July 8th, 2008 Brian Herzog
I had family visiting me for the July 4th weekend, and something they did that I never do was buy a Sunday paper.
I read the local weekly papers, but never buy a big Sunday paper. The travesty of this is that I don’t get to read the Sunday comics - so of course that was the first section I grabbed when I saw the paper sitting on the breakfast table.
I only bring this up because a comic strip I’ve never seen before was very relevant to library work. Check it out, because it’s funny, and true.
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March 18th, 2008 Brian Herzog
In the wake of the recent announcements of companies ditching DRM* as a mechanism to control access to audio files, the New York Times is reporting that Sports Illustrated is opening up access to its entire archive.
The Times did this itself not too long ago, as did Atlantic Monthly, but SI’s project is supposed to go a step further - not just text, but they’re making available their photographs and video and everything. They’re also including a handy search interface that lets people search by athlete, team, coach, year, etc.
Hopefully, more and more periodicals will start making their archives available, too (after all, Information Wants To Be Free). This of course would dramatically change the relationships libraries have with long-time vendors like EBSCO, NewsBank and Proquest, but information is information. If all the information is free, then the real value-added piece becomes the interface.
By the way, I found about this through The Huffington Post. I’ve also read recently about a few more free online resources:
*update: OverDrive just announced (at PLA, anyway) that they, too, are finally moving in the right direction. In June they’ll start offering mp3 files - which, best of all, will be iPod-compatible. And they’ll finally come out with a Mac interface, too. Read the entire announcement [pdf, 70kb].
Tags: archive, archives, free, ipod, libraries, Library, mp3, overdrive, pluc, research, resource, Resources See Also
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