up2date

TOC services

I've been using and recommending ticTOCs, but I think I've found an equally good and quite different Tables of Contents aggregator, again brought to us by the UK. Another recommendation from INFOdocket, written up by Gary Price in Search Engine Land, JournalTOCs covers "17,000 journals published by more than 900 publishers and organizations."

It's very easy to get an RSS feed to the publications you want (an important different to me from ticTOCs). However, the subject classification is even less granular, which makes it much harder to narrow down to a particular area of interest.

Transmedia

A very interesting article in (on?) Publishing Perspectives looking at Transmedia and publishing, a subject that intrigues me at the same time as I struggle to deal with it as a librarian and selector. I can't help but noticing that in the entire article preservation is never mentioned : Transmedia: A New World of Opportunity for Authors and Publishers.

Transmedia: A New World of Opportunity for Authors and Publishers

Harvard's Library Lab projects

From INFOdocket (I'm picking out the ones that intrigue me most -- see the full list on INFOdocket) :

Awesome Box
Interact with an amazing or useful item from the library and return it to the Awesome Box instead of the normal drop box. ... 

Connecting the Dots: Using EAC-CPF to Reunite Samuel Johnson and His Circle
A project between Harvard and Yale universities to demonstrate the benefits of using Encoded Archival Context ... to describe creators of manuscript collections and encode meaningful semantic links between those creators themselves and the primary sources that document their lives and work.

...

Enhance Catalog Searching with Geospatial Technology
A project to explore the opportunities that geo-referencing catalog data can provide to enhancing catalog searching.

...

 

http://infodocket.com/2011/12/08/cool-harvards-library-lab-adds-13-new-projects-to-roster/

Highlighting in GoogleBooks

Hope this comes to the Hathi trust soon. From INFOdocket (subsequently also saw post on the Google Books blog) :

INFOdocket

Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy

Colorful! Highlighting Comes to Google Books

Posted on December 8, 2011 by Gary D. Price

 

 

 

From the Inside Google Books Blog:

Starting today, you’ll also be able to break out the colored highlighters and pens with Google eBooks in the Web Reader.

To start adding notes, first open your web browser and find your Google eBooks in your My eBooks bookshelf (make sure you are signed into your account at the top right hand corner of your screen). If you don’t have any ebooks yet, you can start your collection with a free classic from Best of the Free bookshelf, or purchase an ebook from our eBookstore. Then, click on the book to open it in the Web Reader.

You should be able to select the text you want to comment on by dragging or double-clicking with your mouse. A context menu will appear, and you can then click on “Add Note”.

[Clip]

These new features are currently only enabled for ebooks available in “flowing text mode“, and highlights or notes can’t be added to ebook samples. We are also working hard on bringing these features to your mobile devices and eReaders, so stay tuned!

"A Literature Review: What Exactly Should We Preserve?..."

From INFOdocket :

New online via arXiv.

Title: A Literature Review: What Exactly Should We Preserve? How Scholars Address This Question and Where is the Gap

by Jyue Tyan Low

This review addresses the question of what exactly should we preserve, and how the digital preservation community and scholars address this question. The paper first introduces the much-abused-term “significant properties,” before revealing how some scholars are of the opinion that characteristics of digital objects to be preserved (i.e., significant properties) can be identified and should be expressed formally, while others are not of that opinion. The digital preservation community’s attempt to expound on the general characteristics of digital objects and significant properties will then be discussed. Finally, the review shows that while there may be ways to identify the technical makeup or general characteristics of a digital object, there is currently no formal and objective methodology to help stakeholders identify and decide what the significant properties of the objects are. This review thus helps open questions and generates a formative recommendation based on expert opinion that expressing an object’s functions in an explicit and formal way (using didactic guides from the archives community) could be the solution to help stakeholders decide what characteristics/ elements exactly we should preserve.

Direct to Full Text (15 pages; PDF)

"Redefining the Academic Library: Managing the Migration to Digital Information Services"

From INFOdocket :

Title: Redefining the Academic Library: Managing the Migration to Digital Information Services (51 pages/slides; PDF)

Source: Educational Advisory Board

Don Hawkins shares a summary of the report in this post on The Conference Circuit from Information Today.

Roy Tennant writes:

This is one of the single best sources for this kind of guidance I’ve seen in a long time, and I don’t say that merely because it draws upon the work of some of my colleagues at OCLC. If you work in an academic library, you need to read this, take it to heart, and act.

From INFOdocket :

From the IFLA Web Site:

The Entresse Library in Espoo, Finland and FAIFE (IFLA Committee on Freedom of Access to Information and Freedom of Expression) have together created the world’s first Banned Books video calendar. The project has garnered international attention and is considered pioneering in many ways.

...

The project’s participants include leading figures in the library world, who introduce their favourite banned books: IFLA President Ingrid Parent presents Timothy Findlay’s The Wars; Finnish IFLA President-Elect Sinikka Sipilä presents Mika Waltari’s The Egyptian; Kai Ekholm introduces Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Executive Director Jill Cousins of the Europeana Foundation expounds on James Joyce’s Ulysses. Other books include Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Boccaccio’s Decameron and Walt Disney’s Donald Duck.

Read the Full IFLA Post

Direct to Banned Books Video Calendar