The AcqWeblog Archives

Contents of News

	Weblog
	Weblog Archives
	Conference Announcements
	New Publishers

: a particularly useful site for Acquisitions and Collection Development

October 30, 2000

• Ejournals, from National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM), links to a variety of electronic journal Web resources.

  AcqWeb Site: Library Science : Hot Topics : Electronic Publishing

October 29, 2000

• PRESS RELEASE: Swets Blackwell acquires Munksgaard Direct: "The agreement is effective from October 2000, and will result in Swets Blackwell becoming Denmark's leading agent within the business of subscription, database and electronic information services."

• AcqWeb's Verification In Print Listings just had a major growth spurt, thanks in some measure to another excellent article from Free Pint. If you haven't seen Free Pint, do be sure to take a look. It's a librarian's treasure trove.
  • For China:
    • BOL Ltd Hong Kong
  • For Denmark:
    • BOL i Danmark
    • BogGuide
  • For Finland:
    • bol.com Suomi
  • For Malaysia:
    • BOL Ltd Malaysia
  • For Norway:
    • BOL i Norge
  • For Singapore:
    • BOL Ltd Singapore
  • For Spain:
    • BOL Ibérica S.A.
  • For Sweden:
    • BOL i Sverige
  • For Switzerland:
    • booknet.ch
    • BOL Schweiz AG
    • Lesen.ch

  AcqWeb Sites: Verification : In Print Listings

October 15, 2000

• Two new reference resources:
  • Multilingual Glossary by Marta Davis of Rutgers University Libraries. This brief list of terms commonly used in libraries is "designed to serve international students and scholars who come to use libraries in American universities and colleges for the first time."
  • QuoteWorld.org: on the theory that one can never have too many quotation resources, here is another that searches by person, title, quote or exact word.

  AcqWeb Sites: Reference :
  Library Glossaries and Quotation Sites

September 24, 2000

• Foreignword.com is a resource for translators, linking to over a hundred dictionaries and 19 machine translation systems. As rare book "Web agents" are to antiquarian book catalogs on the Web, so this is to translation and dictionary Web sites. You enter the two languages and it chooses a Web resource to match your linguistic needs. It's the work of Stephan Böhmig, a computer scientist with a natural language processing background, and Alberto Fontaneda, a translator and linguist who worked on machine translation for the European Community.

  AcqWeb Site: Reference : Multilingual Resources

September 23, 2000

• Tool Kit for the Expert Web Searcher is an excellent pithy guide to Web search tools, courtesy of ALA's Library and Information Technology Association (LITA). It's by Pat Ensor (chair of LITA's Top Technology Trends Committee) who searches the Web daily. As well as the common search types, it covers areas such as "Multimedia Searching" and "The Invisible Web."

  AcqWeb Site: Search Guide

• PRESS RELEASE: New On-line Library and Information Services: Research Register. This is one of several new Internet Research Registers from MCB University Press.

September 18, 2000

• PRESS RELEASE: netLibrary and Fatbrain.com Form eBook Alliance.

September 17, 2000

• Can e-books improve libraries? by Chris Rippel of the Central Kansas Library System, is good introduction to e-books, folding in possibilities and concerns for libraries. It is substantive enough to have been added to the highly selective list of resources indexed by LibraryLand.

  AcqWeb Site: Library Science : Hot Topics : Electronic Publishing

September 16, 2000

• The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. This is a new book by André Schiffrin from "radical publisher" Verso. Schiffrin was head of Pantheon for many years and writes a column on publishing for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

• If you haven't seen ibiblio.org - the Public's Library, check it out. You're bound to find something enjoyable. It describes itself as "the ultimate collection of freely available information, the future of Internet librarianship, and a collaboration between the former MetaLab.unc.edu [University of North Carolina] and the Red Hat Center for Development." As well as literature, it includes software, music, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies.

  AcqWeb Site: Verification : Web Collections

September 14, 2000

• PRESS RELEASE: Swets Blackwell and ScienceDirect announce linking agreement

September 10, 2000

• bibliophile.net is a new addition to our evolving list of terrific Web resources for out-of-print and rare books. Their home office is in Zürich, but their inventory is international, currently listing over two million rare and used books. Their interface is quite international too, with a choice of 5 languages: English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. The site is best viewed at a width of at least 1024 pixels.

