Monday, October 31, 2005

A Bunker State of Mind

Over at paidContent.org, Rafat Ali has a post about his attendance at the ONA (the Online News Association) conference. I've lifted this post's title from his and it refers to what he thought he observed among the conference attendees.

Have to say, I very quickly began thinking about library conference attendees while I read it. Rafat says, "...what I see is self-doubt, existential crisis, a siege mentality." Why, yes, Rafat, I do think librarians share some of these with journalists. "Audience" interest in what traditional libraries and traditional newspapers offer is waning and neither media outlets have figured out how to successfully offer the new along with the old. Both, in many cases, have employees who hope that interest in new content channels is a fad, a passing fancy.

Not likely. This is from a comment attached to the post that I suspect does reflect the opinions of this young person's peers:
I am 21, and just finished my business degree. I am one of the older members of the Net Generation - a generation that gets most of its information and entertainment through the Internet. The world I grew up in, is vastly different from the one my parents grew up in. We think differently. I even see huge differences in mentality, regarding media consumption, with my friends aged 25-30. I cannot speak for my peers, but I can tell you that there is at least one person excited about this future. I love media, and I am entrepreneurial by nature. The army of people like me, who have grown up in a different world from the people running the traditional media outlets, are only just starting to get into action.
So, it seems relevant to point you to an essay our colleague Eric Childress sent along to Alice, George and me called The Future of Libraries: Beginning the Great Transformation, written by a futurist, not a librarian.

Making Visible the Invisible at Seattle Public Library

I don't know how I missed this...a most interesting art installation in that piece of art otherwise known as the Seattle Public Library. It's called Making Visible the Invisible and is by artist/engineer George Legrady. The piece consists of six large LED panels that hang behind one of the main desks at SPL. The screens display visualizations of data generated in real time, based on all checked-out items, using several slices of data, including the Dewey Decimal Classification.
Pictures of the screens here, here (this post sent me to the others I link to) and here. An article from the online version of Seattle Post-Intelligencer is here.

Fascinating. I wonder if the library staff are learning things about use of the collection as they see the flow of content, rather than having that data disappear into the black hole of the OPAC.

Friday, October 28, 2005

More on Members Council

Alice mentioned earlier on the blog that Members Council met here in Dublin this week. What a group! The delegates to Council are among the most interesting, articulate, and creatively challenging people it's been my pleasure to work with. This meeting primarily focused on small and rural libraries, both in North America and around the world. We had some wonderful presentations: Chew Ling Beh (eLPEDIA, Singapore), Ellen Tise (University of Western Cape, South Africa), Ernie Ingles (University of Alberta, a delegate from OCLC Canada, and Council's vice-president/president-elect), and Andrew Wang (OCLC Asia Pacific) comprised a fascinating panel to talk on the state of libraries in various regions on Sunday night.

On Monday morning Jay Jordan gave his state of the cooperative meeting, with a special focus on what we are doing outside the US. Then, Jay Starratt (Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville/ILLINET delegate) led the delegates through a discussion of three questions about globalization that resulted in many insights.

Monday afternoon, Bruce Newell (Montana Library Network/OCLC Western delegate) and Jeff Baskins (William F. Laman Public Library, North Little Rock, Arkansas/Amigos delegate) offered a fascinating program on issues facing small and rural libraries, with the focus on US institutions. (Bruce's excellent white paper, "Montana Libraries: Good Neighbors," is available on WebJunction.)

There were also lots of discussions in interest group and type of library meetings. The minutes, small group meeting notes, and other proceedings will be up on the Members Council website soon.

The Council also passed a resolution asking OCLC's Board and management to approve funding for a Council meeting outside of the usual sanctuary of Dublin, Ohio. We have some spade work to do on identifying sites and costs, benefits and ROI, but more on that later!

The meeting concluded with a presentation by Cathy De Rosa on the new study of public perceptions of library and information services that I mentioned in my previous post. I am sure that Alane Wilson, as one of the principal authors of this report, will post here as soon as the report is available online, but I've been informed that it should be available very soon. Watch this space or the OCLC web site.

Podcast

Paul Miller from the UK's Talis will be interviewing me next month on the scan and the new OCLC report which will be released shortly on public perceptions of library and information services. He's opened his blog for anyone who wants to suggest questions we might discuss, and if you have any ideas, please post your comments there.

