The Distant Librarian

SirsiDynix developing an iPhone app

This isn't brand new news, but I was reminded of it today.  SirsiDynix is holding a contest to name their new iPhone app (to be released sometime in 2010 - no other date given). From the contest page:

SirsiDynix is excited to announce an iPhone application that will be available in 2010. The app will give iPhone users information and catalog access to libraries using Symphony. We need your help deciding what to name it.
If we choose your entry, you will win an iPod Touch!
The SirsiDynix iPhone app will offer quick access to your library catalog with a simple discovery interface

• Users find your library through GPS or on a global map
• Patrons can search their library's catalog, place holds, and view a list of their own checked out items
• Libraries can configure the set of available physical library locations and the policies tied to those locations, the library URL, and an image for each library

Any library staff member is eligible to submit up to five possible names. Help us get the word out - send this page to coworkers and peers.

To enter, fill out the form below before November 25, 2009. The winner will be announced in December.

Politician suggests Public Library should drop p-books in favour of e-books to save money

From TeleRead comes the story of a politician with an interesting idea, but who hasn't explored the economics of ebook publishing.  E-books for libraries pushed by economy-minded Los Angeles councilman.

Cory Doctorow kicks off a unique publishing experiment--and a monthly PW column

Cory Doctorow's trying to run an experiment to prove once and for all that giving a book away while simultaneously offering it for sale will realize more money for the author than simply selling the book in traditional formats.  There's quite a bit more to it than that, but that's the gist I picked up from his inaugural column on the Publisher's Weekly website.  Frustratingly, at this moment there's no separate RSS feed for Cory's column :-(

More about the column:

Read Cory Doctorow's Column Monthly in 'PW'

With the digital revolution well underway, these are interesting—and sometimes uneasy—times for the publishing world. So we are especially delighted to announce that Cory Doctorow—bestselling author, Boing Boing blogger and one of the world's most forward-thinking culturists—will be a monthly columnist for PW. Cory's column, With a Little Help, will run in the first issue of each month and will be freely available online on the PW site. In the column, Cory will detail his specific experiences with his latest self-publishing effort, as well as his broader thoughts on the issues he—and many of you—are facing in the new publishing economy.

At this year's inaugural Tools of Change conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Cory made waves with his presentation (referring to advocates of DRM as "the real pirates")—and we expect he'll make some waves here, too. We know you'll find Cory to be at once entertaining, thought provoking and challenging as well. We realize what might work for Cory may not work for you. But we're certain that the insights he'll deliver will help you think more deeply about your books, your business—and your future.

(btw, there's another guy who's experimenting along the same lines)

Books of enduring scholarly value

I found a link to this video on the TeleRead blog.  It's a 4:00 overview of how Cambridge University Press and Cambridge University Library are partnering to both bring back OOS press titles and to digitize library titles in a print-on-demand operation.  Nothing we haven't seen before, but a nice look into how some are working even w/o Google.

When is a book alive, and what if you have the dead version?

My head's spinning a little right now.  Just had a visit from someone in our DocDel dept. who was trying to track down a chapter from the 2nd revised edition of Encyclopedia of Biopharmaceutical Statistics, which our catalogue says we have through Ebrary.  Except that the cited chapter had a publication date of 2006, while the 2nd revised edition Ebrary has is 2003, the original publication date.  Odd.

A Google search on the chapter title leads to a page on Informaworld, but has a publication date of 15 August, 2006.  backtracking to the main page for the publication shows an Original Publication Date of 23 April, 2003, but a Last Updated date of 23 April 2007.  And there's a tab at the top leading to Recent Updates, which means this book is not a static title, but a dynamically-updated one. 

On the one hand I love this idea, this is how to keep things up to date.  On the other hand, we purchased this title from Ebrary, not Informaworld, and as a result we have the dead version of the book, and thus no way to access the chapter requested by our patron!

This is the first time I've run across this - is it more common than I realize?  I wonder if the Informaworld version was more expensive than the Ebrary version we bought?

