Librarian of Fortune

welcome home

Just got home from a trip and found that our house had been broken into. Not much taken; the sheriff said that it's probably local meth-heads. And 5 neighbors in this 40-house subdivision have been hit within the last 6 months... Fortunately, nothing taken that isn't easily replaceable, although this will of course give Allstate an excuse for raising our rates.

Update: John F., don't worry! The sheriff caught the perps and they think they have recovered all the stolen property from all the places the losers hit.

ProQuest acquires Thomson Dialog

After surviving what has felt like benign neglect for several years now, Dialog is being acquired by ProQuest. Regardless of whether ProQuest decides to maintain Dialog as an aggregated search platform or to break out the databases into other packages, I'm reasonably confident that the wide range of content in Dialog will remain in some form. Whether or not the pricing is friendly to the small budgets of info-entrepreneurs and small organizations remains to be seen.

The virtual melds with the real

OMG. this article describes how Disney and Google have rolled out a virtual version of Walt Disney World, in Google Earth. When I think about this too much, my brain bleeds out my ears. Here we have a virtual representation of Earth, and in it we can go on virtual tours of real buildings in the real world.

I'm imagining the day when I could have my business tagged to my little corner of Google Earth (40°07'43.52"N and 105°12'59.66"W to be specific); people can actually "travel" to my home office, where I can give a tour of my business, sell my books, give workshops and consult with clients.

Powerset.com

My latest InfoTip newsletter looks at Powerset.com, an intriguing new semantic search engine (right now, only searching Wikipedia).

RIP Live Search Books & Acadmic

According to this announcement of May 23, Microsoft is shutting down Live Search Academic and Books. It's a shame; I particularly liked some of the Academic features, but MSN clearly decided that it wasn't going to compete with Goliath Google in these arenas. As Microsoft said in its announcement:

...the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content.

Translation: we couldn't figure out how to make enough money off it, so we hope someone else will do it...

Fortunately, there are several options, besides Google Scholar, including Scirus, the Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations, Public Library of Science, CiteSeer, BizSeer, among others.