And please, be kind...this is my first podcast!

George

Thursday, October 27, 2005

WSJ approves of Google Print

Alan Murray has written a column in the Wall Street Journal on why "Google Library is Great for the World."

He's looking at it from an economist's point of view--rather than the publishers--and of course Google's revenues and earnings are looking really good right now. (Raise your hands now--how many of us bought stock when we should have?)

One line from the article give me a twinge, when I have my library hat on:

The Google economy is a kind of high-tech feudal system: The peasants produce the content; Google makes the profits. That's all the more annoying to the content crowd because the lords of this money machine--Sergey Brin and Larry Page--perpetuate the goofy-sounding notion that they do all this to help the world, rather than line their own pockets.

"That's true," Brin said in an interview. "We talked at Stanford for a while about making Google an open-source project. We ultimately decided that would not be an efficient way for us to get the resources we needed to make it run. So we started a company."

As for the Google Print Library Project, Brin says, "We actually dreamed of the ability to do this back before we started Google as a company." It is good for Google's users, good for the business, it's fair, and it's legal, he says. "But more importantly, I think it is really great for the world."



Goofy-sounding notion indeed.

The article needs a login (which I don't have) but there is a Video available for free. And the video gives a clear picture of what "normal" people (or at least media/business people) think about Google Print.

Check out the video--there is one point where the commentator says, "What's the difference between this and going to the library?" I soooo wanted to jump into the conversation!!

Of course, there was also one guy who was adamant that "no one is going to read a book on the computer screen."

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

More on Books as the Brand

Thomas left a comment on the previous post about the results of our survey showing that "books" is what 69% of 3,348 respondents think of when they think of libraries. ("Information" was a distant second at 12%.) I am pulling part of his comment up so I can remark on it.

"If books are the brand of libraries. Maybe we should look at what other things are branded with books. Try Knowledge, Wisdom, Reliability, Information etc. Maybe not so bad brand after all?"

Well, unfortunately, those other good qualities Thomas lists were not mentioned often as being the "top-of-mind" association. If they were indeed co-branded with books, then these works would have been mentioned frequently in the same comments with books as in "A place where you find lots of books and information." They were not.

We did actually probe for those other attributes Thomas mentions, in other questions, and we also took a very close look at the verbatim comments contributed as answers to this question because we wanted to know if books=information, knowledge, learning and so on. Our analyses conclude...no. When respondents said books we are pretty confident they meant the physical thing, not what "book" embodies. The word "smell" showed up a lot, for example, as in "smelly old books. "

You'll be able to have a look at this yourself when we publish the report. We will also be publishing a companion/followup piece called The Library Brand where this is explored more.

When we asked what respondents thought the purpose of the library is, most people said "information" and in response to another question most respondents agreed the library is a place to learn.

It's important to note that the question we asked about the first association people make with "library" was an open-ended one. This means people could say anything they liked. This is different from a question that guides responses by providing a list of choices. The question we asked about the role of the library in the community was a guided response one. Respondents picked from a list of 14 attributes and 85% said the library is a place to learn. This suggests, that when prompted, people do see a role for the library that is beyond the top-of-mind association of books.

If this is confusing to you, try the top-of-mind association game yourself. What is the first thing you think of for "hospital?" What is the first thing you think of for "Mercedes-Benz?" Whatever that word was is the "brand" (for you) of those two things. Now answer the question "what is the role of a hospital/Mercedes-Benz?" Whatever you answered is the "brand promise." They are very different. And neither actually have to be anywhere close to the experience you actually have had of hospitals and Mercedes-Benz.

Here's some of the verbatim comments with the country of the respondent in brackets: A facility that is mostly concerned with books. (Canada); a building with books (Wales); A great collection of books (India); A place to borrow books (US); books and a woman in glasses (Australia); borrowing books (Singapore). And here's one of the very few that included several attributes: A place where expertise, information, knowledge and entertainment are available to the masses.

Sunday, October 23, 2005

Read. This. Now.

