LITA Blog » Blog Archive » Library services and in-house software development Ah, you say, I don’t need to know about these things because I have vendors supply this for me. Yes, that might be true, but such an approach to the situation is expensive in terms of time. It is not possible for third [...]

Library Marketing-Thinking Outside the Book: Don’t focus on the customer/patron (?!) … the authors tell us to refocus our attention from consumers themselves to the jobs they want to get done.

Open Access News Comment. There are two OA connections here. First, skyrocketing journal prices in the sciences have caused most research libraries to cut into their book budgets, which has greatly reduced the demand for monographs, which has greatly reduced the number of new book manuscripts accepted by university presses. If spreading OA can help [...]

Wired News: Suits Seek End to Domestic Spying The New York suit, filed on behalf of the center and individuals, names Bush, the head of the National Security Agency and the heads of the other major security agencies, challenging the NSA’s surveillance of persons within the United States without judicial approval or statutory authorization. … [...]

Boing Boing: DoJ search requests: Google said no; Yahoo, AOL, MSN yes. It seems apparent that Google objected to the request not for privacy reasons, but on grounds that the request was too broad and burdensome. … Justice is not requesting this data in the course of a criminal investigation, but in order to defend [...]

Boing Boing: DRM primer for librarians Mike Godwin has written a great primer on DRM for librarians. Librarians are on the front lines of the DRM wars, since DRM so often interferes with lending, archiving and preserving creative works. Librarians are also a technology-savvy bunch. Accordingly, Mike’s paper is thoroughgoing, smart, and highly recommended. A [...]

Open Access News Infotrieve, Inc., today announced that it had converted ArticleFinder, its online scientific, technical, and medical (STM) database with more than 26 million citations and eight million abstracts from over 54,000 journals, to a free access model. The move provides scientists and researchers, who work for corporations and are subject to different copyright [...]

LISNews.org | Are we set for information overload? As books get digitized and TV shows get downloadable, will it be too much? Maybe! Will all this instantly accessible information make us much smarter, or simply more stressed? When can we break to think, absorb and ponder all this data? It may take better technology to [...]