, so the contradiction is odd. I’ve seen nothing to indicate that Thomson Gale will be excluded from the sale. Probably the bigger reason for the sale is that TL is the poorest financial performer among Thomson’s various divisions. I’ll be watching for news of this auction in 2007, of course.
The Financial Times is reporting today that the Thomson Corporation has started the process of trying to find a buyer for its Thomson Learning division. Thomson Learning is the group that Thomson Gale belongs to, so this is potentially a very large development in the reference industry. The Financial Times says that Thomson Learning is valued at $5 billion, and that the sale plans are expected to made official at the company’s Thursday earnings announcement. Interesting stuff.
Today Google is launching yet another new intriguing product, this one called the Google Custom Search Engine. Essentially, as I understand it, this allows websites to customize a Google search engine for themselves that will search only the sites that the website’s owner chooses (with help from the site’s users, interestingly enough) It would seem to be especially useful for large sites that have their own (probably inferior) search capabilities. The results for any custom search also feature Google advertisements as well, allowing the website to gain additional revenue if it participates in the Google Adsense program. Here is a good article about the product.
Earlier this fall World Book launched a new reference learning site aimed at kids, called–appropriately enough–World Book Kids. This article talks about the site in more detail, but the basics as I understand them are this: reference content from WB’s Student Discovery Encyclopedia, learning activities for kids, and teacher’s guides correlated to national educational standards. Sounds like a good tool for primary school students. The site is available as an additional component to the subscription-based product World Book Online, which is aimed at libraries and schools. (No direct-to-consumer access here.)
The new issue of Referencer & User Services Quarterly has an article on the best free reference Web sites. RUSA gives these citations every year. This year’s list includes interesting sites such as AF: Acronym Finder (self-explanatory) and American Rhetoric, which offers a speech bank. It also includes How Products Are Made, yet another Thomson Gale initiative to make some of its content available for low or no cost on the Internet. I was fortunate to edit the very first volume in the HPM series, back in the early 1990s when I worked at Gale. The series has since grown to 7 volumes. How interesting to see these articles online again now. Some of them are a wee bit out of date, as some site users have pointed out. (Yes, readers can make comments about any article, just as in a blog.) The site is supported by text advertising via Google. Another interesting endeavor by Thomson Gale. I wonder how many other such sites TG has developed that I’m unaware of?
Fresh on the heels of the Encyclopedia of the World’s Nations and Cultures, which I blogged about yesterday, is another new release of ours from Facts On File: The World Encyclopedia of Political Systems and Parties. This three-volume title was very challenging to edit, given that the information it contained changes so frequently. But it includes a ton of useful information.
The four-volume Encyclopedia of the World’s Nations and Cultures, which we produed for Facts On File, has been published. Here is a link to the publisher’s website; from there you can reach the page for this title.
Kris Williamson, former Schlager Group employee and all-around good guy now in Malaysia on a research internship, occasionally sends reports of his travels around the region. I’ve copied his latest report below.
Hi Neil…
I’m back from my trip to Sarawak, part of Malaysian Borneo. Overall, I’d have to say that I had a nice time. It was a weeklong trip along the north coast of the island from near the border of Brunei Darussalam (whose sultan is the richest man in the world) to the state capital, Kuching. I acquired the airfare from KL (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, where I’m staying) to Sarawak on an open-jaw return for about US$5 excluding tax. Forget about Southwest Airlines…THIS is what I call budget airline prices.
I started my trip in Miri, Sarawak’s 2nd largest city. It used to be an oil boomtown, but now economically relies on tourists from Brunei to fill their pubs, clubs, and restaurants vacated by the oil workers. This is quite lucrative, however, since Brunei forbids the sale of alcohol in their national borders.
Next I traveled south to Bintulu, a lucrative (mostly illegal) timber town.
You don’t get a sense of the mass deforestation going on here sticking close to the coast, but you don’t have to go too far inland to find bare patches of land where rainforests once stood. The size of the houses of these timber barons is a testament to how much influence they have over the government in being allowed to cut down however much they want. This town, 4 hours drive away from the next nearest urban center, is also home to the world’s largest liquid natural gas plant in the world. Uneventful, but its construction most likely dates back to the previous prime minister, Mahathir, who (probably for personal, physical shortcomings of his own) saw the need for his country to break international records for biggest, tallest, longest, etc., structures in the world.
After that stopover, I continued down to Sibu, the 3rd largest city in Sarawak. It is nicknamed New Foo Chow due to the large number of immigrants from that region in China. Parts of the city do feel like China; I went walking around the commercial district and hardly saw a Malay, Indian, or indigenous Bornean. Sibu is reportedly home to the oldest standing Chinese building on Borneo, the Tua Pek Kong temple. At night, however, it lights up to look more like a float in Disney’s night parade.