I've had this post sitting in the draft box for several days waiting for the web site of the magazine Fast Company to reflect the latest print issue so I could point you to the article I talk about below, but it is still showing the October one. So, either find a print copy or you might have to wait until the November issue shows up on the Web site.
********************

Get those library glasses out and read this Fast Company essay with them on. It's a mere two pages long but should have you shifting uneasily in your chair, or bouncing up and down, yelling, "yes! yes!! yess-ss!!" The title is "Back in the Box" and it's by Douglas Rushkoff. [spelling corrected, thanks]

"In their endless rush to embrace the next big thing, too many businesses have forgotten what they are and what they really do. The fashionable compulsion to break with the past has, bizarrely, come to mean abandoning the true value they once offered customers."

And this, for me, resonanted with something I read last week, in a source few of you will be able to lay hands on--nyse magazine (oct/nov 2005) which is published by the New York Stock Exchange. (It was on Jay Jordan's desk and it was, um, borrowed). The article was about McDonald's.

"Back at the turn of the new century...a variety of cost-cutting measures had derailed the company. 'Ultimately,' says CFO Matt Paull, "we think we hurt the brand."

As Alice has noted, we are thinking a lot about brand in our part of OCLC (George probably is not thinking do much about this) because of the survey I tiresomely keep referring to that you can't see yet because we haven't released it (I tell you proofreading umpty dozen tables full of numbers takes a long long time). The survey results show that for the respondents--3300+ in 6 countries--the overwhelming top-of-mind association with "library" is "books". So, "books" is the brand of The Library.

Perhaps you are not surprised. Perhaps you are happy that this strong association exists. But, it is then a bit odd, I think, that for all the e-resources we've added, for all the portals and web sites that have been built, for all the classes academic librarians have held on using non-print resources, for all the computers that people use in public libraries.....that the brand is still books.

So, this is what we have to work with when we promote our libraries and their resources. Like it or not, it is not possible to change peoples' associations with a strong brand by telling them something different. BIG questions: what is the value of The Library and what does it do?

Friday, October 21, 2005

Members Council this weekend

Librarians around the world are packed their bags to gather at Members Council this weekend. Alas, I was not looking at my calendar (I was actually in the airport...oddly enough) when my mother rang me up to ask if she could come see this new house (and its associated boxes) that she has heard so much about.

So without so much as an inkling of common sense, I agreed that she should take advantage of the cheap flight she has procured and come visit.

All of that is to say unfortunately you will have to rely on Alane and George this time, for all the dialogue and conversations that emerge. Or perhaps it is fortunate? Oh--don't answer that!

Tuesday, October 18, 2005


A completely gratuitous post...Inquiring (kitty) minds want to know... Posted by Picasa

City branding

Speaking of branding and the trend towards branding things you never used to think needed a brand...(libraries, the post office, water, universities) cities now join the ranks.

Oh sure, cities have always had marketing campaigns and bids for tourists. Vegas, Honolulu, New York...but this new effort looks like it has residents--as well as tourists--in its target audience.

The City of Atlanta has an initiative underway, complete with new logo, anthem, newsletter and team. The message is "Opportunity, Optimisim, Openness" and the effort highlights Atlanta's prominence as a major airport hub ATL.

I am beating the branding horse again, I know, but I tell you this: if a major city that hosted the Olympics less than 10 years ago now feels compelled to spend $4.5M on image perception, it makes me think that we (speaking for libraries as a whole) have a lot of catching up to do.

Friday, October 14, 2005

Top 100 brands

We've been doing a lot of talking about the library brand and what that means lately, largely around the report Alane was talking about a few posts ago. So my "brand antennae" has been up, you could say.

Which is what the "Top 100 Global Brands Scorecard" caught my eye. The top 4 brands have not moved in the past 4 years: Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE, in that order.

The next 5 have all hung together, although there has been some switching around: Intel, Nokia, Disney, McDonald's, Toyota, Marlboro.

A few surprises for me: Starbucks was way down on the list, as was Apple, Nike, VW--all these brands that I tend to think of as watershed, in terms of great, memorable, visual brands and brand experiences...

Check out the list for yourself.

And then start to think where the mindshare might be for "Your Library" in your library user/patron/customer/information consumer's head. Because this list represents the brands that are your competition for his/her attention!

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Google looks for content

I know, I know...everyone's heard it already. But I can't help but bring it up, as it seems the harbinger of what we all know is true: content, content and more content will rule the roost, soon enough.

Read more about the Google+Comcast deal to buy the content side of AOL, from Reuters.

Of course, it's all rumors and innuendo at this point.

