The AcqWeblog Archives

Contents of News

	Weblog
	Weblog Archives
	Conference Announcements
	New Publishers

: a particularly useful site for Acquisitions and Collection Development

Web Sites for Literate Teenagers, including two online book reviews, are discussed in the current Book magazine (July/Aug, 1999, page 37). Favorite Teenage Angst Books offers the "heart, humor, and ... careful eye" of Cathy Young, while The Book Bag's Newsletter is a weekly email from Teenreads.com's bookstore.

AcqWeb Site: Library Science :
Collection Development : Book Reviews

June 29, 1999

LibraryLand, one of the best general library science sites, is now arguably the best. That's because they have recently added an indexing/search service for major Web sites dedicated to the practice of librarianship. To this end, they select thorough Web resources for various library specialties (e.g. CoOL for conservation and Libstats for library statistics) and then use a search engine which mines these sites. According to its editor, Jerry Kuntz (Electronic Resources Consultant, Ramapo Catskill Library System), the short term plan is to index these selected sites every two months, and each time add three or four more sites.

To accomplish this goal, LibraryLand has been moved to the Berkeley Digital SunSITE, with the help of Roy Tennant. For those interested in technicalities, it uses a combination of wget (which retrieves web files from other servers) and SWISH-E (an HTML indexer).

We are delighted to say that AcqWeb is among the first sites they are indexing. Because of this, links to it are included on our own Search Page, as well as in the Search Guide.

To add a search box from LibraryLand to your own Web page, just copy and paste this HTML code. The results will look like this:

LibraryLand's Search Engine

Truncate words using an asterisk (*); use Boolean "or" and "not" to narrow searches.

AcqWeb Site: Search Guide

June 28, 1999

Karla's Guide to Citation Style Guides has annotated links to citation guides for electronic and Internet resources. It's part of the Journalism and Mass Communication Resources compiled and edited by Karla Tonella, University of Iowa.

AcqWeb Site: Reference : Style Guides

June 25, 1999

Collection Development Training for Arizona Public Libraries is an excellent resource by the Arizona Department of Library, Archives and Public Records and Dr. Sandra G. Hirsh. While its focus is on training in small and rural public libraries in Arizona, the care evident in its structure and detail makes it worth a visit for anyone with collection development responsibilities. Each of its sections (policies, assessments, weeding, etc.) has links to relevant Internet sites, brief bibliographies, and definitions.

AcqWeb Site: Library Science : Collection Development

June 24, 1999

An Anti-Browser? Due out later today, netomat is free software by artist/IBM-developer Maciej Wisniewski. It has the potential to viscerally demonstrate how the Big Two in browsers have narrowed our understanding and use of Web standards. For more information, see today's New York Times.

June 22, 1999

Act I Bookstore in Chicago, which employs local theatre professionals, has a searchable database of over 6,000 theatre and film titles. According to Publishers Weekly (6/7/99, p.26), over half are not listed in standard online bookstores or in Books in Print. One drawback: the search engine is a bit confusing. It's accessed through individual subject areas (such as "Directors" and "Plays"), rather than having its own page.

AcqWeb Site: Publishers : Performing Arts

June 21, 1999

The Directory of Book Reviews has had quite a growth spurt in recent weeks, including links to:
• American Political Science Review;
• BestsellerReviews.com, with links to reviews, summaries, information about the author, and first chapters of books on the New York Times Bestseller list;
• CD HotList, a monthly web-based review source of sound recordings for the library community, by Rick Anderson of the Jackson Library, UNC Greensboro;
• The Mystery Reader, with frequently updated and substantial reviews and news about current mystery novels, plus its sister site The Romance Reader;
• Rain Taxi, with partial content from "the quarterly publication featuring reviews of literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, with an emphasis on works that push the boundaries of language, narrative, and genre;"
• RALPH: The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy, and the Humanities, a semi-digital reincarnation of The Fessenden Review which, they proudly report, "managed to irritate almost everyone in the book publishing business;"
• Read Ireland Book News, from Read Ireland Bookstore; and
• SA Book Review, dedicated to the growth of the South African book market.

