From the Article:

In 1961 a new edition of an old and esteemed dictionary was released. The publisher courted publicity, noting the great expense ($3.5 million) and amount of work (757 editor years) that went into its making. But the book was ill-received. It was judged “subversive” and denounced in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Life, and dozens of other newspapers, magazines, and professional journals. Not every publication condemned the volume, but the various exceptions did little to change the widespread impression of a well-known reference work being cast out from the better precincts of American culture.

Source: Humanities

From the Article:

While Google agreed to share the revenues with the publishers and authors, libraries, some consumer rights groups and other parties are worried that Google would have solitary and overwhelming control over access to “orphan books”—titles whose authors and rights-holders have essentially abandoned.

Source: Paid Content (via Forbes)

From a Wikimedia Post:

Wikimedia Commons, the multimedia repository shared by Wikipedia and all other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, has been a wonderful success story, having grown to more than 4.5 million educational, freely usable media files since its inception in 2004. But the combination of the complexity of free content licensing and the integration of Commons into the experience of contributing to a project like Wikipedia or Wikibooks can make for a very daunting experience for new contributors.

See Also: Full News Release

Source: Wikimedia

+ Google Book Search Now With Cloud Tag (via Search Engine Land)

+ Serials Solutions 360 Core Enhancements Offer Increased Functionality and Better User Experience

+ CQ Press Releases Washington Information Directory, 2009 – 2010

+ Now Live on the SAGE Reference Online Platform: SAGE Reference Online Handbook Collection

+ Scopus works with European Science Foundation to expand Arts & Humanities coverage

+ ProQuest Strengthens Microfilm Manufacturing Prowess

Direct to Issue (4 pages; PDF)

Articles Include:

+ Project MUSE announces new titles and prices for 2010

+ MUSE and Social Technology

+ New Features and Functionality Enhance MUSE Experience

+ Using MUSE to Your Advantage: More By an Author

See Also: Project Muse Facebook Page

Source: Project Muse

From the M-W Site:

Merriam-Webster Editor at Large Peter Sokolowski offers up daily dispatches on new words, etymology and more. Read his tweets about the latest happenings at Merriam-Webster and the wider world of lexicography and linguistics—and enjoy a few personal observations and insights along the way. Visit Peter’s Twitter page and follow along today.

Direct to Twitter Feed

Source: M-W

+ New EBSCOhost Enabling Technology Makes its Debut

+ Elsevier Launches SciVal Spotlight: New Tool Provides Multidisciplinary View Of Research Performance

+ NewsGator, Cataphora: opportunities for infopros (via VIP Livewire)

+ H.W. Wilson Art Museum Image Gallery Expands (via Charleston Advisor)

Word from Charles W. Bailey, Jr that a new version (#4) of his Google Book Search Bibliography is now available online.

Direct to Bibliography

This bibliography presents selected English-language articles and other works that are useful in understanding Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it. Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories. Note that e-prints and published articles may not be identical.

Source: Charles W. Bailey, Jr. (via ERIL-L)

From the OCLC News Release:

The Review Board on Principles of Shared Data Creation and Stewardship, convened jointly by the OCLC Board of Trustees and Members Council to represent the membership and inform OCLC on matters concerning shared data, has issued its final report [Our Emphasis] recommending that the proposed Policy on Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records be withdrawn and a new policy drafted.

In May, Jennifer Younger, Review Board Chair, and Edward H. Arnold Director of Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame, presented a report to OCLC Members Council recommending that the proposed policy be formally withdrawn and a new policy should be drafted. “We affirm that a policy is needed, but not this policy,” said Dr. Younger.

The dialogue and debate surrounding OCLC’s record use policy have demonstrated some of the great strengths of the OCLC cooperative—that we are indeed a membership organization, that our members are vocal, and that we listen to the membership,” said Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO. “Soon we will announce a new initiative to develop a record use policy that reflects both the rights of individual libraries and the needs of the cooperative to sustain and grow WorldCat for future generations.

Direct to Full Report (17 pages; PDF)

Source: OCLC

From the Announcement:

Portico (www.portico.org) is pleased to announce the signing of an agreement with Emerald Group Publishing Limited to preserve its entire online journals collection. Established in 1967, Emerald Group Publishing Limited is the world’s leading publisher of management research. In total, Emerald publishes over 700 titles, comprising 200 journals, over 300 books and more than 200 book series as well as an extensive range of online products and services.

Source: Portico

Direct to Issue (44 pages; PDF)

Articles Include:

+ Practicing Law Librarianship: A View to Abridge

+ Public Relations: Moving the Library

+ “A Day in the Life of the Law Library Community” Photo Contest Winners

+ What’s on the Library’s Mind? Facebook’s place in the law library

+ Free PACER

+ Much More

Source: American Association of Law Libraries

From an SLA Blog post:

A group of SLA members are circulating a petition for the creation of a new SLA division, focusing on ways to organize and structure information so that content is accessible and useful. The proposed Taxonomy Division would offer a practical context for exploring issues and sharing experiences related to planning, creating, maintaining and using taxonomies, thesauri, authority files, and other controlled vocabularies and information structures.

Direct to Learn More/Sign Petition

Source: Special Libraries Association Blog

The full text document is available for a fee. Here are some of the highlights that came to us via e-mail.

The report presents data from a survey of 400+ American college students about how they go about doing research in their college libraries. The 150+ page report gives extensive data on student use of major search engines, wikipedia, library databases, book collections and other library resources. The study also gives detailed information on how their professors advise them to use the library, and how comfortable they feel about their research skills and how helpful librarians have been in helping them in their research. Data is broken out by more than 16 criteria including gender, income level, type and size of college, mean SAT acceptance score of the college, and many other
variables. Just a few of the report’s many findings are that:

+ Only about 47% of students are sure that they have ever been required to turn in a research paper exceeding 10 double spaced typed pages in length for any of their classes.

+ More than 86% of students say that they understand the concept of plagiarism “well” or “very well”.

+ 64% of students sampled say that they know how to contact a librarian online.

+ 55.2% of the students in the sample had not asked for help from a librarian within the past year.

+ Nearly 29% of students say that Google, Yahoo and other major search engine searches were the most important information source for their last research assignment.

+ More than 9% of information needed for research papers was sourced from Wikipedia or other wickis.

+ The higher the grade point average the less information for research papers was obtained from search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

Source: Primary Research

+ New Features, Terms, Content in ABI/INFORM

+ St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Baltimore Sun Added to ProQuest Historical Newspapers

+ Alacra Launches Deal Pulse

From an Announcement (5 pages; PDF)

Here’s something to get the twitterati tweeting: dictionary experts at Oxford University Press (OUP) have been monitoring 1.5 million tweets this year to explore the impact of the Twitter phenomenon on the English language.

Applying the cutting-edge technology used for gathering data in OUP’s two-billion-word Oxford English Corpus, lexicographers are able to track changes in the language across a wide variety of media including newspapers, magazines, blogs - and now Twitter.

See Also: Twitter Facts (3 pages; PDF)

The Oxford English Corpus contains almost 1.5 million tweets, randomly selected from all public tweets between January and April 2009

BASIC NUMBERS
Total tweets = 1,496,981
Total sentences = 2,098,630
Total words = 22,431,033
Average words per tweet = 14.98
Average sentences per tweet = 1.40
Average words per sentence in Twitter= 10.69
Average words per sentence in general usage = 22.09

Source: Oxford English Dictionary