Jessamyn: How I Tried to Resign from Google Answers but Found I Was Already Fired

"Is what they said true? Do you think 'many' librarians use Google Answers as a resource themselves? Where do you suppose they get the money to do this? How would Google even know this 'fact' considering that most of their users are at least somewhat anonymous. If you are a librarian who has used Google Answers, I'd love to hear from you. And I still think information wants to be free, no matter what Google Answers says."

I don't know what SLS IT would do without Donna (and Jody), but I've been remiss in noting that Donna has put my last two presentations online.

• Portals, Blogs, & RSS: why they are your future - A presentation I gave at the Alliance Library System last month, it's also an update for those of you that saw the rough draft first version last spring.
   
• The Future of PDAs - I was part of a panel, so I only had about 15 minutes to cover this broad topic.

Also, if you subscribe to Library Journal, the October issue is available and it includes the netConnect supplement, which has my latest Product Pipeline column. Link to appear behind that column name when it's available online.

Utilizing E-books to Enhance Digital Library Offerings

"A comparison of circulation of identical titles available at the University of Pittsburgh in e-book and print book format indicates that e-book circulation is higher than print book circulation. During a four-month period each e-book title was accessed an average of 3.7 times compared to an average of 1.4 accesses per print book title. Thirty percent of the titles in the e-book collection were accessed during this period while only ten percent of the print collection was accessed [11].

Some e-book content is in more demand. These include current subject matter within certain disciplines and content that is generally not read in its entirety, i.e., scholarly, professional, and reference content.

Current netLibrary e-book usage patterns suggest highest subject usage within the economics and business; computer science; literature; medicine, health and wellness; technology; history; education; sociology; and religion collections. These e-book content areas are similar to those identified by librarians.

In June 2001, netLibrary emailed questionnaires about e-book content to 1900 academic, public, and special librarians. The sample was equally distributed among the three types of librarians. One hundred eighty-one responses were returned. Eighty-four percent of the responses were from academic librarians, fourteen percent were from public librarians, and two percent were from special librarians. Business, medicine, computer and information science, technology, and career content were the highest ranked subject areas for e-book collections. Digital reference content was also ranked highly [10]....

If libraries are to thrive in an electronic world, an e-book company focused on the needs of libraries is requisite. Libraries are a different audience from that of consumer electronics, and have different priorities. They have a higher dependency on standards than retail customers because they serve a wide variety of patrons, publishers, distributors, and locations, under ADA guidelines, and must do so at an extremely cost-effective level. They also have a stronger need for standards-based technologies to ensure that the goals of open scholarly exchange and learning can be met between user communities and between institutions. Academic researchers need to rely on authenticity and integrity of content; e-book content should match any print content and include all its elements (text, graphs, and illustrations). Content needs to be separable from access and manipulation features, and needs to be transferable, in a non-proprietary format, into a variety of reading appliances. Interoperability of files between systems is important, as is digital rights management software to enforce control over intellectual property [12]. All of these specialised needs foretell an e-book service by libraries and for libraries." [Ariadne, via The Virtual Acquisition Shelf and News Desk]

So looking at these statistics, why aren't ebooks more popular? (Regular readers will recognize this is a rhetorical question.)  Again, I have to wonder why publishers aren't partnering with libraries to make us launchpads for ebooks and digital content. (Yes, another rhetorical statement.)