Minnesota Press & Amazon revive out of print books

http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/11/7572n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medi
(user name: rulibrary ; password: ru2007)

Wednesday, November 19, 2008
University Press, With Amazon, Revives and Sells Out-of-Print Books
By JENNIFER HOWARD
Like homesteaders sitting on land with untapped oil reserves, many university presses possess a rich but underused resource: out-of-print titles. The challenge has been how best to drill into that resource—how to let readers know about books that have been out of print for years or decades, and then make it easy for them to buy a copy.
Many presses have been testing out print-on-demand and other ways of delivering old books to new readers. On Thursday, the University of Minnesota Press will formally announce a new program to put almost every book it has ever published back in print and make them readily available. The program, Minnesota Archive Editions, comes out of a partnership with Amazon.com, Google, and the Minneapolis-based company BookMobile, and is notable for its scope and how it outsources much of the heavy lifting to commercial partners.
Under the arrangement, Amazon has agreed to digitize the files of the press's out-of-print books; the full texts will be browsable using Google Book Search. If a reader comes across one online and likes what he sees, he can click through to Amazon.com and order a copy to be printed and shipped to him using Amazon's BookSurge publishing program. Or he can click over to the press's Web site and place an order, which Minnesota's distributor, the Chicago Distribution Center, will forward to BookMobile for printing and delivery. That option may be more appealing to library and bookstore clients who have specific warehousing and distribution accounts.
Either way suits the press just fine, says its director, Douglas Armato. The point is to get as many books as possible out there, and at very little cost to the press. It paid no money upfront to Amazon; the online book seller will recoup the cost of digitizing as copies are sold.
About 660 books are already available through the program, and Mr. Armato expects that number to reach a thousand. From the press's perspective, the hardest part has been researching the rights to everything it has published since it opened its doors in 1925. Contracts had to be unearthed, and living authors or heirs had to be contacted and informed about the plan. "It has familiarized us in a remarkable way with our backlist," Mr. Armato said. "It really amounted to an archaeological dig."
Most authors have been happy to hear that their work will be back in print, he said, but "they do have questions"—most involving what kinds of royalties might be involved.
That, of course, depends on sales and on the original contracts. Mr. Armato isn't expecting Minnesota Archive Editions to leave the press's coffers overflowing, but he already has evidence that a market exists for at least some of those books.
Without any publicity, the program has already generated sales through Amazon: about 200 units so far, with the highest concentrations in history and philosophy, where a classic is perhaps more likely to remain a classic than in more newfangled fields. A modest Minnesota Archive Editions best seller has even emerged: Essays in Ancient Philosophy, a 1987 collection by the late Michael Frede, who taught philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, has sold 12 copies.
The most surprising sale to date? One copy of a 1949 volume, Therapeutic Group Work With Children.
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

HeinOnline Wiki

The HeinOnline Wiki is HeinOnline's "Help Center" that contains various how-to's, FAQs, search examples, and more! The Wiki contains a dedicated page for specific HeinOnline Libraries that outlines how to navigate and understand the library, as well as how to search for a word, phrase or other term, and each page includes links to videos and training guides when applicable. In addition to library specific help pages, the Wiki also contains all HeinOnline User Guides which includes Quick Reference Guides, feature specific guides, searching guides, and more! It also provides links to each of the video tutorials that have been created for using HeinOnline.

The HeinOnline wiki is available at http://heinonline.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page or can be accessed from the Resources tab in any HeinOnline library.

New book on teaching Info Lit.

Off last week's display: 028.7 BUR

Great for those wanting to get an idea of what Info Lit is all about.

Tied to the ACRL IL Competency Standards for HE - with exercises

Reasons researchers really rate repositories

http://optimalscholarship.blogspot.com/2008/10/reasons-researchers-really-rate.html

Interesting article about weeding

Weeding: facing the fears by Eleonora Dubicki
Collection Building (2008) v 27 (4) p 132-135

http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/01604950810913689

Library Quarterly added to JSTOR

The Library Quarterly (Arts & Sciences VI)
Release Content:
Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 1932) – Vol. 72, No. 2 (April, 2002)
Moving Wall: 5 years
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISSN: 0024-2519

Since 1931, The Library Quarterly has maintained its commitment to scholarly research in all areas of librarianship–historical, sociological, cultural, evaluative, statistical, bibliographic, managerial, and educational. Through unique and innovative approaches, LQ seeks to publish research that provides insights into libraries and librarianship for the library, research, and other communities involved with the collection of, access to, and dissemination of information.

Visual Dictionary Online

How cool is this!
A dictionary with a new point of view
that catches the eye and enriches the mind.
20,000 terms with contextual definitions,developed by terminology experts;
6,000 full-color images of a wide variety of objectsfrom all aspects of life

See: http://visual.merriam-webster.com/society/education/library.php for a library pic!

Blogs by college and academic librarians

http://www.academicblogs.org/wiki/index.php/University_Librarians

Blogs by college and academic librarians

The plausibility of computing the h-index of scholarly productivity and impact using reference-enhanced databases

I have linked up 4 references to articles by Peter Jacso, that focus on the pros and cons of the three largest cited-reference-enhanced databases (Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science) for determining the h-index.

You can access them in the "h-index" folder on RefShare at the url below:
http://www.refworks.com/refshare/?site=037931147244400000/RWWS1A1306351/h-index

Boxes for books!

