Moving Forward at ALA Midwinter

Upbeat outlook and new releases keep the show floor buzzing

By Michael Rogers -- Library Journal, 2/15/2007

The show floor of the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in sumptuous Seattle (January 26–29) was the standard wonderland of screen-laden booths ranging from monstrous to mousy. Librarians seemingly have grown accustomed to major vendor acquisitions. The recent buyouts of SirsiDynix and Endeavor Information by private-equity firms (and the latter's merging into ExLibris) and Cambridge Information Group's (CIG) pending ProQuest purchase, which in the past might have caused alarm among customers and even fellow vendors, were met with an upbeat attitude by those traversing the automation marketplace's shifting landscape. The Seattle affair didn't bring word of any significant releases or deals, with many vendors gearing up for major announcements at this summer's ALA annual in Washington, DC. Nonetheless, there were enough cool gadgets and upgrades to existing releases to keep things interesting. Here are a few that are noteworthy.

Additional coverage of ALA releases will appear in the March 1 InfoTech.

H.W. Wilson brandished both new products and updates. The most exciting is a tool for librarians themselves, Library Literature & Information Science Retrospective: 1905–1983. The database includes the full text (plus PDFs) of hundreds of periodicals including LJ and the company's own defunct Wilson Library Bulletin, indexing from Library Work (1905–11), along with complete books, book chapters, library school theses, citations, and book reviews. Wilson also is releasing the sixth print edition of Famous First Facts, with 1000 new entries (7500 total), revised existing listings, and new sidebars and illustrations.

Lastly, the company has expanded its already plentiful Art Museum Image Gallery to the tune of 62,000 additional images for a total of more than 155,000 rights-cleared illustrations. Wilson told LJ that the database is not just fine art materials but includes a large collection of World War II poster art and more. WilsonWeb also has been tweaked with new enhancements like Chicago/Turabian style added to MLA and APA formats for creating bibliographic citations, the power to email PDF page images as attachments, and a new layout for easier navigation.

With the CIG sale, ProQuest has landed squarely on its feet and continues to crank out products at a rapid pace. Additional releases include the spring debut of ProQuest Civil War Era, a primary source database of newspapers and activist publications, among them 2000 pamphlets representing the perspectives of government officials, clergy, social reformers, and other top opinion leaders, drawn from the personal libraries of then Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase and New Hampshire Senator John P. Hale.

The eight newspaper sources represent the perspectives of the North (Boston Herald, New York Herald), South (Richmond Dispatch, Charleston Mercury), Mississippi Valley and border states (Kentucky Daily Journal, Memphis Daily Appeal), and other regions. Additionally, the company has added the New York Amsterdam News and Pittsburgh Courier, two of the nation's leading African American tabloids, to its Historical Newspapers project.