  AcqWeb Site: Verification : Antiquarian Agents

September 8, 2000

• AcqWeb's Search Engine is working again.

September 7, 2000

• ISBN.nu : Online Bookstore Price Compare or Search is one of many projects by Glenn Fleishman, "Unsolicited Pundit." It compares the inventory of nine U.S. and Canadian Web bookstores. Of particular interest to us library-types is his example of a well-structured page about a book. When do you suppose we will have access to compact information of this quality?

  AcqWeb Site: Verification : In Print Listings :
  United States

September 5, 2000

• AcqWeb's Directory of Publishers & Vendors was updated yesterday. This time we have 331 new links. Many thanks go to Cinthya Boeriu of UCLA Biomedical Library for supplying an enormous number of useful links, plus, as always, Cindy Hepfer, David Marshall, Ann Denton and all others who sent in suggestions.

  AcqWeb Site: Directory of Publishers & Vendors

September 4, 2000

• Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga says it is the first Russian Web bookstore. As well as books, it lists newspapers, magazines and CD-ROMs from Russia and the CIS countries. Thanks to David Marshall for this find.

  AcqWeb Site: Verification : In Print

• Kluwer Alert is a free email notification service from Kluwer Academic Publishers, Kluwer Law International and Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers. It allows you to limit by subject, by journal or book series.

  AcqWeb Site: Publishers : New Title Notifications

September 3, 2000

• RatingZone is one of the new breed of automated readers' advisory services. As well as books, it predicts music and movies that users will like, based on their ranking of roughly 35 titles. It takes about 10 minutes and requires registration, but we found it to be quite accurate.

  AcqWeb Site: Library Science :
  Collection Development : Book Reviews

September 2, 2000

• Create Change is "a resource for faculty and librarian action to reclaim scholarly communication." Jointly sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries (a division of the American Library Association), and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), it is "a response to the serious crisis in scholarly communication," in particular its increasing commercialization and the very steep rise in journal costs.

  AcqWeb Site: Library Science : Hot Topics : Scholarly Communication

• Book Hunter Press now includes a searchable database of used book dealers in the United States and Canada. Currently it has 7,900 entries and is updated continuously.

  AcqWeb Site: Publishers & Vendors : Subject Directory : Rare and Antiquarian

• JustBooks UK Ltd. is a European Web agent for antiquarian, rare and used books, with a German as well as English web site.

  AcqWeb Site: Verification : Antiquarian Agents

September 1, 2000

• Life in the fast lane.... AcqWeb continues to bump through the server/URL switch. The latest two challenges: the contact form stopped working and our search engine doesn't think we exist any more. The former is fixed (thanks again to Vanderbilt Library Systems), and we have high hopes the latter will be back in working order shortly. Meanwhile, to speak the latest busino-babble, "Thanks for your patience." (This is often said to us by customer service types when we have a scowl worthy of Henry VIII etched on our face. We can only wonder.) Meanwhile....

• Create An Acquisitions List From An Innopac Review File Using PERL is a must-see for Innovative Interfaces users. It's the home of "Acq.pl," a Perl script written by Xiaowen Huang of Vector Research Inc. and Yuan Yao of Georgetown University Law Library, which generates new title lists. Quite a number of law libraries, including Yale and Capital University are putting this script to good use.

  AcqWeb Site: Library Science : Acquisitions Sites

• A couple of new verification sites:
  • Booksense.com is a virtual consortium of U.S. independent-bookseller websites. It's an interesting concept. You key in your zip code, and it finds a bookstore close to you. Even more interesting is its Director, Len Vlahos, who "after touring with his rock band Woofing Cookies, ... settled down to the world of books. He now pines for those subdued days of rock-and-roll."
  • Amazon.fr: the ubiquitous Amazon now has a French store.

  AcqWeb Site: Verification : In Print Listings

• Tom the Dancing Bug, the comic by Ruben Bolling from Salon, details how "Library System Terrorizes Publishing Industry." It features such noteworthies as Melville Dewey, "a plucky 149 year old" and a "panicked publishing industry."

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