ABC TV on your iPod
And just in case you read my fawning review on the new Nano and rushed out to buy one, (Come now, you know who you are...) I have a reason for buyer's remorse: an even more recently released iPod does video. Story from CNET. More photos. (And it comes in black, too, which my fashionista sense says will match more of my "I hang out with graphic designers" wardrobe.
I hear you can watch Desperate Housewives on it? Ah, but will it play CSI?

Perhaps now Alane will finally want to watch some TV... Speaking of TV and ABC, have you seen ABC's mobilestore, where you can download show clips to your mobile phone? Very interesting...

There are apparently more than 11,000 audiobooks in iTunes, too.

New Card
All this happened today AND I got my new library card with my new address on it today. And guess how easy it was?

A heck of a lot easier (and MUCH more pleasant) than most of the other forms, systems and bureaucracy I encountered today. Foreshadowing for the post tomorrow...

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Semiotics to the Rescue

I found this article , "More Use RSS Than Have Heard Of It" from ClickZ very interesting, reporting on a survey conducted for Yahoo! by Ipsos Insight. "The number of tech-savvy Internet users who knowingly sign up for RSS syndicated content is only four percent, while another 12 percent are somewhat aware of the term RSS. Twenty-seven percent of adult Internet users access RSS feeds through personalized start pages, though they don't know that's what they're doing on personalized portal pages."

One reason it's interesting to me is that the survey data we're wading through to produce the report (titled The OCLC Report on Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources...still on for release at the end of the month) shows this same odd relationship between use and familiarity in our data. Even though our survey takers all use the Internet, sometimes they report "never have heard of" for things that make us scratch our heads..."they use the web and x% have never heard of email?" What is up with that!?

Well, this report helps me understand why maybe. Even web-savvy users don't always know what the particular service/feature names are, especially if the functionality provided is known by several names (email, chat, IM), or if the discrete function/service is perceived to be part of a bigger whole. And example of this might be "ask an expert" services. If I've sought help from a Lands' End expert while shopping online I might not separate that bit of the process from the process as a whole. So, on a survey I might answer, "yes, I have shopped online," but answer "no, I have not used an ask-an-expert service."

The converse is true too...a brand name such as Kleenex, Xerox or Google comes to "stand in" for the entire use category, as in: Hand me a kleenex please, I'll just xerox that for you, Did you google her?

This article and the data from our survey suggests to me that there is a lot of thinking and testing that needs to be done to determine what we call resources and services we offer over the Web...or whether in some cases we don't call them anything and embed them seamlessly.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Reagan Library workers claim age discrimination

From NPR: Reagan Library volunteers were relieved of their duties, because they were too old. Of course, many of them are younger than the President, when he left the white house.

Monday, October 10, 2005

Open WorldCat Reviews (revised)

Revision added October 12. Ok, ok...sometimes I write/talk before I think/do (I am an ENTJ on the Myers-Briggs scale) and this was one of those times. As several of my esteemed colleagues informed me...I am flat out wrong about linking in the Open WorldCat reviews feature. Lorcan clarifies in the comments to his original post, linked below. Here's what he said:

Thom Hickey writes a little about how the review functionality is implemented with some links to background information about the underlying technology. Thom points to a review he has started in which there are several links. URL links are now supported. At first there was some concern about links to inappropriate sites. After feedback, it has been decided to allow links and see what happens. The guidelines will be amended to reflect this soon.

Thanks to everyone who corrected me.

Finally, Anonymous Commenter? I do know, generally, what "nudnick" means...and like the sound of the word added to the meaning to connote "annoying wind bags who know nothing."

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Original Post: Only so we don't look like complete know nudnicks, I refer you to Lorcan's post about the release of the terrific review feature in Open WorldCat (no bias here!).

S'wonderful, S'marvelous. Can I just say that it would be more marvelous if we could link from within the review? We bloggy types are habituated to the hot link inside and it feels like amputation to have to communicate in flat text. I've forgotten how to point people to things except to provide a link.

My stalwart OCLC Open Worldcat colleagues....it's all about context! Stand alone bib records--even those enhanced by reviews--are entombed little artifacts. When readers can show others that this book has connections to that book, and this web site and these seventeen journal articles and that one really flakey personal blog...then we're really exposing the value of metadata and exploiting in the best sense the value of WorldCat.

