Library Journal has released its annual list of best reference sources. This particular list has the great advantage of including both print and electronic-only resources. (Of course, these days, nearly all of the print titles are also available online.) Among the highlights for me are Cambridge’s Historical Stastitics of the United States, which I would love to own if only it weren’t for that $990 price tag; Macmillan’s Encyclopedia of India; and Mideastwire.com, which I am not too familiar with but which looks like a wonderfully useful information tool–the kind any of us in this business would love to produce. You can see the full list here.
I’m linking here to an interesting and thought-provoking article about the Seattle Central Library, the Rem Koolhaas-designed building in downtown Seattle. The author makes some good points about how the design of the building’s spaces impacts the user experience of the library’s patrons. He also touches on the issue of whether new, modern libraries like Seattle Central are shortchanging the basic needs of their patrons in their zeal to focus on their high-tech electronic aspects. We certainly want our modern libraries to facilitate electronic research, but don’t they also need to remain conducive to basic reading, studying, and contemplation?
The Toronto Globe and Mail has an article about the bidders for the Thomson Learning division. No surprise: the bidders are all private equity firms. Apparently a decision is expected by the end of June.
The Financial Times is reporting today that the German media giant Bertelsmann, which among other companies owns Random House, is considering making a bid for Thomson Learning. If it does bid, it will do so in partnership with 3 other private equity companies. I still wouldn’t expect there to be many changes at the individual Thomson Learning companies (e.g. Gale), even if it’s Bertelsmann that wins the bidding. But that’s just a guess. The FT is a subscription site, but here is a link to a similar article about the bid on MSNBC.
Check out this blog post by Jenny Levine (the Shifted Librarian) from the in-progress CIC Library Conference. (CIC stands for the Committee on Institutional Cooperation; it’s essentially a consortium of the Big Ten universities plus a couple of others, e.g. the University of Chicago, thrown in for good measure. At least on the library side, I believe the consortium acts as a single purchaser of library materials, at least in some instances.) The title of the panel was “The Agile Organization: Looking to the Future,” and it included some colleagues and friends. One was Frank Menchaca of Thomson Gale, whom I first met as part of our work on the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives (Frank used to be the publisher of the Charles Scribner’s Sons imprint at TG before moving on to bigger things). Another was Chris McKenzie, a former colleague of mine at Gale and a good friend to boot who is now at John Wiley & Sons. The third speaker was Stephen Rhind-Tutt, one of the founders and currently the CEO of Alexander Street Press. You can see from J. Levine’s blog post that the topic of discussion was germane to everything we do at Schlager Group and that it got to the heart of the challenges and opportunities facing the information industry, and in that I include both publishers and librarians. Menchaca talked about how Gale is dealing with the challenges: experimenting with placing some of its content on the open Web, making some metadata available to search engines like Google, and requiring its staff (including content editors) to communicate much more heavily with students, teachers, and librarians than they have in the past. McKenzie discussed the issues facing college textbooks. Rhind-Tutt explained Alexander Street’s publishing approach, which includes not trying to compete with other publishers but rather to offer unique, fresh, original content that is heavily indexed and linked as much as possible to other sources.
And I can’t help but be amazed: This panel finished speaking perhaps 90 minutes ago.
I’m including a link here to a blog posting by Karen G. Schneider at the ALA TechSource Blog. It’s pretty scorching, and I think all of us who work on the publishing side of the library marketplace equation should read it and understand just how much debate and soul-searching is going on among librarians about the digitization projects underway by Google and others. I think she makes many valid points, and I continue to fear for the future of libraries in our society, just as do many librarians. If libraries as we know them cease to exist, then so will a company like ours–unless we can find a way to succeed in the digitial universe dominated by Google, Microsoft, Thomson, and others. Our challenge is to find a way–using all the flexibility and nimbleness that a little company like ours has at its disposal–to carve out a sustainable niche in an information industry buffeted by enormous change. My hope is that libraries will continue to be a huge portion of that niche.
A blog that I enjoy reading, PersonaNonData, has a couple of recent postings about the Google Book Search program. I thought it was a good time to link to these in light of the public scolding Microsoft gave to Google earlier this week about the latter’s cavalier approach to copyright. Of course, Microsoft has a vested interest in doing whatever it can to promote itself at the expense of Google. Nonetheless, there is truth to its arguments about Google, as many publishers will attest.
One of the aforementioned posts discusses the results of the Google program so far; apparently, there is some question about the quality of the OCR scans that are at the heart of the program. The second post sheds some light on the dubious claims by Google about how many books are under copyright but out of print and thus neglected; Google claims the number is nearly 30 million, while other assessments indicate it may be closer to 5 million.