The speakers for this session were Beth LaPensee of JSTOR and Alice Preston from Ithaka. JSTOR is currently in the process of doing a major site redesign, and Beth LaPensee gave an overview of some of the changes that might (emphasis on the word might; this is still a work in progress) be included in the final version, which will be released sometime next year. Some of the more notable changes that she mentioned include: The ability to limit searches to journals within a specific discipline from the basic search page. The option to rerun previous searches within a session. An auto-complete feature when searching by journal title. The ability to search at any point while browsing; i.e., there will be a box on all of the browse pages that will allow you to search within a specific journal or issue of a journal that you have browsed to, without…
Author: jbauder
More about Libraries as Digital Publishers
The Kirtas/BookSurge/Amazon book digitization program is getting press! Book Standard Chronicle of Higher Education
Libraries as Digital Publishers: A New Model for Scholarly Access to Information
This panel featured six speakers who are involved in a new project to digitize books and make them available both online and print-on-demand via Amazon. Two of the speakers, Lotfi Belkhir and Robin Asbury, work for the companies that are behind the project—Kirtas Technologies and BookSurge, respectively—and the other four speakers are with institutions that are digitizing books: Martin Halbert and Lisa Macklin, from Emory University; Joyce Rumery, from the University of Maine, and Linda McKenzie from the Toronto Public Library. This project differentiates itself from Google’s scanning project by focusing on quality control. As Lotfi explained in his presentation, Google and their partner libraries are privileging quantity—digitizing the most books possible in the shortest period of time—over quality—creating the most complete, accurate, and usable digital copies of books possible. (To demonstrate the problems in the Google method, he showed a set of images of one book that Google scanned…
The Ultimate Debate: Do Libraries Innovate?
Hello LITAblog readers! I’m Julia Bauder, a student in the MLIS program at Wayne State and one of the LITA conference bloggers. I’ll be blogging three sessions this weekend. First up is The Ultimate Debate: Do Libraries Innovate?, featuring Andrew Pace of North Carolina State University as the moderator, Joseph Janes of the University of Washington, Karen Schneider, and Stephen Abram of SirsiDynix. Unfortunately, I missed the beginning of this panel. There are two Renaissance Hotels hosting ALA programs, I discovered today about five minutes before this discussion was due to start, and the Renaissance Hotel hosting this program was not the one right across the street from the convention center—it was the one two Metro stops away.