|
 | Microsoft Abandons Book Scan Plan
Microsoft last week announced that it will pull the plug on its book and scholarly article scan plans, Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, and that both sites will be taken down. "We recognize that this decision comes as disappointing news to our partners, the publishing and academic communities, and Live Search users," reads a Microsoft blog post from Satya Nadella, Microsoft senior VP search, portal and advertising. "We believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner." Nadella said that books digitized under the programs would now be included in MSN search results.
The announcement comes as book publishers will gather this week in Los Angeles, CA, for BookExpo America, the industry's annual tradeshow. In a somewhat confusing message, Microsoft said it would continue to "reach out" to publishers and libraries, and would encourage libraries to "build on the platform" it has developed with its partners-even though that platform is evidently commercially unsustainable and would no longer be financially supported by the company. The company also said the libraries and institutions outfitted with Microsoft state-of-the-art Kirtas scanners for the program could keep the scanners.
In a post on the Internet Archive site, Open Content Alliance (OCA) founder Brewster Kahle noted that "funding for the time being is secure," but he acknowledged that "going forward" Microsoft's investment will need to be replaced. "Let's work together, quickly, to build on the existing momentum," Kahle urged.
The OCA launched in 2005 with an initial investment from Microsoft, whose then nascent book scanning program was praised by publishers for its policy only to scan books for which it had permission. Live Search Book launched in beta in late 2006 with books scanned by library partners at the University of California, the British Library, and the University of Toronto.
In his statement, Kahle diplomatically praised Microsoft's involvement, saying that their participation has led to over 300,000 titles being "publicly available on the archive.org site that would not otherwise be." In addition, he praised Microsoft's decision to release public domain books from any "contractual restrictions." Kahle has been a vocal opponent of book scanning practices that make public domain books surface only within the search engines owned by the companies that scanned them, or that prohibit their wide use and reuse-with Google being a main target, given its dominant position in the book scanning realm.
In exiting the book scanning arena, Microsoft suggested the future of public domain books rests on libraries and publishers. "Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries."
The big question, of course, is who will fund the repositories Microsoft hopes to one day crawl? Commercial competitor Google currently forbids rival search engines to crawl its scans. Kahle, meanwhile, has long advocated a "public works" approach to scanning public domain books. "At 10¢ a page, 300 pages in a book, it would price out at about $30 million, costs that could be spread out over many institutions," Kahle told Library Journal in an interview last year. "We can do this." That kind of large-scale public, institutional support has yet to materialize, however, suggesting the future of the public domain book content online is, at best, in uncertain hands.
|
|
Quinnipiac Librarians Build Homegrown E-Reference Portal
Every year, the trend becomes more clear at Quinnipiac University's Arnold Bernhard (Hamden, CT), writes automation librarian Terry Ballard in the May 15 issue of Library Journal: more reference sources go from print to online to the library home page. "But while we had the materials to offer the students, we needed a delivery mechanism for the electronic content that could be as simple as the reference shelf is for print," Ballard writes in "The VERSO Solution."
So, Ballard writes, the library created its own: the Virtual Electronic Reference Source (VERSO), an intuitive, visual link to an e-reference titles that resides on the library's home page. How difficult is the building process? How effective was the result? If you're a small to mid-size academic library, like Quinnipiac, for example, "a grassroots, homemade virtual reference tool is probably the best solution available," Ballard writes. Nearly all of VERSO was "put together with simple HTML programming well within the means of almost any library." Read Ballard's full article here, or pick up the May 15 issue of Library Journal, out now.
|
| LJ Academic Newswire Newsmaker Interview: Author Marilyn French
With the 1977 publication of her breakthrough novel the Women's Room, Marilyn French became one of the world's great feminist writers. That book went on to sell more than 21 million copies worldwide. As publishers gather this week in Los Angeles for BookExpo America, the Feminist Press is celebrating a new milestone with French-the press is publishing in four volumes, what is very likely French's defining work-From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World. Library Journal Academic Newswire recently caught up with French to talk about this unparalleled work, as well as about society, culture, and a woman running for president.
