Licensing Digital Content – A Practical Guide for Librarians, Lesley Ellen Harris, American Library Association, 2009
Librarians need to read this. 150 pages.
Licensing Digital Content – A Practical Guide for Librarians, Lesley Ellen Harris, American Library Association, 2009
Librarians need to read this. 150 pages.
Fundamentals of MARC 21 Bibliographic Format, Subarna K. Das, Ess Ess, 2009
Library electronic catalogs are backed by databases that use the MARC standard record. This book is for database programmers, and describes the MARC fields in detail. Hardcover, 400 pages.
The Case for Books : past, present, and future / Robert Darnton, PublicAffairs, 2009
This very readable book discusses copyright law as seen by the chief of Harvard’s library, who negotiated with Google on their book digitization project. Hard cover, 200 pages.
This book is overdue! : how Librarians and Cybrarians can save us all / Johnson, Marilyn, Harper, 2010
This book will interest community leaders who need to know the great value of libraries as they transition to the internet era. It will also interest students who might choose a career as a librarian. The book is very readable, even motivational. Hard cover, 250 pages.
Licensing and Managing Electronic Resources / Becky Albitz, Chandos, 2008
Here is legal help for librarians in charge of electronic resources, written by an American librarian. It is well written, 150 pages.
Managing technologies and automated library systems in developing countries : open source vs commercial options : proceedings of the IFLA pre-conference satellite meeting / edited by Bernard Dione, K.G. Saur, 2008
This funny little hardcover has academic papers on library automation in Africa. The book is partly in English, partly in French. It is not at Amazon, and that makes it rare! Read the paper by Norwegian students who used the open source Koha ILS in a Kenyan library. Maybe OPL should be using Koha because it is or will be better than Lirico/sirsidynix, so OPL can save money for more book purchases.
Safari, O’Reilly’s online book access, has lots to offer. It has lots of current tech books, it is searchable, and you can read books before they get to the stores. However, you have to read books on your computer, which may be inconvenient, or you have to print out chapters, which is really inconvenient. Oh, and Safari costs $20 or $40 per month. I discontinued my subscription to save money, then re-subscribed to search out a problem that I was having (in a threaded program in gnu c++, what are those large ‘arena’ anon mappings, that use relatively little resident memory, and why). Safari helped where Google had not. But I much prefer holding a book in my hands, and I have not visited Safari in a week. YMMV.
The library used to have a Safari shared license so any three people could use Safari via the library site. The service was stopped recently because it was not getting used much. To bad.
A new building for the Ottawa Public Library? Maybe, but let’s look at the options. They are asking for a big new public building in central Ottawa. But the way we use the library has changed; we place holds online and pick up the materials at the local branch. There is no longer a need for a downtown architectural monument. The large sum they are discussing could buy warehouse space near the 417 and stock it with Amazon’s ‘long tail’. Mark Sutcliffe, the Citizen columnist, writes about this option.