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OverDrive and Sourcebooks are preparing to launch an innovative and ambitious pilot program whose goal is to clearly demonstrate the impact libraries have on book sales and author recognition.
OverDrive sent a letter today to about 35,000 librarians worldwide and invited them to opt in to a program that will run from May 15 through June 1 and allow all participating libraries to feature simultaneously on their OverDrive home page, at no cost, a single title from Sourcebooks.
During a visit to Egypt two years ago, George Kerscher, Secretary General of the Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) Consortium, found that the country’s major libraries had only a very small collection of books available for print-disabled patrons. And while staff and volunteers were working to make more books accessible, output was limited to only a handful of titles each year.
Discerning this as an outsider, Kerscher (who is blind himself) realized that it was very much a microcosm of how the process of producing accessible books has traditionally functioned in the United States.
The question that has most frequently come up in the course of the two-year planning process for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has been a very simple one: What is it?
Since April 2010, the planning initiative has taken the form of an extended, national design phase to plan out what we should build together. The emphasis of this process has been to solicit diverse views as to what the “it” should be that we are working toward.
EnvisionWare, one of the largest providers of self-service products in the public library market, is preparing to ship this month a reporting tool that the company says will thread together and visualize data from its entire line of 22 products.
By now, you’ve no doubt heard about the lawsuits that the Edwin Mellen Press brought against McMaster University librarian Dale Askey. One of those suits (which also named McMaster as a plaintiff) was subsequently dropped, but as far as I know at this writing the other (naming Askey alone) still stands. I’m not writing to [...]
Library conferences can be great places to pick up new ideas, with roundtables, seminars, and sessions filled with stories of successful projects from peers, vendors, and professionals from other fields. Information from these sessions can help other libraries get started on new initiatives without having to reinvent the wheel.
But all projects involve some degree of risk, and some projects can fall apart as the result of preventable problems. At the recent Code4Lib 2013 event held at the UIC Forum at University of Illinois at Chicago, a group of librarians found during their Fail4Lib pre-conference workshop that discussing failed or problematic projects can be as constructive as discussing success.
SIrsiDynix, one of the largest ILS companies, is poised to roll out a new system later this year that the company says will integrate its product lines in a cloud architecture.
Various aspects of the BLUEcloud Suite (BCS) have been discussed previously, and some products that it comprises–such as Enterprise, BookMyne, and Social Library–are already on the market. But, at the Cosugi conference held in Salt Lake City March 14-16, BCS was announced as a re-engineered technology stack and holistic brand that company officials say will become the architecture upon which the company will build its products in the future.
From ebooks to digital literacy, there was plenty to debate at the Midwinter meeting of the American Library Association. But the unconference on January 25 revealed clear consensus on one topic: maker spaces. They’re red hot.
In recent TV ads for Samsung Galaxy smartphones, two actors exchange a music playlist simply by tapping their phones together. This quick and easy method for exchanging information is enabled by Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. It isn’t a particularly prevalent feature on smartphones yet. But given NFC’s functionality—it is particularly useful for applications like secure contactless payment—it seems likely to be a ubiquitous feature on smartphones in the future.
Data-driven voter outreach has become a crucial component of modern political campaigns, and Wadsworth Public Library (WPL) recently illustrated that the analytics tools that underpin those efforts can also help libraries get-out-the-vote.
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