Open WorldCat: Book Buying Pilot and Virtual Reference Links

Some more information is starting to filter out regarding the Open WorldCat book buying pilot. An announcement posted to OCLC-CAT refcently had a bit more detail than that link. Here's an excerpt.

Each time a Web searcher purchases a book through Open WorldCat, a portion of the proceeds will be shared with Open WorldCat libraries in one of two ways. The purchaser decides online whether to apply a credit directly to the account of a selected Open WorldCat participant library or to redirect the credit to support the ongoing development of Open WorldCat for the benefit of all participating libraries.
In the introductory phase of book purchasing through Open WorldCat, Baker & Taylor is the single supplier of books. Baker & Taylor will sell books from its current inventory of over 500,000 titles. The book buying option will be visible initially to users in the United States. OCLC hopes to expand this feature to other content formats and additional partners, and to libraries outside the United States in the future. OCLC will pursue the best prices and discounts available for consumers, who will identify their library as part of the transaction.

Like I said in a comment to another post, I've always been a little iffy about the marriage of business transactions and libraries, but we'll see what happens.

Now, onto something I'm not iffy about, virtual reference. Everyone take a peek at this and let me know if there is interest in listing our virtual reference services. I'm our Open WorldCat contact, so I can get the necessary changes made. We'd need to have a single access page, so it would probably have to wait until the Web site re-design, but it's definitely something to think about. I've seen the links in Open WorldCat records and I'm thrilled by the visibility it could afford us.

ISBN-13 Is Coming, Dummy

If anyone is a little concerned/interested/confused by the impending 13-digit ISBN, the Book Industry Study Group has teamed up with our old pals at Wiley Publishing to offer ISBN-13 for Dummies. (By the way, does anyone else still bristle at being called a "dummy" when reading about MySQL or Robert's Rules of Order?) The pdf is just 21 pages and it appears to be geared more towards publishers than librarians, but the first few pages offer a nice overview of what's in store with ISBN-13. You may have noticed them lurking around a few versos already, and we can expect them to be fully rolled out around January 2007. My favorite bit of all this is that ISBN-13 for Dummies has, yep, you guessed it, a 13-digit ISBN!!! (978-0-555-02340-2, to be exact. You knew I'd check.)

I'm not really concerned about the 13-digit ISBN itself, it's the prospect of OCLC squeezing it into their existing 10-digit 020 field that gives me the willies. I'm sure that OCLC knows what it's doing and pretty soon everything will be fine, but at the moment we have to put it in the 024 field; which I have some reservations about, rather like wearing my sister's hand-me-down bell bottoms in 1986.

Project Muse full text searchable through Google

From College & Research Libraries News, July/August 2005, p. 507 or online:

Project MUSE, an online collection of scholarly journals in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, is collaborating with Google Inc. to enable researchers to use the Google Web site and the Google Scholar interface to search the Project MUSE Web site. Individuals at Muse-subscribing institutions will be able to search the full-text content from any of the more than 270 scholarly journals hosted by Project MUSE and access the articles in HTML or PDF format. Those unaffiliated with a MUSE-subscribing library will be able to view abstracts or excerpts of articles found through a Google search of MUSE journal content. Currently, MUSE subscribers can search and browse the collection’s journals through the subscribing library’s catalog and traditional abstracting and indexing databases.

BIG Meeting

The next meeting of the Atlanta Area Bibliographic Instruction Group (BIG) will be held on Wednesday, July 27th at the University of West Georgia in Room I-301 of the Technology Learning Center. That sounds like a cool place! The meeting is free but if you want to go, RSVP to Christy Stevens at cstevens(at)westga.edu by July 21st.

See this handy announcement for more info, including speakers and directions and such.

Freakonomics website

If you or a patron liked Freakonomics, there's a great companion website that includes an Authors' Blog. Levitt and Dubner post all the blog entries, and they accept public comments (and comment themselves).

And in case you're wondering who has the Decatur copy checked out, it's me.

Another Google Trick

I accidentally stumbled on this cool Google search today: if you type in an airline and a flight number the first result will be links to flight tracking sites. Very cool!

Here's an example: delta 824.

Have a great weekend.

eBook of the Month

Speaking of NetLibrary, I just read about their eBook of the Month campaign. Pretty neat. This campaign might be good content to highlight in our Web site redesign.

The eBook of the Month campaign is a monthly content promotion designed to showcase new and noteworthy titles available from NetLibrary and encourage patrons to visit your eBook collection. Each month, NetLibrary selects a new featured title and provides free, unlimited access through the authenticated homepages of more than 12,000 public, academic and special libraries.

The eBook of the Month for July is National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer by Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist. Looks pretty interesting, even to an unapologetic sports-phobe like myself.