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U.S. Census Bureau to Eliminate Strategic Publications Including Statistical Abstracts
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by Barbie E. Keiser
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Last month, the Census Bureau released its budget estimates to Congress for FY2012, requesting $1 billion for discretionary spending. Responding to the administration's request that all agencies "curb non-essential administrative spending" and "seek ways to improve the efficiency of programs without reducing their effectiveness," this is 16% below the annualized FY2011 funding budget authorization under the current Continuing Resolution. Cuts have to be made, and everyone has his/her own favorite data series and publications, but we must question the rationale for specific cuts announced in the Census budget.
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Books at JSTOR Initiative Grows
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Four U.S. academic publishers announced plans to bring their scholarly books online at JSTOR—Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and California university presses. This is the second wave of presses to join the Books at JSTOR initiative. The initial group included Chicago, Minnesota, North Carolina, Princeton, and Yale university presses.
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R.R. Donnelley Acquires Journalism Online and Press+ System
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R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. announced that it acquired Journalism Online, LLC and its Press+ offering, which enables publishers to integrate a paid content engine seamlessly with their websites. Journalism Online's Press+ system supports publishers as they offer audiences a mix of free and subscription-based premium content.
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SirsiDynix Launches BookMyne 2.1 and Web Services for Horizon
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SirsiDynix, a provider of library automation solutions, announced the release of SirsiDynix Web Services for SirsiDynix libraries running the Horizon ILS. With the Horizon Web Services release, Horizon libraries gain advanced tools for accessing, customizing, and sharing their data. By installing Web Services, SirsiDynix Horizon libraries can also benefit from the full functionality of the SirsiDynix BookMyne iPhone application, the 2.1 release of which is available now.
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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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