I first heard about Reference Extract back in 2008.  I thought it was a great idea then, and am glad to see this additional funding in place to keep the project moving forward.  Here is more information from the press release: DUBLIN, Ohio, January 6, 2011—The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded [...]

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From an OCLC Press Release:  In addition to the 200 million records contributed by OCLC member libraries worldwide, 500 million items from leading publishers, aggregators and mass digitization efforts are also now accessible through WorldCat Local. OCLC has recently added content to WorldCat Local from EBSCO; Gale, part of Cengage Learning; Modern Language Association; ProQuest [...]

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I attended the Northern Ohio Technical Services Librarians Conference today and one of the speakers was Nicole Merriman from the State Library of Ohio.  Nicole provided details on the Ohio eBook Project, a statewide public library consortium purchasing eBooks and audio books through OverDrive.  Academic and school libraries are not able to join the program [...]

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From an OCLC Press Release:  OCLC and EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) have expanded their partnership to enhance the discovery experience for users of WorldCat Local and the EBSCO Discovery Service through an expanded data exchange agreement. The new agreement will create more value for libraries that subscribe to services from OCLC and EBSCO. WorldCat Local libraries [...]

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Cory Tucker, Head of Collection Development from UNLV and Emilie Delquie, VP of Publishers Communication Group provided an overview of the variety of ways in which electronic content is being procured in libraries.  Cory discussed several current driving factors for procurement including decreasing library budgets, the variety of business models available, and network level access [...]

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A colleague of mine forwarded this presentation by James Michalko from OCLC to me.  The presentation was done at the Keio Symposium earlier this month.  One of James’ slides, based on data from the US Department of Education, NCES Academic Library Survey 1998 – 2008, shows projections that academic library expenditures on purchased and licensed [...]

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A must read OCLC newsletter article written by Andy Havens and Tom Storey – Libraries and the changing role of creators and consumers.  Havens and Storey interviewed Catherine Mitchell from the California Digital Library and Andrew Pate of On-Demand Books.  Topics include: the university as publishers embedded librarians library as publisher (espresso book machine) libraries [...]

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What if your eBook aggregator or perhaps the publisher with whom you now own over 5,000 eBook titles went belly up next week?  What if OCLC and EBSCO never purchased NetLibrary, where would your titles have gone?  Perhaps the 100 titles you’ve bought for your personal Kindle are no good when the device disappears due to [...]

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Wow, ton of good things to read over the last 4 days, here’s a sampling of what I’ve been reading: Digital Lending Goes into OverDrive Digital Books Come of Age (Or) The Textbook is Dead; Long Live the Textbook Kindle 3 vs Kindle 2 in size plus hands-on report by PC World’s Perenson Cataloging and [...]

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More good news for eBook discovery!  OCLC and ebrary are working together to add records for the ebrary ebook catalog to WorldCat.  ebrary’s growing selection of over 170,000 authoritative ebooks in all subject areas will be represented in WorldCat with a link to the ebrary platform. Libraries that subscribe to ebrary ebooks can have ebrary [...]

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