“This month, OCLC’s WebJunction celebrates 10 years as an online learning community for library staff. On May 12, 2003, a celebration at the U.S. Library of Congress marked the launch of WebJunction.org, a new online community dedicated to sharing the knowledge and resources necessary for libraries to successfully provide public access to information.” (via WebJunction)

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“Debra Hanken Kurtz, Assistant Director of ITS and Head of Digital Experience Services at Duke University Libraries, has been appointed as the new director of the Texas Digital Library (TDL), a consortium of academic libraries in Texas that provides shared services in support of research and learning. Kurtz will take over the duties of current director Mark McFarland on June 1. McFarland, who announced in November 2012 he would step down from his role, co-founded the Texas Digital Library in 2007, and has served as director or co-director of the organization since that time. McFarland will continue his duties as Director of Information Technology for the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin.” (via University of Texas at Austin Libraries)

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“Just weeks before the American Library Association annual conference, a new ALA-sponsored report, entitled Digital Content: What’s Next?, examines how libraries are evolving in the digital revolution, from e-books, to licensing, to developments in self-publishing. The supplement also details progress made by the ALA’s Digital Content Working Group. Contributors include Publishers Weekly contributing editor Peter Brantley, director of scholarly communication at Hypothes.is, whose piece, “The Unpackaged Book,” examines ways in which the “fundamental model of libraries, publishers, distributors, and books will need further re-engineering.” (via )

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“Members of the public in both New York City and Pennsylvania will soon get to see The New York Public Library’s original copy of the Bill of Rights, which will be exhibited for the first time in decades. The Library and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania today announced an agreement to share display of the national treasure, which has been preserved in The New York Public Library’s collections since 1896. The document will go on public display alternately at The New York Public Library and in Pennsylvania beginning in fall 2014 (the year marks the 225th anniversary of the document being drafted and proposed by Congress).” (via The New York Public Library)

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“LexisNexis® Legal & Professional, a leading provider of content and technology solutions, today announced that, together with Reed Elsevier Properties SA, it has acquired the acclaimed publishing brands and businesses of Sheshunoff™ and A.S. Pratt from the Thompson Media Group. Financial details of the transaction are not being disclosed. Widely known for its “how to” guides for compliance professionals, the Sheshunoff collection of publications includes more than 100 titles offering expert information critical for the financial services industry with a strong focus on federally regulated banking and credit union lending activities. The A.S. Pratt collection has established itself as the “gold standard” of analytical content for the banking and commercial practice areas and includes 40 industry-leading titles covering key legal and regulatory issues – including respected treatises, journals and newsletters such as the Banking Law Journal, Pratt’s Letter, Brady on Bank Checks, Clark’s The Law of Secured Transactions, and others” (via LexisNeis)

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“We have several more releases planned, including enhancements to both data coverage and functionality.  During the next few months we will extend the currently available data sets back to the 104th Congress, and will add Committee profile pages and indexed text of congressional reports back through the 104th Congress.  The next step will be to extend the core legislative data back to the 93rd Congress.  We also plan a release that focuses on improvements to the visual design and information architecture, based on usability testing that was conducted this spring.  Future releases will further enhance the search features, and begin implementation of an alerts framework.” (via In Custodia Legis: Law Librarians of Congress)

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“Texas A&M University and The University of Texas are opening up a joint library at A&M’s Riverside campus in Bryan, according to a report on the TAMUTimes, A&M’s news site. The aim is to combine the resources of both universities to house over a million books, for academic and medical research. Other institutions will also be able to use these books for research as well. The concept of the Aggie and Longhorn rivarly isn’t lost on the brass either.” (via Houston Chronicle)

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“Amazon only introduced the Kindle in 2007, but sometimes the literary world can already feel as if it exists entirely without the burden of print. New documentary, “Out of Print,” from one-time librarian and director Vivienne Roumani, tackles the questions that threaten traditional books following the digital revolution.Debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival last April although I caught it Tuesday at the Seattle International Film Festival, “Out of Print” clocks in at a brief 55 minutes in length, making it perfectly suited for television. That being said, it is certainly less appealing for an audience who’s paid any sort of attention to the news. While Roumani’s facts one in three American adults owns an ereader, and the like are certainly shocking, they’re not exactly revolutionary — most people are well aware that print is endangered, bookstores aren’t doing well and that teenagers love the Internet.” (via New York Daily News)

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“Carole King isn’t done with music – not yet anyway.

The 71-year-old singer-songwriter known for such hits as “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and “You’ve Got A Friend” was awarded the nation’s highest prize for popular music in a concert Tuesday. She received the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song at the Library of Congress and will be honored Wednesday by President Barack Obama at the White House” (via Associated Press)

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“The Harvard Library and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University are pleased to announce the appointment of Peter Suber as director of the Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC), starting July 1, 2013. Suber will continue his current activities as director of the Harvard Open Access Project, based at the Berkman Center, as well as his affiliations as a Berkman faculty fellow, senior researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and research professor of philosophy at Earlham College. Suber’s new role with the OSC closely aligns with his work leading the Harvard Open Access Project. Both are driven by a common vision for opening access to cutting-edge research for everyone who can make use of it. Integrating the two roles into one position will allow the projects to better share strategies, staff, resources, and knowledge, and accelerate the progress of open access both within and beyond Harvard.

via Harvard Library Portal)

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“The Obama administration went on record four years ago supporting a proposed international treaty to make books more accessible to the blind. But as world leaders prepare to gather in Morocco next month to finalize a deal that Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay proposed in 2009, the administration is mum on whether it supports a treaty that would, for the first time, loosen copyright restrictions. Many fear lobbying by Hollywood and dozens of the world’s largest corporations, including ExxonMobil, may scuttle the treaty altogether.” (via Wired.com)

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“The phrase “bookless libraries” arrives with a dull, oxymoronic thud, enough to get the blood of any bibliophile boiling. It’s the sort of thud made in the 1980s by doomed reports promising a “paperless office”. Anyone who remembers that much-mocked slogan might well shrug off this latest idea as overheated punditry.