AcqWeb Site: Library Science :
Collection Development : Book Reviews

June 18, 1999

Proxis, based in Belgium, is a Web retailer selling books and CDs in English, French and Dutch. While it is expanding, its primary focus has been on the European market. It began in October 1997 and currently has a database of 2.6 million books and 300,000 CDs. Search fields include ISBN, as well as author and title.

AcqWeb Site: Verification : In Print : Netherlands

June 16, 1999

usgovsearch (or Gov.search) was to have been a joint venture between Northern Light and NTIS, searching documents found in over 20,000 U.S. federal government Web sites. However, there was significant public outcry about its cost, since it is federal policy that all government information be unrestricted to the public. Now NTIS and the Commerce Department have backed out. Northern Light will carry on without NTIS, charging individuals, but giving free access to libraries and schools. For more information, see yesterday's New York Times.

AcqWeb Site: Reference : Government Information

June 15, 1999

J. Hewit & Sons Ltd. is not really a bindery, but rather a supplier of equipment, tools, materials and sundries to other binderies. While the Web is in its infancy, they have been in business for 200 years and it shows in some measure on their site. We link on our Binderies page to their List of Bookbinders, but there are number of other interesting areas of their site to explore. See, for example, their newsletter, Skin Deep.

AcqWeb Site: Publishers : Binderies

June 14, 1999

AcqWeb's Weather Resources have been revamped, including the addition of Weather Underground's "Fast Forecast" search engine embedded in the page. For those who would like their own home page to have a weather search engine or local forecast sticker (such as the one for Khartoum on the right), see Weather Underground's FAQ.

Thanks to Free Pint, the delightfully British Web current awareness service. Their issue of 10th June 1999 #40 was our inspiration.

AcqWeb Site: Reference : Weather

June 11, 1999

Three New Dictionaries have been added to our collection:
• ArtLex, a dictionary of visual art;
• Campbell R. Harvey's Hypertextual Finance Glossary; and
• The Wordsmyth English Dictionary-Thesaurus, a standard dictionary of American English, integrating a thesaurus within its structure, by Robert Parks.

Thanks to Assistant Editor Peter Brading for these finds.

AcqWeb Site: Reference : English Dictionaries

June 10, 1999

AALL's Letter to the Federal Trade Commission by the American Association of Law Libraries' Washington Affairs Representative Robert L. Oakley is a model for library consumer advocacy. Carefully crafted based on feedback from members, it covers areas such as informing customers when a subscription is sold to another publisher, unsolicited shipments as an unfair trade practice, required display of a customer's purchase order numbers on an invoice, and the use of format-neutral language, so coverage is not limited to print publications.

June 9, 1999

Kidon Media-Link is one of several good international lists of news sources. However, unlike most, it also covers television and radio news on the Web, as well as newspapers and magazines. This is a great place to start if you want to check the news using streaming video or audio formats. Our random samplings included France 3 and Radio Australia.

AcqWeb Site: Journals : Directories

June 8, 1999

A Housekeeping Alert: The Verification and Library Sciences pages had become long enough that we have finally split them into multiple pages. This in turn tipped AcqWeb's architectural balance, making it a big enough (potentially confusing enough) site to warrant Yahoo-like guideposts. If you have no idea what we are talking about, please look at Diversions as an example. In the blue left margin, you will see "Home: Library Science: Diversions." That's it -- a sample guidepost. There's one on every page now. We think of them as navigation trails. Unlike Yahoo and other behemoth Web favorites, we eschew the more CRT-look of the > as a delimiter in favor of the venerable colon. Naturally, this is in honor of MARC. One final housekeeping note: we have also renamed "Reference Resources about the World Wide Web" a more apt Guides to Getting Started on the Web. Thanks to Elizabeth Leiserson for this suggestion.

