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Worldreader Aims for ‘Books for All’
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by Paula J. Hane
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Worldreader is a U.S. and European nonprofit whose mission is to make digital books available to children in the developing world, so millions of people can improve their lives. Reports indicate that 50% of schools in sub-Saharan Africa have few or no books (SACMEQ II), slowing learning and societal advancement. As of May 2012, Worldreader had put more than 100,000 ebooks—and the life-changing, power-creating ideas contained within them—into the hands of 1,000 children in sub-Saharan Africa.
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Bibliotheca to Support Open Source Ebook Model
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Bibliotheca, a supplier of technologies designed to enhance library efficiency and the user experience, is partnering with the library community to facilitate adoption of open source platforms for the delivery of electronic content. The company will build upon the concepts originally designed and developed by the Douglas County Libraries, Colo. (DCL) to enable libraries, first in North America and then around the globe, to meet the many challenges that the emerging world of ebooks presents.
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Gale Brings Online Education Program to Public Libraries
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Gale, part of Cengage Learning, announced a new program, ed2go for public libraries that brings turnkey online training and education solutions to the public library market. ed2go, also part of Cengage Learning, provides online training courses for the adult education, career, and corporate training markets through partnerships with colleges, universities, community-based organizations and now through public libraries.
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OCLC Adds Linked Data to WorldCat.org
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OCLC is taking the first step toward adding linked data to WorldCat by appending Schema.org descriptive mark-up to WorldCat.org pages. With the addition of Schema.org mark-up to all book, journal, and other bibliographic resources in WorldCat.org, the entire publicly available version of WorldCat is now available for use by intelligent web crawlers, such as Google and Bing, that can make use of this metadata in search indexes and other applications.
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ICANN Releases List of 1,400 Possible New Internet Top-Level Domains
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by George H. Pike
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With a range of possibilities from "AAA" through "Zulu," on June 13, 2012, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) released its highly anticipated list of potential new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) for consideration and comment. The controversial gTLD initiative could open up the internet domain name system to countless variations beyond the traditional .com, .net, .edu, .info, and others. The release begins a 60-day comment period where both the general public and parties such as trademark owners will have the opportunity to comment or object to possible new domains.
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Primo Upgrade From Ex Libris Builds on Customization Strengths
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by Barbara Quint
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After several months of testing with "early adopters," Ex Libris Group released version 4 of its Primo Discovery and Delivery product. Primo currently operates at more than 1,000 sites worldwide. According to one expert, Primo has particular appeal to academic and research libraries in part due to the way its "toolkit" approach allows librarians to customize the service to their particular collections and clienteles. The new version expands on this with personalization options that filter and rank material down to the academic degrees and disciplines of users, as well as additional administrative tools for local librarians. The ScholarRank feature helps to identify key research and bring it to the top of search results.
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