ebrary announced today the launch of the much awaited patron driven acquisition model.  It’s been a couple of years in the making, received considerable testing, and was grown from librarian demand and suggestions.  A brief history: ALAMW Conference, 2009.  ebrary hosted a session to discuss patron driven acquisitions and many librarians were there to offer [...]

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RUSA (Reference & User Services Division of ALA) sponsored a panel discussion of the product development of electronic reference products.  It was organized by RUSA, with Joseph Yue of the University of California at the lead and moderated by  Kay Cassell from Rutgers SLIS.  The panel included Frank Menchaca from Gale/Cengage, Rolf Janke from SAGE [...]

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Gale, part of Cengage Learning, recently announced a partnership with ABC-CLIO to distribute select titles from ABC-CLIO’s eBook collection through Gale Virtual Reference Library.  Directed toward users of public and academic libraries, nearly 250 eBooks have been selected from a variety of disciplines including history, humanities, current events and general interest.  These titles introduce resources [...]

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There is some great news for librarians wanting their reference content to be searchable on one common interface.  ABC-CLIO has added 250 titles to the Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL).  The titles are either ABC-CLIO, Greenwood, Praeger, or Libraries Unlimited imprints and cover history, humanities, and general interest topics.  The addition of the ABC-CLIO titles [...]

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Got a chance to beta test the new ABC-CLIO/Greenwood interface this week – Digital Collections.  It’s a nice looking interface, easy to navigate with pleasant layout, colors, fonts, etc.  Basic/advanced/browse searching of over 6,200 titles.  They have some cool features too – cite this source ( I still need to check the citations against versions [...]

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For the first time in history, the American Library Association’s (ALA) Dartmouth Award, designating outstanding quality and significance to a reference source, was given to an electronic resource.  Greenwood’s Pop Culture Universe, was the 2009 recipient. The Committee selected Pop Culture Universe because it compiles over 300 sources of pop culture information into a fun, [...]

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My recent discussion with Cynthia Cleto from Springer got me thinking about some issues.  I’m curious if Springer’s model – no DRM and ILL rights – is unique or if other ebook publishers and aggregators offer similar things.  To me, it’s a superior blend, but I’m thinking that most publishers and aggregators feel it’s a [...]

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Big news in reference publishing today.  ABC-CLIO has licensed the content of Greenwood Imprints.  Here’s a clip of the press release: ABC-CLIO and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt today announced an agreement granting ABC-CLIO a perpetual license to use the imprints and publish the titles of Greenwood Publishing Group, including Greenwood Press, Praeger Publishers, Praeger Security International [...]

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Gale and Greenwood eBook Partnership Expands Current Greenwood Titles Now on Gale Virtual Reference Library Farmington Hills, Mich., September 12, 2008 – Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, and Greenwood Publishing Group have enhanced their partnership to include more high-demand Greenwood titles, including more than 130 titles released in 2008 as eBooks on Gale Virtual [...]

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Greenwood Digital Collection Review. First published November 1, 2006 (Booklist). The Greenwood Digital Collection includes more than 3,500 titles from Greenwood, Praeger, and Libraries Unlimited—encyclopedias, biographies, dictionaries, and primary documents. About 25 percent of the titles are reference and cover a variety of topics and fields in more than 24 subject areas. Users can browse [...]

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