Or perhaps they should think again, as the world’s first completely paperless public library is scheduled to open this summer in Bexar County, Texas, in the United States.” (via BBC News)

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“ARL has published Research Library Issues (RLI) no. 280, which features articles on open educational resources (OERs) as an alternative to traditional textbooks, ARL’s e-book licensing effort, and research library trends as shown by the ARL Statistics. A pre-publication version of the article about OERs was released earlier this year.” (via ARL)

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“Thanks to a recent $1 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, we will be expanding our TV News Search & Borrow service that enables everyone to search, quote and borrow U.S. television news programs. Launched last September, the service repurposes closed captioning to facilitate deep search and present relevant short-streamed with clips from more than 400,000 news broadcasts dating back to June 2009. We are striving to help inform and engage communities by strengthening the work of journalists, scholars, teachers, librarians, civic organizations and others dedicated to serving public interests.” (via Internet Archive Blogs)

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“Seated recently in the special collections room at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology library, Anders Fernstedt raced through an imposing set of yellowing articles and correspondence. Several years ago Mr. Fernstedt, an independent Swedish scholar who is studying the work of the 20th-century philosopher Karl Popper and several of his colleagues, would have scratched out notes and set aside documents for photocopying.” (via NYTimes.com)

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“For a long time we’ve wanted to expand our editorial products at Goodreads. Our general newsletter is great, but one of the coolest things we learned as we created the site was how readers around the world bond over a shared love of a particular genre, be it literature from 1900 to WWII, steampunk, or books about sailing. Knowing that, we wanted to provide a newsletter tailored to your passions. Today, I’m pleased to announce that we are launching our first genre-themed newsletter, with the plan to create many more in the future. We started with a voracious group on Goodreads: our YA readers. And we hope you’ll be satisfied!” (via Goodreads)

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“A decade ago, Brewster Kahle, philanthropist and founder of the Internet Archive, created the first digital bookmobile: a complete printing press in the back of a car. With a power source, satellite internet connection, printer and binder, the vehicle and its descendants subsequently printed thousands of public-domain books where they were needed most, such as in rural areas without internet connection, including schools and refugee camps across Africa.” (via )

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“John Van Horne, 63, who has presided over the Library Company of Philadelphia during nearly three decades of unprecedented digital change, has announced he will retire in May 2014. When Van Horne arrived in 1985, the Library Company, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731, had a Wang word processor. Soon, it acquired a fax machine that used thermal paper. Now the library has created a rich and growing online environment.” (via Philly.com)

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“Skip Prichard, an experienced senior executive in the information services market, has been named the next OCLC President and CEO. Mr. Prichard has led multi-national organizations that serve libraries across the full spectrum of library services and content needs. Most recently, he was President and CEO of Ingram Content Group Inc., which provides a broad range of physical and digital services to the book industry. Prior to his service at Ingram, he was President and CEO of ProQuest Information and Learning, a respected global publisher and information provider serving library, education, government and corporate markets with offices around the world.” (via OCLC)

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“James L. Hilton, a professor and higher education administrator nationally recognized as an advocate for collaboration between academics and technology, will return to the campus where he began his academic career, as U-Ms dean of libraries and university librarian. Hilton also was appointed as a professor, with tenure, in the School of Information. His appointments were approved Thursday by the Board of Regents and conclude an international search conducted by a search advisory committee.” (via University of Michigan)

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“Credo, the industry leader for information skills solutions, today announced that it has launched 12 new and updated Subject and Publisher Collections, adding to the more than 75 collections currently available for perpetual purchase or subscription.” (via Credo Reference)

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“A scholarly publisher has issued a warning to Jeffrey Beall, a librarian who writes about what he calls “predatory” practices in the scholarly publishing industry, threatening him with a $1 billion lawsuit for his blog posts criticizing the company. Beall is an academic librarian at the University of Colorado; he writes about the journal industry on his personal blog, Scholarly Open Access. More specifically, Beall identifies and lists journals that he says prey on academics’ need to publish their research. Such companies often charge a “handling fee” that requires authors to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars if a paper is published.” (via NPR)

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“The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) was recently named one of the top 10 original catalogers in the world in OCLC’s Annual Report for FY12. During that period, GPO added 17,310 new records for U.S. Government information products to WorldCat, a database of bibliographic information built continuously by libraries around the world and OCLC. As one of the founding members of the OCLC network in 1976, GPO has reached several important milestones as an active contributor to WorldCat over the years. In 1992, a GPO Cataloger contributed the 100,000th record to the OCLC Bibliographic Database, and in 1999, another GPO cataloger contributed the 43,000,000th record.” (via FDLP)

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“Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), a not-for-profit organization and leading provider of licensing and Open Access (OA) solutions, has joined the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), which offers a forum for bringing together the entire Open Access community. “As traditional and new publishers gather and create standards around Open Access publishing, it’s increasingly important to have organizations like OASPA leading dialogue among publishers, academics, researchers and others,” said Roy Kaufman, Managing Director, New Ventures, CCC. “We’re honored to be a part of OASPA’s ambitious mission of exchanging information, setting standards, improving the author experience, educating the research community and the public and promoting innovation.” (via Copyright Clearance Center)

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“Today, the menu of the Scholarly Kitchen is expanding with the launch of our podcast, which is being edited and managed by Stewart Wills, whose Side Dishes you have likely become familiar with via his excellent Twitter feed.” (via The Scholarly Kitchen)

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