Interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus June 19, 2008. "3 Mathematics Associations Caution Against Overreliance on Impact Factor." by Maria José Viñas. Apparently, the International Council for Industrial and Applied "Mathematics, the International Mathematical Union, and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics have released a report that the impact factor "measures are often misunderstood and misused." Other factors should also be considered.
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3102/
Attetion-- Hey -- does anyone out there want to volunteer to guest edit an issue of ATG that deals with Impact Factors?

There is a fascinating article in a recent New York Times about the Mundaneum Museum in Mons, Belgium and Paul Otlet. In the 1930s and 1940s, Otlet drew up plans for a network of "electronic telescopes". Otlet was fascinated with printed books and was described as a bookworm. But much of his work echoes what is happening now -- the Web, Google, social networks. In fact, reportedly Google is planning to open a data center at the edge of Mons. See "The Web Time Forgot," by Alex Wright.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html?pagewanted=1&ref=t...

Building on Cris Ferguson's great article in the April 2008 ATG Technology Left Behind column, "Throwing Kindling onthe eBook Fire" -- There is an interesting article in the NYTimes about the Kindle being the talk at BookExpo which just ended a few days ago. There was a standing-room only session given by Jeff Bezos in which he was talking primarily about Kindle "which he said already accounts for 6 percent of his company’s unit sales of books that are available in both paper and electronic format." Acceptance of the Kindle is reportedly seen as a "threat" by some booksellers who feel that it will increase Amazon's power as a bookseller. The article also features some new books coming out so check it out. See "Electronic Device Stirs Unease at Book Fair," by Edward Wyatt in the New York Times, June 2, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/books/02bea.html?_r=2&ref=technology&o...

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has posted a new web version of the American National Standard Z39.7-2004, Information Services and Use: Metrics & statistics for libraries and information providers—Data Dictionary, and invites comments from the information community. The Data Dictionary can be found on the NISO website at www.niso.org/dictionary/. NISO committees have updated and upgraded the standard several times since it was first published in 1968.
www.niso.org.

CQ Press, the book publishing unit of Washington-based Congressional Quarterly Inc. (CQ), has been sold to SAGE, the independent academic publisher. The sale was announced jointly by Robert W. Merry, CQ’s President and Editor-in-Chief, and Blaise Simqu, SAGE’s President and CEO. CQ’s corporate parent, Times Publishing Co. of St. Petersburg, Florida, announced on January 3 that it would divest CQ Press in order to direct investment resources to other opportunities, notably the core CQ publishing business and the company’s newspaper, The St. Petersburg Times. Merry said the sale will allow CQ to focus resources on its traditional journalistic enterprise as a provider of news and analysis on Congress, politics. and public policy. He added the company will expand its mission aggressively, particularly in web publishing. SAGE plans to keep CQ Press intact as a separate division based in Washington, D.C., bearing the CQ Press imprint, and retaining all CQ Press employees under the senior management team that will remain in place, including Publisher John A. Jenkins, who will also carry the title of President of CQ Press. SAGE, founded in 1965 as a publisher of academic journals, has expanded into a global education publisher of books, journals and electronic products. In four locations around the world, SAGE publishes more than 500 journals and 700 books a year encompassing 40 disciplines within the academic and scholarly arena.
http://www.sagepublications.com
http://www.cqpress.com
http://www.cq.com

Have just learned that EBSCO Information Services has acquired Minerva Wissenschaftliche Buchhandlung GmbH (Minerva), of Vienna, Austria, from Springer-Verlag GmbH & Co., a subsidiary of Springer Science+Business Media (Springer). Founded in 1909, Minerva has a tradition for providing service to libraries in the areas of serials management and monograph orders, complementing the EBSCO portfolio of products and services. Minerva is a subscription agency in Austria and Hungary and has business operations throughout Central and Eastern Europe. This new business opportunity resulted from Springer’s efforts to streamline its activities and focus on its core business of publishing. EBSCO will continue Minerva operations in Vienna. Accordingly, Minerva customers will retain their current customer service contacts and should expect no change in their existing service.
http://www.ebsco.com

Two interesting articles in today's New York Times (May 27, 2008) -- The first one on Google's resistance to posting their privacy policy on their "Spartan home page." See -- "Google Fights for the Right to Hide Its Privacy Policy," by Saul Hansell.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/google-fights-for-the-right-to-...
The second article is about Borders which is leaving their partnership with Amazon and launching their own e-commerce site. "Borders Book Chain Turns a Page on the Web" by Brad Stone
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/borders-book-chain-turns-a-page...

The OCLC Members Council has elected two delegates to six-year terms on the OCLC Board of Trustees. They are the awesomely fantastic Tony Ferguson (University Librarian, University of Hong Kong Libraries) and our Back Talk contributor in Against the Grain and Sandy Yee (Dean of Libraries, Wayne State University), and outgoing OCLC Members Council President. OCLC has adopted a new governance structure designed to extend participation in the cooperative to an increasing number of libraries and cultural heritage institutions around the world. On May 20, the OCLC Members Council approved changes to the Articles of Incorporation and Code of Regulations that had been recommended by the Board of Trustees. The changes will transform the current Members Council into a Global Council that connects with Regional Councils around the world. The new Global Council will replace the Members Council in a transition that is expected to take 12-18 months and will be coordinated between representatives of the 2008-2009 Members Council and the Board of Trustees. “I’m very excited about the prospect of involving librarians from throughout the Asia Pacific region in the evaluation of OCLC products and services,” said Tony Ferguson, who also makes the move from Members Council to the Board. “Asia Pacific librarians who attend the new Regional Council meetings will network with others facing the same challenges and will be able to directly communicate their needs and concerns to OCLC managers and developers.”
www.oclc.org

BookLocker.com has filed a class action lawsuit against Amazon.com in response to Amazon’s recent attempts to force all publishers using Print on Demand (POD) technology to pay Amazon to print their books. Amazon's policy would require that companies use BookSurge, the Charleston, SC-based company they bought in 2005. Booklocker is a POD publisher based in Maine.
http://antitrust.booklocker.com/booklocker-files-class-action-lawsuit-ag...

"Microsoft said Friday that it was ending a project to scan millions of books and scholarly articles and make them available on the Web, a sign that it is retrenching in some areas of Internet search in the face of competition from Google, the industry leader." See "Microsoft Will Shut Down Book Search Program," by MIGUEL HELFT, New York Times, 5/24/08.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/technology/24soft.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&...
Microsoft was partially funding the Internet Archive but Brewster Kahle says they have enough money "...for a while ... and [e]ventually funding will come from the public sphere" U of Toronto and other libraries plan to continue with the project.
And this from Techdirt, the Insight Company for the information age -- "... Microsoft ... is handing over the scanning systems it put together to its various library partners and hoping they'll continue scanning on their own, saying: 'Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries.'" http://techdirt.com/articles/20080523/1402111214.shtml