My last stop was Kuching, the state capital and largest (or maybe 2nd
largest) city on Borneo. Kuching is consistently rated by various travel publications as the “most livable” city in Asia. I don’t know if I would want to live there, but it was certainly more comfortable than the rest of the state. In Malay, the word ‘kuching’ means ‘cat.’ And this city takes its moniker and really uses it: cat statues, museums, shapes incorporated into buildings, and certainly all the tourist paraphernalia that you can buy. I was there for the Chinese mooncake festival so the Chinatown part of the city was quiet festive. Unfortunately, I was not able to get one of the signature mooncakes of the area (or any food, for that matter) made with live sago worms in it. I decided I would try it while I was there…but after an honest attempt to find some of those foods and coming up empty-handed, I was saved from truly testing my stomach’s “iron constitution.” About the weirdest (or shall I say, least familiar in the US?) food I tried here that I don’t normally eat in KL was a squid chili sauce-cum-soup. I normally eat this chili sauce-cum-soup with whole-fried minnows, not squid.
Not wanting to leave Borneo without having a nature story, I spent a day in Bako National Park, only about 45 minutes out of Kuching. When I reached the last village on the way to the park, I had to take a boat down river to finish the trip since there are no roads into the park itself. The return fare for chartering a boat (marked on a signboard written in Malay…so it wasn’t a tourist scam) was about US$25…five times more than my return airfare from the Malay Peninsula! Once dropped off in the park, there is a campsite, a few chalets, and a map. My friend and I managed to do just 2 of the trails that day…I love hiking and have lots of time put in on the trails in the Appalachians and various parks out in California…but this was really hard compared to those! And to make it worse, the friend I was traveling with, a Muslim, was fasting because it is the month of Ramadan. So…out of respect (or guilt?) I also fasted…no food or water from about 4:30am to 6:30pm. That’s not good when hiking in the rainforests of Borneo though. We survived, but did not cover as much ground as expected!
In the process, however, I got to see proboscis monkeys, macaques, flying squirrels, bearded pigs, a plethora of insects and bird, and personally got to feel the bite of somewhere around one billion mosquitoes. I left feeling triumphant, however, because I managed to do this without acquiring any hitchhiking leeches along the way!
So back in KL now, I see that the haze originating in Sumatra has gotten worse and the city is once again covered in a blanket of smoke. I haven’t seen the sun in over a week. Nevertheless, I’m back safely and parasite free (that I know of).
Today’s New York Times Book Review features a review of a new biography of Johnny Cash written by Michael Streissguth. Thanks to the efforts of editor in chief Arnold Markoe, we were lucky enough to have Streissguth write the article on Cash for the forthcoming volume of the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives. The NYTBR review of Streissguth’s biography was written by historian Douglas Brinkley, who gives a very favorable opinion of the book. Congrats, Dr. Streissguth.
We’ve taken to calling this Rock Star Week around the office, as we work on updating the Contemporary Authors database with news of the Nobel Prize winner (Orhan Pamuk), the Booker Prize winner (Kiran Desai), the Quill Award winners, and the National Book Award nominations. I’ve never read anything by either Pamuk or Desai but now have extra motivation to do so. Last night I was able to catch an interview with Pamuk on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Pamuk was interesting and well-spoken. He talked of his longstanding wish to be a bridge between cultures (West and East, Christianity and Islam, Europe and Asia) but then admitted that the cliche was becoming very well worn. And he averred that he doesn’t believe in the so-called clash of civilizations but then wondered if events and individuals aren’t pushing us toward that anyway. If you’re interested in learning more about these authors, I urge you to check out your local public library, which likely has a subscription to Contemporary Authors, either in print or online, and may even offer remote access from your home computer. Or, if you like, you can see whether Amazon.com has the CA entries on these authors available for e-text download for a few dollars apiece.
As many of you probably know, the Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition) is now available in an online edition via paid subscription. While many of us have been cursing this edition ever since it appeared in print a few years ago (perhaps some of my staff would like to add their comments about this?), it is nice to have the text available online now. The chief advantage, as far as I can tell, is that you can search the full text, thus easing the task of finding what you’re looking for–always a difficult job given the CMS’s byzantine index. And the overall site design is quite pleasant and attractive. I’m less impressed by the technological feat: the online edition is basically just the print version in digital form. An e-book, if you will. Perhaps this was the only logical approach to take, but I wonder if a more daring and original vision might have produced something more useful. Maybe the University of Chicago is spending its energy on producing a version that could be integrated with MS Word? Now that would fit my definition of “daring and original.”
CountryReports.org has completed a major redesign of its Web site. The new site is much cleaner and more attractive than before. CountryReports.org is an interesting example of a subscription-based reference site. Much of their information comes from publicly available data from international organizations like the U.N., it would seem, although they claim that “most” of their content is “unique to CountryReports.org.” Among the items offered at the site is geographical and economic statistics, crossword puzzles, flags and other symbols, and customs and culture information (again mostly statistical data, I think).
The new issue of Library Journal has a review of Concise Major 21st-Century Writers, which is a subset of Contemporary Authors. We produced much of the content for this title, although like all of our work for CA, we receive no credit. (The reason why remains somewhat of a mystery to me, although it has to do with the very modern nature of CA, which is a giant database out of which various print volumes are extracted each month. Apparently, the publisher isn’t always able to know which content we might have produced in any given volume and thus has decided not to credit us in the frontmatter of each volume.) The LJ reviewer recommends the set and says it is “bound to come in handy for students and those working with them.”