After Losing Users in Catalogs, Libraries Find Better Search Software

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about next-generation catalogues.  While the article provides a pretty good background of the issue (IMHO), the comments provide an excellent summary of librarian psychology.  What's only touched upon briefly in the article is the ability for these new "web-scale index searching" tools to search so much more than traditional bibliographic data.  As I mentioned in last week's LJ webcast, at the University of Calgary we want to expose students to the collections of not only our library, but also our museum, archives, and locally digitized material, none of which appear in a traditional OPAC. 

Read those comments.  Where do you fall in your thinking?

Putting your money where your mouth is

Last week I wrote about indie publishing innovator MCM's challenge to TV viewers in the US to watch the US premiere of his cartoon, Rollbots.  Well the results are in, and it looks like he'll be donating nearly $10,000 to the EFF!!! In addition, and perhaps even more significant, he'll be relinquishing all copyright claims on his next book, Typhoon, by releasing it under a Creative Commons 0 license, which I hadn't heard of until this challenge.

CC0 enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright-protected content to waive copyright interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright.

In contrast to CC's licenses that allow copyright holders to choose from a range of permissions while retaining their copyright, CC0 empowers yet another choice altogether – the choice to opt out of copyright and the exclusive rights it automatically grants to creators – the "no rights reserved" alternative to our licenses.

This is from a small-time guy who makes almost all his income from his writing projects.  If that's not putting your money where your mouth is, I don't know what is.  I know I'll be buying Typhoon (The Vector was excellent!)

Support a publishing innovator by watching TV

I've mentioned MCM before.  He's the author of The Pig and the Box, and a true innovator in the world of independent publishing.  I've been fascinated reading his blog posts over the past year as he explores one interesting idea after another for publishing via crowd sourcing, PDF, print, epub, donations, sponsorship, releasing work under Creative Commons, etc.

And now's he's back for season two of his excellent cartoon, Rollbots.  Rollbots has been available in Canada for about a year (viewing season), and now it's about to debut in the US on Saturdays at 8 AM on CW4Kids.

So what?  You don't watch cartoons?  But check out what will happen if you do!  If enough of you watch it, MCM will donate nearly $10,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  Go read the post, and watch the cartoon on Saturday, it's for a good cause!

BTW, this is not a sponsored post; I love the guy's work, and really enjoy the cartoon too!

Tune In September 2: The Google Book Scanning Project--Issues and Updates

Educause Live presents:
Topic: The Google Book Scanning Project—Issues and Updates
Date: September 2, 2009
Time: 1:00 p.m. EDT (12:00 p.m. CDT, 11:00 a.m. MDT, 10:00 a.m. PDT). International participants: You may wish to visit this external time-conversion website to calculate the start time in your time zone.
Duration: 1 hour

For about five years, Google has been scanning and indexing millions of volumes drawn from academic libraries and other sources worldwide. The project has been greeted with high praise but also with lawsuits. In the latter category, a judge will shortly decide whether to approve a settlement reached last year by Google and several organizations representing authors and publishers. The issues swirling around the settlement include the treatment of absent rightsholders, user privacy, and competition. This session will offer a status report on the project and explore both sides of these questions.

The event is free, but registration is required and virtual seating is limited. REGISTER NOW.

Participants:
Jonathan Band, Counsel, Library Copyright Alliance
Dan Clancy, Engineering Director, Google Book Search

Post-holiday link dump

Some miscellaneous links you may find of interest:

• Co-Browsing Tools: Guide To The Best Online Services
• Five Best Video-Sharing Sites
• Newswire Opinion: Libraries Clash with Harvard Business Publishing on Deep-Linking
• The undiscussed danger to libraries in the Google Books Settlement: A warning from library law expert Peter Hirtle
• Sony to link Readers with libraries, allow e-book borrowing
• Facebook Privacy Update: Here’s What’s Changing

iPhone apps for textbooks and another library catalogue

Yesterday brought two interesting iPhone apps to my attention.  The first is iUSask, the University of Saskatchewan iPhone application, which includes a category for searching the OPAC.  This is touted as "the first iPhone application of its kind in Canada for University Students."  I played with is a bit yesterday and unfortunately wasn't very impressed.  The campus map was VERY slow to resize, and I couldn't tell if my iPhone had frozen, or if it was still just chugging away.  Of course it's the OPAC we really care about, and while it worked just fine, it was very difficult to read; small white text on a black background (unlike what's shown in the demo on the site).  Hopefully this is just a starting point for them.

