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The home base for the New York Public Library (NYPL) Labs is a strange mix of old and new. A bunch of modern cubicles hover incongruously amid the stately marble walls of what used to be a courtyard in the venerable Schwarzman Building, before the need for more space convinced the library to press it into service. It’s not a bad metaphor for what the labs do: turn the library’s substantial historical holdings into something new, useful, and a little bit quirky.
As the ALA annual conference got under way, ALA President Molly Raphael welcomed the news that Penguin was putting its toe back in the library ebook lending waters
Big Six publisher Penguin Group, the New York Public Library (NYPL), the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL), and 3M Library Systems today announced a pilot project to make Penguin ebooks available to patrons of The New York and Brooklyn public libraries six months after initial publication. The program will begin in August and, if successful, could roll out across the country. The move comes four months after Penguin pulled out of its contract with OverDrive.
At the Association of American Publishers (AAP) annual meeting today, a trifecta of librarians presented their views on how libraries and publishes can collaborate—particularly around the vexed question of ebook sales.
Google’s popular social networking site, Google+, was launched in June of this year, and has since built up a membership of more than 40 million users. But only earlier this month did Google begin allowing organizations, and not just individuals, to create their own pages on the site.
The New York Public Library has formed a partnership with a new educational media venture called The Floating University that will give library patrons access to a series of video lectures being offered as a freshman seminar at Yale, Harvard, and Bard colleges.
