Library Journal has several new items of interest. First up is a brief interview with Gordon Macomber, president of Thomson Gale. He basically attempts to soothe librarians’ concern about the impending sale of Thomson Learning. He reiterates the belief that Gale will not be sold separately from its sister companies in the Learning division, but that the entire Learning division will be sold as one unit. Second, LJ devotes considerable space to summarizing the state of electronic reference as we enter 2007, and then provides a more in-depth look at the efforts of specific reference publishers in the e-reference arena: Oxford, Facts On File, World Book, Sage, H. W. Wilson, Marquis Who’s Who, ABC-CLIO, and Greenwood. (Notable omissions: Gale, CQ Press. Did they turn down requests for interviews on the subject, or did LJ deliberately ignore them?) It appears that virtually every major publisher is now building its own platforms for delivering e-content, rather than letting Thomson Gale or Ebsco deliver its content for a fee. As I read these interviews with various executives, I still sense a lot of denial about the appeal and threat and promise of less-traditional online sites, whether those are hugely popular places like Wikipedia or smaller, more narrowly focused sites. Also on display is the continuing tension between librarians, who are balking at the high price of the online offerings of traditional publishers, and the publishers themselves, who are adamant that the high prices are necessary to justify the enormous technological investments required–and to offset declining print sales. (Yes, one executive actually says that her company has priced its online products at a high level because librarians are buying fewer of their books. Does anyone else find that attitude a little strange? Wouldn’t that be like Ford pricing a new sedan $5,000 higher than the marketplace warrants because sales of the Taurus are declining?)
A new wiki-tool has launched, Scholarpedia. As the name suggests, and as the owners of the site make clear, it’s an attempt to develop a Wikipedia-like site, but with crucial differences: only scholars are invited to write, each article is peer-reviewed, and scholars have control and responsibility of their own articles after publication. Right now, the main thrust of the encyclopedia is in the areas of technology, mathematics, and neuroscience. In other words, it will offer highly technical articles aimed at a highly technical audience. Thus, it will hardly get Wikipedia-like use. Nonetheless, the effort and the tool itself are quite interesting and worth commenting on. First, this is yet another free scholarly encyclopedia offering, similar to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy now apparently housed at the University of Tennessee at Martin. It seems there is a trend for scholars to produce free, online encyclopedias for a scholarly audience. What does that mean for traditional scholarly encyclopedia publishers? Nothing good, I would suspect. Second, the tool itself is, of course, very cool. It makes a great use of the wiki technology and avoids the pitfalls of Wikipedia. As we launch our own content initiatives in 2007, you can bet we’ll be paying attention to these developments, as we try to carve out a viable, useful niche in the information marketplace.
Lee and Brenda Lerner, our friends at Lerner & Lerner, checked in from another whirlwind trip (London, Dublin, Egypt, and now on to Moscow, Paris, London, and Scotland) to say hello. It sounds like they saw some great sights in Egypt, and were lucky enough to get private tours of some of the ancient monuments. He wrote this:
We were both surprised, however, at our strong claustrophobic feelings inside the great pyramids. For the Khafre pyramid one descends a shaft 4 ft by 4 ft for 100 meters at 30 degree angle. You obviously can not stand. They have wooden planking on floor and so you bend over and sort of scoot and spider walk. At some point you must force yourself to keep going down. After 100 m there is a chamber you can stand and then another small shaft for 50 m at 30 degrees upwards to burial chamber. Italian Egyptologist Giovanni Belzoni left his mark on the wall there in 1818. The air is as stale and dank — you struggle to breathe. Not death defying — but some psychological challenge.
Lee also made a very interesting comment to my posting from August 29 (”Ernesto Bids Us Adieu“). He offers smart insights into the difficulties of the print reference business, the whims of critics, and the need to diversify for small producers like Lerner & Lerner and Schlager Group. Here’s hoping that Lee and Brenda start a blog at some point.
Earlier this week various companies announced a new product offering called “SuiteTwo.” Despite the odd name, I’m actually quite excited about this service. What it will do is offer small businesses an integrated suite of online tools: a blogging platform provided by MovableType; a wiki platform provided by SocialText; an RSS aggregator provided by NewsGator; and RSS syndication featured by SimpleFeed. It may all sound like a lot of techno mumbo-jumbo. But for a business like ours, which is tiny and struggles to incorporate these new kinds of Internet tools (they’re referred to as “Web 2.0″ tools) into our daily lives, it is potentially a big deal. The blogging feature, for instance, promises to be far richer and more powerful than our current blogging tool. (Among other frustrations, I cannot track the number of readers of this blog. Not that there are very many. But the principle is important.) Being able to adopt wiki technology would be completely new for us, as would the ability to think more seriously about adding RSS syndication to some of our content/projects. We’re actually giving a lot of thought these days to how we can overhaul and streamline our existing project work with some of these and similar tools, and to how we can incorporate them into upcoming efforts to create some of our own proprietary content. In any event, SuiteTwo sounds very promising, and I look forward to its roll-out.
Information Today has another article on Wikipedia battles. In the latest go-round, a longtime Wikipedia critic has found more instances of plagiarism. Also, apparently some hackers did some damage, infecting the site with a worm that generated tons of spam for users.
Speaking of spam, we’ve been inundated by it ourselves in the past few months. We have finally found some relief with a new software program that is drastically reducing our spam levels, not to mention providing better security against those aforementioned worms. (This, after one of our computers was waylaid by a worm last week.)
Encyclopedia Britannica has started a blog, and among the roster of employees who are posting to it is our friend and colleague Michael Levy, who contributed to the World Encyclopedia of Political Systems and Parties. In keeping with his background in political science, Michael’s early posts are related to politics. However, like all of the posters, he is free to write about anything he likes. Take a look.