'BOOK NERD' BUILDS BOXES FOR BROWN'S RAREST VOLUMES:

At Brown U.'s library, one staff member busies herself with making boxes -- beautifully wrought, one-of-a-kind boxes -- to protect the books in storage.

user name: ru library
password: ru2007

SETTLEMENT REACHED IN GOOGLE BOOK-SCANNING LAWSUIT:

Under the terms of the deal, Google will pay $125-million to establish a Book
Rights Registry, to compensate authors and publishers whose
copyrighted books have already been scanned, and to cover legal
costs.

New RUL webpage Subject Guide link

You may have noticed the new Subject Guides link under Resources on the Library webpage This replaces the previous link which was a sub-link under Databases.

The new link presently leads to our old Subject Gateways. The links are gradually being replaced with links to our new (LibGuide) Subject Guides. As they are linked Anne Moon is marking them with a "NEW' icon. Once all the Subject Guides are completed we will change the link to lead to the new Subject Guide page where users will be able to select their subject/tag from the main page.

SAOUG Conference 2008

I have attached the PDF version of a conference report that appeared in vol. 25 no. 6 of Library Hi Tech News.

You can access it in the RefShare SAOUG_Conference-2008 folder at: http://www.refworks.com/refshare?site=037931147244400000/RWWS1A1306351/SAOUG_Conference-2008


ABSTRACT:

The purpose of this paper is to report on papers presented at the ninth annual Southern African online user group conference on 3-5 June 2008 in Pretoria.

The focus was very much on the changes facing librarians daily, changes in users as well as in technology. This was addressed in subthemes such as the Google generation, news alerting services, institutional repositories and end-user training.

The new research information management system (RIMS) was also discussed.

Zotero versus RefWorks

The little I could find about Zotero on the Web was pretty uncomplimentary ...

See, for example, the below:

Zotero Bibliographic Software at MIT: MIT Libraries
"There are still some kinks to be worked out of the software, so you may not want to use Zotero for writing your thesis or for creating complex bibliographies..."
http://libraries.mit.edu/help/zotero/

MIT Libraries uses Zotero in addition to RefWorks and EndNote - They've created a very informative table comparing Zotero with RefWorks and EndNote. It can be accessed at: http://libraries.mit.edu/help/bibliography/comparison.html

I also found an FAQs page about this Firefox extension at: http://www.zotero.org/documentation/#faq_and_troubleshooting (Here it is confirmed that Zotero works only with Firefox).

E-Books on Rhodes RefShare Folder

Some recent references to e-books articles have been added to the RefShare Folder at the url below:
http://www.refworks.com/refshare?site=037931147244400000/RWWS1A1306351/E-Books


You should be able to access the shared E-books Folder from within your RefWorks account by following the steps below:

1. Go to the View menu in your Refworks account. (It is on the top horizontal menu bar).


2. You will see “RefWorks Shared Area” at the bottom of this drop-down menu. Click on this.


3. Now click on the hyperlink under “E-Books”. The references should now be displayed.

New Subject Guides (LibGuides)

The first 3 new Subject Guides (using our new LibGuides software) are now linked under
http://oldwww.ru.ac.za/library/electronic_resources/dept/

They are: Chemistry, Economics and Psychology

Are Blogs Here to Stay?

Are Blogs Here to Stay ? : An Examination of the Longevity and Currency of a Static List of Library and Information Science Weblogs

Kay Johnson

The chronological entries in Weblogs or blogs record musings, opinions, news or other information supplied by individuals or groups. The nature of blogs is ephemeral in that the content is closely tied to the time period of the posting. The author examines the library and information science blogs listed on Susan Herzog’s “BlogBib: Select Librarian/Library Blogs” to see if they were being updated thirteen months after Herzog stopped maintaining the Web site.1 Active, inactive, ceased, and blogs with changed URLs were recorded. Extra content was noted.

http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2008.06.009

Google and Hathi Trust - online books

A group of major universities has been quietly working for the past two years to build one of the largest online collections of books ever assembled, by pooling the millions of volumes that Google has scanned in its partnership with university libraries.
One of the most important functions of the project, say its leaders, who plan to unveil the giant library today, is to create a stable backup of the digital books should Google go bankrupt or lose interest in the book-searching business.

http://chronicle.com/free/2008/10/5061n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

The Changing face of document supply: The British Library

The British Library: the changing face of document supply
By Mat Pfleger, British Library, Bookham, UK

The environment for document supply is rapidly changing.
The paper below provides an insight into the current response of the largest document supplier in the world, the British Library, to this change.
The link to the article is :
emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/02641610810897836

YEARNING AFTER BOOKS

YEARNING AFTER BOOKS: Why are so many artists and writers
preoccupied by the so-called demise of bookish culture?
see article at: http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/10/2008101001c.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

......."The most eloquent reflection I have found on the future of books is Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night (2006), which strikes a balance between romanticism and realism, nostalgia and foresight. His reflections on books and technology emphasize complementarity rather than conflict: "The birth of a new technology need not mean the death of an earlier one: The invention of photography did not eliminate painting, it renewed it, and the screen and the codex can feed off each other and coexist amicably on the same reader's desk."
And, it may be that electronic technology is even more fragile than books. "There may come a new technique of collecting information next to which the Web will seem to us habitual and homely in its vastness," Manguel writes, "like the aged buildings that once lodged the national libraries in Paris and Buenos Aires, Beyrouth and Salamanca, London and Seoul."
We are pained by the change of familiar bookish institutions, but, before long, I expect we will begin to feel nostalgia for the microfilm and the CD-ROM and yearn for a time when the Internet was as fresh and young as our belief in its capacity to replace the printed book and the library."