LJAN: From Eve to Dawn, in 2002, represents a remarkable undertaking. Can you talk a little about the history of that book?
MF: This answer will be longer than you may desire-I started this history in the 1980s. My agent, Charlotte Sheedy, wanted to turn the history chapter in my book Beyond Power into a television series on the history of women. She was unable to interest any American television producer, but Channel 4 in Britain was interested. They paid me a fair amount of money, which I used to hire a managing historian and various experts, the best scholars in the world on women's history. In the next months, they sent essays on the most important issues in their period of expertise, and reading lists, and I worked, sometimes 14 hours a day, for 15 years. Meantime, Margaret Thatcher had placed British television on a self-paying basis, which led the educational department of Channel 4 to collapse. The television show was down the tubes.
Everyone told me to stop work on the history, but I couldn't. When I finished the book, it was 10,000 pages long. My British publisher cancelled the contract in the face of its length. My longtime American publisher, Jim Silberman, let the manuscript sit on his floor for months, then, he retired. Everyone told me to cut it. I resisted, but, finally, I did. Charlotte sold the book several more times, but, again, each publisher let it languish. After many years, Charlotte gave up on it. Having lunch with Margaret Atwood one day, I told her this story and she asked to see the manuscript, which by this time, was half its former size. She urged Kim McArthur, a Canadian publisher, to publish it-and it did well enough that McArthur later published it in England and Australia.
Can you talk a little about your relationship with the Feminist Press and how the book has now landed there so many years later?
Florence Howe, then head of Feminist Press, was a friend and asked to see it. She is a great reader and a great editor, and she felt it was a great book. Apart from Margaret Atwood, who wrote a perceptive review of it for the Times in London, Florence was the first person to read it seriously enough to see what I was doing: proposing an entirely different way of seeing the past and the present. Most history does not concern men and exclude women. Most history concerns power, which excludes human life or rather, treats it as if it were synonymous with power. It is not.
How difficult a task was it to put a complete gender history into book form?
It was terribly hard. I don't want to overemphasize that, since it was also very exciting to do. But information was so hard to come by, and the same things keep happening over and over. And the sad fate of women as a class, in period after period, was depressing to discover, and also to write. I would fall into bed at night thinking about some group of women, thinking, well, at least they died and are at peace.
In 1977, you published The Women's Room, a groundbreaking novel. How would you say things have changed for women-and, for you-in the decades since its publication?
My life had changed before I wrote the book-those changes made the book possible. I started the Women's Room in the 1950s, but could not finish it because the outlook for women was too depressing then. For women, lives in the west have changed enormously. Women with education can now have full careers and have no idea what it was like being limited to being wives and secretaries and salesgirls in department stores. Emphasis on the "girls" part of sales-girls, no matter their age. Women's lives in the east, however, even in China, have not changed as much, despite the laws promulgated by the early Communists in China.
|
| LJ Academic Newswire Newsmaker Interview with Marilyn French, Part II
Part II of the LJ Academic Newswire Newsmaker Interview with Marilyn French:
I can't resist asking one of the world's great feminist writers a few questions about society and culture-but first, politics! I'm curious to know how you view Hillary Clinton's campaign, for example, and Nancy Pelosi becoming speaker of the house?
Hillary Clinton was, at the outset, the best qualified candidate in either party, better qualified than anyone in the country except Al Gore. If she were a man, she would have been a shoe-in as a candidate. It is because she is a woman, intolerable as a candidate to many people in this country-women, as well as men, hate women-that she was so suddenly eclipsed. I don't particularly like Clinton's positions, but they are no different from Obama's on most issues.