The second is CourseSmart, an application for reading textbooks on the iPhone/iPod Touch.  Here's some background on the provenance of the product: CourseSmart takes on Kindle, puts textbooks on iPhone. I signed up for a student account and looked around a bit.  You'll have the choice to buy an Online Version OR a Downloadable Version; I believe you must choose the Online Version in order to be able to access the content from the iPhone application.  They do offer a pop-up explaining most of the differences between the two options.

Interesting model in that you don't get to own the textbook; they all have a subscription model for either a 180 day subscription (most common) or a 360 day subscription.  There are a few sample textbooks available when you download the app, and I don't think I like them.  On the one hand, it's nice to be able to see the same pages you'd see in the print version, with sidebars and images and such, but on the other hand, there's so little real estate on the screen these extras make the text much harder to read.  Another minor problem is that you can't purchase textbooks from the app; you have to do that from the website.  Pretty minor as students would likely buy a few at the beginning of the year and be done with that, but still.

They've covered themselves in their TOS with what I'm dubbing "The Kindle clause":

From time to time CourseSmart may move, delete or update material on the CourseSmart Site and you agree to periodically check that your links and any Licensed Material are current and promptly remove or update any link that is broken or incorrect or any Licensed Material that has been deleted or is out of date. CourseSmart reserves the right in its sole discretion to revoke these licenses at any time for any reason, and if you are so notified, you agree to immediately remove all links to the CourseSmart Site and all Licensed Material from the Instructor Website. You agree not to not use or display the links or the Licensed Material with any other material that could be viewed as disparaging the CourseSmart eTextbook or its author or publisher or otherwise casting the CourseSmart eTextbook or its author or publisher in a negative light.

So a couple of starts, with room for improvement.  Speaking of which, I'm now off to revisit SafariBooksOnline to see if there's been any improvement there from the library POV.

RenewBot vs Library Elf

Fight!  (I looked, but couldn't find a picture of a robot fighting an elf)  I just discovered RenewBot, which will automatically renew your library books X # of days before they come due, where X is set by you.  First two months are free, then if you want to continue it'll cost $2.99 per year for each library card you run through the system.  How many days would your book have to be overdue to pay for that?!?  I was impressed at how quickly they added Calgary Public Library and the University of Calgary to their system after I requested those additions (less than 24 hours).  Turns out RenewBot also does pretty much everything my longtime fav Library Elf does too; after logging in you can see which books are checked out on that card, and which holds are still in the queue.  Here's the RenewBot privacy policy, and here's the policy for Library Elf.

Many libraries are lending Kindles

While we wait to see if BYU will reinstate their Kindle lending program, take a look at the list of libraries that are still lending them put together by iReaderreview.  I's not just a list; there's a fair bit of supporting content in the post.

Kindle, Libraries

BYU suspends Kindle program over legal concerns

Sometimes it's a problem pushing the envelope - seems that the BYU Library initiative to use Kindles instead of getting books via ILL has been suspended after "some buzz on library-related blogs for breaking ground in the uncertain area of lending books on the Kindle." 

"We are playing it safe," Layton said. "Two people here said we have verbal permission. But if we don't have it in writing, that's a different thing. We don't want to do anything that Amazon doesn't completely agree with."

Everyone in the comments seems to be in favour of the initiative.  Hope this forces Amazon to acquiesce!

Ready to try Summon? Go ahead!

Dartmouth, one of the first two (I think) libraries to sign on as beta partners with Serials Solutions' Summon Unified Discovery Service, has opened the beta up to its entire campus community.  And you can search it too!  You'll find a prominent link on their home page, or you can jump directly to the search page.  A brief overview of the product for their users is also available.

So whattya think?  About the speed, relevancy, accuracy, or in general?  The University of Calgary is also a beta partner with this product; we've recently had our MARC records loaded, and are awaiting the inclusion of metadata from some of our other local collections before opening it more widely to our clientele.

Summon, Discovery