The two collections discussed here are the Japanese Woodblock Print collection at the University of California-San Francisco, representing a digitized version of physical holdings, and Arts Journal, a gateway to third-party public domain sources on the internet. While the collections share a few surface similarities, their intended user groups and organizational schemes have little in […]
What Are Apple’s Textbook and Educational Publishing Goals for the iPad?
For many, print textbooks are a vital and unchanging part of education. Writers and editors craft the books under the direction of a publisher. Teachers (or states) pick from the top titles on the market to be used in their classrooms. College students buy from their university bookstore, lug large volumes around in backpacks, and […]
Media Consolidation and Conglomeration: The Library Consequences
Over recent decades, consolidation has been a consistent theme in mass media and other types of information providers, with the emergence of large information empires which continuously acquire new subsidiaries. This conglomeration is a challenge to LIS because the values of these companies are directly contrary to many of the core values of librarianship. First, […]
John Stuart Mill on Intellectual Freedom: His Thoughts Applied to Today’s Information Landscape
In his essay On Liberty, published in 1859, philosopher John Stuart Mill makes a strong case for the necessity of intellectual freedom in society, outlining four points that would have a profound effect on librarianship. He argued that any and all opinions that are not heard may in fact contain truth; that the “collision of […]
Concerns Over Google’s Social Features and the Loss of Objective Search
Google’s key feature has always been simplicity: a clean, uncluttered search interface that returns the most relevant webpages for any query. The search giant would weigh a variety of factors to measure a page’s authority, most importantly its inbound links, and rank the list of results accordingly. But recently, Google’s quest to increase personalization and […]
Is Siri a Threat to Google and Search Engines?
With Google’s current dominance over search, it’s natural to speculate about possible threats. Microsoft’s Bing, for one, is investing big time resources in hopes of gaining market share, and up-and-coming services such as DuckDuckGo are also intriguing. But the strongest competitor might not be a traditional search engine at all, but rather a fundamental new […]