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New Lending Model for Ebooks in Libraries from Internet Archive’s OpenLibrary
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by Barbara Quint
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The swirling, chaotic ebook revolution continues to generate controversies, particularly in the library arena. An announcement from HarperCollins restricting the number of allowed loans of ebooks by libraries (via OverDrive and others) started a wave of protests in the blogosphere. The furor may have drowned out a quieter and more generous offering to libraries from the Internet Archive's OpenLibrary. Begun in November 2007, OpenLibrary takes a wiki volunteer approach to building a mammoth catalog of all kinds of books, a catalog now numbering around 20 million entries. It also provides access to some 1.7 million full-text digitized books and documents hosted by its parent, the Internet Archive. The new In-Library eBook Lending Program will initially offer some 85,000 ebooks, many not available in the OpenLibrary itself, for perusal inside participating libraries' physical facilities.
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EBSCO Publishing to Release Chemical Hazard Information Library
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EBSCO Publishing is releasing the new Chemical Hazard Information Library (CHIL). CHIL brings toxicology, pharmacology, occupational and public health, and chemical hazard information to corporations, government agencies, medical facilities, and academic institutions. CHIL includes millions of documents in the areas of toxicity, carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, teratogenicity, occupational exposure, and other hazard-related subject matter.
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Grovo Launches Premium Online Training Service
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Grovo.com, an online education and training platform that helps people find and use relevant websites, announced the launch of Grovo Premium, exclusive content for businesses looking to take advantage of online business tools. Along with the announcement of Grovo Premium comes a full site redesign and revamped experience for free users, positioning Grovo as "the personal field guide to the Internet."
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IEEE and Access Innovations to Re-Index Xplore Digital Library
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The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) collaborated with Access Innovations, Inc. to complete a comprehensive re-indexing of about 2.1 million IEEE article records in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library database. Xplore contains IEEE publications from 38 specialized societies and seven technical councils serving more than 400,000 members in 160 countries. IEEE publishes more than 1,300 standards and sponsored more than 1,200 conferences in 2010.
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Search Quality, Content Farms, and Conspiracy Theories
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by Paula J. Hane
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The blogosphere and media outlets have been abuzz lately with reports of low-quality search results from the major search engines. It started in December 2010 with a New York Times, story about an unscrupulous merchant whose bad treatment of customers and negative reviews pushed the site to prominence in Google searches. In response to the flap that arose, Google quickly addressed this with changes to its search algorithms. Since then, there have been a New York Times expose of J.C. Penney's SEO practices ("The Dirty Little Secrets of Search") and Google's subsequent changes to its algorithm, Google's assertion that Microsoft Bing was copying Google search results, Google's banning of spam from low-quality sites and so-called "content farms," and even a conspiracy theory about which company was launching a negative publicity campaign against Google. This has indeed been a wild and crazy time.
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