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: a particularly useful site for Acquisitions and Collection Development

June 30, 2000

• Libraries: Checking Out in the Digital Age, by Doug Brown (Inter@ctive Week, June 26, 2000) is a surprisingly substantive article from an Internet industry weekly. It's about libraries in the digital age, with a particular focus on research libraries and copyright law.

• The Search Engine as Cyborg (Lisa Guernsey, New York Times, June 29, 2000). According to this article, human intervention is the latest strategy for designing effective Web search engines. Could they possibly be talking about classification? Is the light dawning for the rest of the world? The article includes a photo of and closing quote from well-known reference librarian Greg Notess.

• Search AcqWeb: At long last, we have a new and sophisticated search engine. We've been running on an ancient CGI script for several years, which while better than nothing, just wasn't up to current standards. Our new search engine is powered by UltraSeek run on a Vanderbilt University server. It can sort by date or relevance, plus has Boolean and other special searching capabilities. Many thanks to Jim Parker, Vanderbilt Webmaster, for giving us access to this.

  AcqWeb Site: Search Guide

• Seeking a Radical Change in the Role of Publishing. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the nine Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing agreed to by individuals from the Association of American Universities and the Association of Research Libraries. The principles include cost-containment for scholarly publishing, using electronic capabilities, archiving, increasing the speed of publication and shifting measures of faculty worth from quantity of publication to quality of publication.

• The Library as the Latest Web Venture. Today's New York Times looks at the intersection of dot-com-land and libraries -- in particular NetLibrary, Ebrary.com and Questia Media.

• Where have all the librarians gone?
  Answer: They've gone to dot coms, one by one -- at least according to Mary Lord of U.S.News & World Report. "As the Information Age roars into high gear, and as new studies have found a compelling link between academic achievement and strong school libraries, the keepers of America's repositories of knowledge are bailing out."

• Miss Charlotte Brown, Librarian, Goes Mad by Felix W. Jung. This is a must-see. We will say no more. Just go there if you have Flash.

  If you don't have Flash, you can download its player at no charge from Macromedia.

  AcqWeb Site: Library Science : Diversions

• 4 Giants Set to Embrace Electronic Publishing (Doreen Carvajal, New York Times) reports on the further forays of Time Warner, Simon & Schuster, Random House and Microsoft into e-books.

• Our Verification Tools: In Print Resources have had quite a boost thanks to the eagle eye of David Marshall. The Spanish and Portuguese listings in particular have expanded, in large part because of Submarino. The site describes itself as "the online retailer for the Spanish and Portuguese speaking communities in Latin America, Spain and Portugal, and the United States." It's essentially the Amazon.com for these portions of the world, with over 1,000,000 books, music, videos and other products.

  To be more precise, our additions include:

  • Argentina
    • Submarino Argentina
    • Cuspide Libros S.A.
  • Brazil
    • Saraiva
    • Siciliano
    • Submarino Brasil
  • Mexico
    • Submarino Mexico
  • Spain
    • Submarino

  AcqWeb Site: Verification : In Print Resources

• Depository Program Funding Cut strikes us as an important read for all U.S. librarians.

• Who Can Dig Digital Books? (Kendra Mayfield, Wired) explains the Penn - Oxford University Press Digital Books Project. The study aims to be a rigorous analysis of ebook usage. It "may also help librarians decide which options are best to deliver electronic books."

• ixquick.com is yet another fabulous search engine -- this one a meta-searcher which ranks the relevancy of web pages. We may be prejudiced, though, as a search for "AcqWeb" produced a delightfully overwhelming 12 stars.

  AcqWeb Site: Searching the Web :
  Meta-Search Engines

• One-Stop Guide to Online Etexts by Jorn Barger is an "etext finder" for monographs in particular.

  AcqWeb Site: Library Science : Hot Topics : Electronic Publishing

• Coming up for air in the midsts of moving our library staff (for building renovation), we happened across: Measuring the Value of a Good Used Book, by Michelle Slatella. It's from last Thursday's New York Times, so it will probably only be available for a couple more days. We still thought it worth a mention because it's not yet another newspaper article about ebooks (we tire of ebook rants and raves), but rather a chatty comparison of Alibris and BookFinder.com. We hope the author finds another favorite of ours: AddALL.

• Raging Search is a new Google-style search engine from AltaVista. It comes highly recommended from the current (5/5/00) Scout Report. We like it because it not only is simple and customizable -- it also doesn't use cookies.

  AcqWeb Site: Searching the Web

• David Marshall and Barbara Karpel have done it again! AcqWeb's Publisher Email Address Directory has just been updated. It has gone up another 162 entries, for a grand total of 4971.

  AcqWeb Site: Publishers : Email Directory

Until next time, wishing you all a pleasant cyber-day,