Nice PowerPoints!

At the Ohio Library Council conference last week, Omar Wasow quipped, "Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."

Despite this sage advice, you might want to check out Eric Childress' PowerPoint presentation on applying the OCLC Environmental Scan in a tech services context. It will be available tomorrow on the Office of Research presentation web site.

If you're attending the Arizona Library Association conference later this week, I hope you'll find time to attend my presentation on Thursday morning, "Google, Gamers and the Gathering Place: Implications of the OCLC Environmental Scan for Arizona Libraries." But if you don't go to my presentation, go see Chrystie Hill, who will be talking about Arizona's WebJunction, or Tim Prather from Amigos Library Services, who will be talking about OCLC's Union List Service. We're all on at 9:00 a.m. Thursday.

Reputation is stronger than truth

A MARC Database Manager and Senior Cataloger at the State Library of North Carolina was on her toes last week. She sent me the story "The Mining of the Invisible Web," and I just about fell on the floor. There is a line in the article,
"Meanwhile Google is creating a comprehensive bibliographic database that it calls WorldCat to search for and find information formerly only found in libraries."


Maybe I've been on my soapbox again lately, talking about reporters checking facts (or NOT checking facts, as the case may be).

I asked if I could share it with everyone, to which she answered:
"Please do share it! I'm so glad you enjoyed it. Though I am steamed on behalf of OCLC and thousands of nameless catalogers that one of our major cooperative products is being attributed to Google..."


And I am pleased to report, there are a number of comments (6 so far) to correct the author. The most colorful, I have to say, is "Sergey Brin was just a gleam in his daddy's eye when OCLC invented WorldCat!"

The other thing it tells me, is that we (OCLC) need to make sure it's very clear who is doing what: librarians and library staff members are building WorldCat. Google is simply indexing it and making it visible/accessible on a much wider scale.

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Omar Wasow: Move from "Information to Transformation"

Omar Wasow was the keynoter on Thursday at the Ohio Library Council conference. What a dynamite speaker!

Mr. Wasow is the co-founder of BlackPlanet.com, an online service aimed at African Americans that now has more than 16 million members. He is also a frequent media guest, on CNN, The Tavis Smiley Show, and, perhaps most notably, as the man who taught Oprah how to use computers in a 12-part series on her show.

Mr. Wasow managed to ingratiate himself with me immediately by NOT talking about how much he liked libraries when he was a child. Instead, he related how he had used libraries this spring to wipe out a few incompletes on his college transcript, allowing him to enroll in a Ph.D. program at Harvard which he started last month.

But the bulk of Mr. Wasow's comments were about how libraries must move from a focus on information to one of transformation. He referred several times to the OCLC Environmental Scan, mostly approvingly but occasionally taking us to task for focusing too much on the information role of libraries. (He did note positively our discussion of the library as "third place," but he thought we should have centered on this more.) He applied the concepts laid out in The Experience Economy by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore to libraries, saying that we should pay as much attention to the experience our users have when they use our services as we do to the services themselves. "The experience of being in a library can be as important as the information available," he said. "Part of the magic of libraries is the experience."

Mr. Wasow's last thought was inspired: "Too often, libraries are viewed as a Temple of Books. To succeed, libraries must embrace that they are Temples of Thought!"

Thursday, October 06, 2005

A Nice Pair of Breaches, or Divides, Digital and Other

Today, I'm speaking at the Ohio Library Council conference here in Columbus on the things we as librarians can learn from the gamer generation. And as I was preparing for the talk, I was thinking a lot about a short essay that Alane turned me on to, called "“Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,"” by Marc Prensky.

Prensky got me thinking about one of the first roles of American public libraries, the key reason Andrew Carnegie was so interested in underwriting library buildings all over North America. Carnegie believed that having public libraries in every city, town, and village would help geographic immigrants acculturate (and yes, even assimilate) in their new home. The public library and the librarians would help immigrants learn the language, the customs, and the other basic material needed to gain citizenship in this strange land.

To me, this is the library's role in the digital divide. We can help digital immigrants acculturate to this strange new land. We can help them learn the language, the customs, and the basic rules of the road. The librarians at the turn of the 19th century did not see it as their roles to lift people out of poverty and make them middle class American citizens. They saw it as their role to provide access to the tools (anachronistic phrasing, I realize) that the immigrants could use to help themselves.

