Posts Tagged nifty technology
Netflix being used by academic libraries
Posted by Elaine Patton in News on September 20, 2010
From Fast Company via the EFF Facebook feed:
For some time now, academic librarians have been resorting to Netflix to plug shortages in their media holdings. In fact, they have been thoroughly above-board about it; even the distinguished journal Library Trends ran an article about “Netflix in an Academic Library” last winter; author Ciara Healy wrote in the abstract that “Netflix turned out to be an excellent, cost-effective solution.” The other week, an acquisitions librarian at Concordia College in New York blogged about the blessing of her institution’s double eight-disc-at-a-time subscription, which she wrote saved her library $3,000. Though one commenter wondered “how you got this past legal for your university,” she responded that there had been “no legal repercussions.”
Whoops. Turns out Netflix isn’t actually cool with libraries using the service and doesn’t want early adopting librarians to be encouraging others to do so.
On the one hand, librarians should be more conscious than the general public about usage terms and agreements (as a function of copyright). On the other hand, Netflix effectively doesn’t care. On the other other hand, it’s too bad libraries can’t wrangle a corporate Netflix account or at least get Netflix-esque prices from their vendors.
Library-esque eBook advancement
Posted by Elaine Patton in News on May 3, 2010
I came across this little update through AustenBlog of all places: while you are in a Barnes & Noble store, you can have free access to eBooks for an hour at a time.
A lot of the discussion around eBook readers in relation to librarianship and traditional book reading has involved the ability (or inability) to annotate and share, and the place of eBooks in libraries. In that light, this is an interestingly library-esque addition to the Nook capabilities that nonetheless falls short.
For one thing, I’d love to know who decided the 1 hour cut-off…it seems rather arbitrary, unless, perhaps, there’s research that shows fast readers can finish a novel in 2 hours and so a more limited amount of time was in order.
I also wonder what the distribution of books is between B&N stores and their eBook selection. Namely, I’m wondering what the point of this access is if you can only take advantage of it while sitting in the midst of shelves and shelves of books, any one of which a customer can curl up with in one of the armchairs for as long as it takes to finish reading it. This seems like a step in the right direction but still not enough. I don’t expect corporate bookstores to take on the public library function, but even just setting up unlimited access only in a B&N store would better parallel the access to physical books.
