TechEssence.info

For a while now I've noticed that journal articles from some not-for-profit (but not free) content delivery projects--like JSTOR and Project MUSE--have populated my Google search results. But the implications of that never sunk in until I sat in on recent presentations by salespeople from both Thomson Gale and EBSCO, both of who say they are working with Google on a similar capability: results from their databases will appear in Google results.

As anticipated, earlier this week the International Standards Organization approved the OpenDocument Format for retrieving and exchanging documents. The impetus to move to an open standard has come from governments, archivists, and librarians concerned about the storage and use of longtime proprietary document file formats such as MS Office documents and pdf files.

As a manager of information technology services, sometimes it's easy to lose sight of what these tools can really do. One of my non-work diversions is historical research on some obscure individuals in American history. Recently I revisited a few of these projects after having put them aside for several years, and used some tools that have been developed since that time: like Google Book Search, Proquest Historical Newspapers, and Newspaperarchive.com.

It has been vilified as spyware, but the Google Toolbar's Autolink feature is tantalizingly close to enabling a type of functionality I'm very anxious for: the ability to select book information (ISBN, mainly) on a page and link it to an ISBN search in the library catalog.