June 7, 1999

Web Search Reference is an amazingly simple and effective international gateway that chooses the most appropriate address and telephone search engine for you. It's about time we had better international access to such information. Don't let its simple appearance fool you. Check its second option, the "Metasearch," in particular. It lets you specify the country and whether you are looking for telephone, email address or reverse lookup information. To see the potential for acquisitions, try searching "publisher" in various countries listed in the Business Search section. One caveat: luck plays a significant role. It generally does with Web searching. So, we had good results searching Antigua and Australia, but not Andorra and Argentina.

AcqWeb Site: Search Engines : Address & Telephone

June 4, 1999

PICK: A Long List of Electronic Journals and Newsletters of Interest to LIS from the Thomas Parry Library, University of Wales Aberystwyth, categorizes, annotates and has a three star rating system for library and information science journals on the Internet. However, it appears not to have been updated in some time.

Elektronische Zeitschriften zum Bibliotheks- und Informationswesen of the Deutsches Bibliotheksinstitut is more current, and has two briefly annotated lists: one German and the other international.

Thanks to Library Juice and Rory Litwin for pointing out these two very thorough listings of library science journals.

AcqWeb Site: Journals : Directories

June 2, 1999

Acses, the very useful international Web comparison shopping engine for online bookstores, now also searches multiple movie and music stores. So far the non-book stores are only in the U.S. and the music is limited to CD's, not scores. For printed music and all things related to music verification, Anna Seaberg's Music Selection Resources on the WWW is still the best place to start.

AcqWeb Site: Verification : In Print Listings

June 1, 1999

AcqWeb's Directory of Publishers and Vendors was updated today. This included a major spring cleaning -- so major that for the first time ever we deleted more links than we added. Gone are 142 sites which were nowhere to be found using a combination of Google, Yahoo and AltaVista. In general, current statistics for the publisher section of AcqWeb are:

Alphabetic Directory	3,597
Email Directory by David Marshall	4,250
Subject Directory	4,011
Total Links	11,858




AcqWeb Site: New Publisher Links

May 28, 1999

Audible Inc. is a publisher of audio journals, newsletters, audio books, news programs, conference proceedings and lectures for the Internet, including (here's what's special) MP3 files.* Some are free. There are only a few, but it's an interesting variety: P.G. Wodehouse, Joseph Campbell, portions of the Wall Street Journal and so on.

* MP3 is the hot digital music (mostly) file format. It's so hot, searchterms.com currently ranks it as the most popular term for Web search engines. You can download MP3's and play them on your computer with a shareware plug-in such as Winamp or on a portable player such as Diamond's Rio.

AcqWeb Site: Publishers : Audio Books

May 27, 1999

VLB (Verzeichnis Lieferbarer Bücher) -- the German books in print from Buchhändler-Vereinigung GmbH. We've had a link for some time to buch+medien Online but thanks to Assistant Editor Peter Brading of the University of Bristol Library our specific link is now faster and more logical. Just take a look at the URL. At 134 characters it's AcqWeb's longest.

See also their Datenbanken page for access to VLM (music), VLE (electronic media), VLZ (journals) and VLS (textbooks). On each individual page "Komplexe Suche" is generally the most useful link for acquisitions work.

AcqWeb Site: Verification : In Print Listings

Announcing Ms Acquisitions' Weblog

We love Webspeak. It can be astonishingly self-descriptive. "Weblog" is the latest in a growing collection of our favorite terms. It still hasn't made it to the Webopedia, a great place to decipher technobabble, but look at CamWorld's list, sample a few, and one deduces that a Weblog is a frequent, usually pithy, description of gleanings from the Web. It's something we've been considering doing with AcqWeb news for a while. Now that we have a name for it, we thought we'd give it a try.

In our case, we will (of course) focus on sites of interest to the acquisitions and collection development world. Updates will probably be a couple of times a week, since it's not every day we find a site worth bending your ear about.

Also, like all good Weblogs, we thrive on feedback, so drop us a line at: a.leiserson@vanderbilt.edu

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