I agree with Alane that libraries and librarians cannot cure poverty or homelessness, we cannot fix the lives of people who make bad choices, and we can't change the economic system. What we can do is help people learn to use all the tools that are available to them, and then, maybe, they can do those things for themselves.


Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Once More, Into the Breach

Over at BlogJunction, our QuestionPoint (goodness, why did I type QuestionPoint??? And why didn't I notice until Chrystie pointed out on 06/05 that she works for...) WebJunction colleague Chrystie Hill has a thought-provoking post revolving around this question: "Is there anything that’s still relevant to me about my library?"

This is a relevant question! And is related to the data I refer to a couple of posts below that we have in-house and are publishing soon about peoples' perceptions and uses of libraries. Chrystie is much younger than I am, and one trend that's very evident among the data gathered is that younger people (14-25) have much less use for and interest in using libraries and their resources, print or otherwise, than older people. Perhaps this was ever so, but I suspect the disinterest is supported now by other technologies and ways of accessing and delivering content.

Chrystie also says: "Is there enough there there to sustain this concept of libraries for the public good? I’m afraid we can’t sustain ourselves serving only the people in our communities who have no money; the benevolence of our government or other benefactors is far from guaranteed."

Now, at the risk of starting another go-round with George about the Digital Divide (actually I thoroughly enjoy these debates!), this issue of sustainability and serving people with no money (and it's these people that are always assumed to be on the "have not" side of the DD) is huge. There are very few organizations that have sufficient funds, out of the public purse, to serve the disadvantaged adequately (welfare? medicare? food stamps?).

And the current sociopolitical climate, at least in the US, has more and more money being removed from funding the public good from government purses, leaving the gap to be filled, in theory, by generous private benefactors. One response from the library community is that we, then, must step up and bridge the divide on behalf of the disenfranchised.

What are the stats on TV ownership in the US? Rheotrical question because TV ownership is very, very high. There are few disenfranchised wannabe TV /owners/viewers. Why is that? Because most people choose to participate in that form of technology and will assume debt to participate. Which suggests that even people with low annual incomes decide to spend scare dollars on something they value.

OK, I'll stop being oblique. The so-called digital divide, in the US, is one driven by values. If people valued access to seek-it-yourself information, to email, to the internet in the same way that they clearly value access to network TV, I doubt there would be a digitial divide. The DD, simplistically, is a clash of values between what librarians think people want and need and what people opt to spend time and dollars on.

Here's a divide for you: my husand and I own a television. we never watch it. I haven't watched TV at home for almost 20 years. Ahhh, you say to yourself, that's what's wrong with her!

Monday, October 03, 2005

Foiling the Spambots

Dear readers and sometime commenters: we've had to turn on the comment verification feature because, for some reason, the volume of blogspam has jumped recently. So, humans now have to type in the word they see in order to leave a comment. I wonder why so much of our spam was about voip services?

Yahoo to digitize library collections

Now that Google is having to duck and cover on the copyright infringement issue--and the authors guild is up-in-arms--Yahoo will quietly step into the breach.

Here's a snippet of what Scott Carlson and Jeffery R. Young of The Chronicle report about the project:

Yahoo officials say that the project is not a response to Google's partnership with five major research libraries to scan millions of books, and that some planning for the Yahoo project was under way before Google announced its plans last December.

The new archive is called the Open Content Alliance, and it was conceived in part by Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library. The archive will be doing much of the actual scanning for the project, using a process it has developed in recent years. Libraries involved in the project can have their books scanned by the Internet Archive for 10 cents per page, which leaders of the project say is far below the standard price of scanning.

Other participants in the project are Adobe, the European Archive, the National Archives of England, O'Reilly Media, and Hewlett Packard Labs. The project hopes to attract other libraries and other partners, however, as well as more financial support.


Here's the story as it ran in the Washington Post.

Interestingly enough, the link for Open Content Alliance did not come up on top, for a Google search.

I am a bit irked, though, by headlines such as "Open Content Alliance brings libraries online" (from Macword UK) and wonder if the editor really thinks that libraries just *hadn't thought of it yet* ?

We know the truth, my friends...and I guess this is where we smile as say, "Yes, isn't it wonderful? Great library content, all available online, all the time. A dream come true!"