Hillary
I sympathize with Hillary Clinton. She is a very smart woman with ambition, something I was myself once. She has had to suffer terribly in this campaign. When I was a child, I listened to the radio and heard the comedians and commentators making fun of Eleanor Roosevelt. They were cruel, and the carping was unremitting. I remember vowing to myself to have nothing to do with politics when I grew up, lest I attract such brutal criticism. Nothing has really changed since then. Woman hatred is, if anything, more pronounced, probably because men have been so threatened by feminism.
The person I would have liked to vote for was Dennis Kucinich. I would certainly vote for Hillary Clinton if I had the chance, and I did, in the New York primary. I was, for a while overjoyed that before I died, I would have the chance to vote for a woman for president. Alas, it seems I won't. As for Nancy Pelosi, she is not an ideal Speaker. She is competent, a politico like the rest. But being female shouldn't have to mean being ideal.
Being a library publication, I can assume the majority of LJAN's readers, statistically speaking, are women. Still, statistics also suggest that men in libraries make more money and are overrepresented in leadership roles. How do you view the workplace for today's woman?
As you say, women earn less, have less respect, and occupy, on the whole, lower rungs in the status ladders. But as I said, women are now prominent in fields they were excluded from when I was young, and no one is surprised to see them functioning super-competently in any field. But then, Aristotle saw brilliant women all around him in ancient Athens and still posited that they were a lesser species.
Technology, specifically the Internet, has been touted as a democratizing force. How do you think technology, from bloggers to access to more information and access to education and (supposedly) more opportunity, affects the dynamic between the sexes?
Certainly a couple of technological advances have profoundly affected women-birth control, for instance. The Internet does seem to increase democracy. But I do question this. Consider that U.S citizens have protested most of the wars we have fought, the Civil War in particular, and World War I, but probably because of the draft, no war was more vociferously protested than the Vietnam War, which nevertheless became the longest war we ever fought. Was that the government's reply to our protests? There were many protests of the present war before it happened and soon after it began. But control from the top is so complete now that even the New York Times and CNN, powerful media forces, did not bother to cover them. A protest without an audience is useless. And while photos of protests proliferated on the Internet, pictures from New York and Paris and London and everywhere, that war too, is still ongoing. What use is democracy when corporations and a handful of oligarchs run the world?
Last questions: what are you reading right now, and what are you writing?
I am writing a memoir. I am re-reading Cranford. I love Elizabeth Gaskell, who for years was put down and called "Mrs. Gaskell," like some inferior species. People should read her. Darwin is a character in one of her novels. There is North and South, Wives and Daughters, Sylvia's Lovers, Mary Barton, and a biography of Charlotte Bronte.
|
Library Journal Academic Newswire
Contributing Editor: Andrew R. Albanese
Phone: 646-746-6852 E-mail: aalbanese@reedbusiness.com
Editor: Francine Fialkoff
Phone: 646-746-6807 E-mail: fialkoff@reedbusiness.com
Executive Editor: Rebecca Miller
Phone: 646-746-6725 E-mail: miller@reedbusiness.com
News Editor: Norman Oder
Phone: 646-746-6829 E-mail: noder@reedbusiness.com
TO UNSUBSCRIBE
To unsubscribe send an e-mail to Unsub_Academic_Newswire@email.libraryjournal.com
TO SUBSCRIBE
Subscribe to Academic Newswire or our other newsletters
Subscribe to Library Journal magazine
ARCHIVE
Read past issues
PRINT
You must change your print settings from portrait to landscape to print this page.
VIEW OUR PRIVACY POLICY
Click here
QUESTIONS?
If you need further assistance with your newsletter subscription, please contact our Online Support Staff.
Send editorial questions about this newsletter to: aalbanese@reedbusiness.com.
RBInteractive: onlineads@reedbusiness.com, (888) 7RBI-WEB.
PRIVACY MANAGER: privacymanager@reedbusiness.com
Reed Business Information 2000 Clearwater Drive Oak Brook, IL 60523 | Fax: 630-288-8394
© 2007 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2008 Library Journal. All rights reserved.
"Library Journal" is a registered trademark. "Library Journal Academic Newswire" is a trademark.
|
