Information Research Weblog

While searching for information on the King County wireless Internet system, I came across a conference series I hadn't seen before, which is available on the Web. It's the Virtual Reference Desk Conference series. The first thing that hit my screen was a discussion between Mike Eisenberg (University of Washington) and Charles McClure (Florida State University) in the second conference in 2000, which is entertaining as well as informative. However, there's a lot more there on the impact of the Internet, and of electronic connection between user and library that points to significant changes going on and likely to accelerate.

The latest papers (although, in fact, most are presentations rather than papers) available are those from the 2002 conference. One of the 'exemplary' papers is from Simon Bains at the University of Edinburgh on Testing Collaborative Electronic Reference Services: The Experience of UK University Research Libraries in the Use of QuestionPoint

All in all, worth a browse.

In the course of my browsing, I came across Walt Crawford's column in American Libraries on 'the PoD people' - that is, the phenomenon of Print on Demand. These days anyone with a word-processor can produce a book text that is good enough for publication - at least in technical terms, whether it is readable is another matter! Crawford suggests that a publisher might charge $100 to $160 to convert the text to PoD form and make a profit. Of course, many people are already producing books in this way - but putting them on their Web sites, rather than having them turned into print. Much of the stuff I have looked at would not be worth buying in any event, but one shudders to think about the problems caused for libraries by having to select what is good from this kind of output for the benefit of their readers. A number of e-book providers already exist, for example cBook Pro offers to guide you through the production process and claim s that thousands of sales can be made to impulse buyers. For the PDA market there are sites like Handheld Crime, which offer both free downloads to Palms and Pocket PCs and books for sale.

In other words, Crawford is probably right about the potential explosion of output.

Tom

Greetings from snowy Poland. I'm in the old city of Torun, which currently has snow falling. I'm at a conference here of the DELOS group - dedicated to digital libraries in Europe. The papers will be published in some form after the conference and should be of interest to many readers of Information Research. In the interim, after the conference, the powerpoint presentations will be on the Web site of ICIMSS - I'll keep an eye on this myself and let people know when they are available.