Open Letter from Gale: "Play fair, EBSCO"

Just read John Barnes' (Executive Vice President, Marketing & Business Development, Gale) "Open letter to the library community" describing how:

"...EBSCO, persists in a practice that drives up costs while limiting access to information...", that "...vendors should support libraries with advocacy efforts and sponsorships..." and that "If you worry about information costs going up, we ask you [the libraries and librarians] to take a stand."

Although you could see this kind of statement as self-serving (siding with their customers against one of their biggest competitors), I think this may be a case of technically all actions being in your self-interest.  (We still think there's altruism despite this interpretation.)

This is very interesting to me, given my new position as Collections Librarian.  It presents a problem:  clearly this can and probably does happen.  Information vendors are businesses and it makes business sense to create micro-monopolies wherever possible.  And this does increase costs that are passed on to the customer.  But it's very difficult to see - when there's only one price, it's impossible to compare it - and very often these are resources that libraries cannot operate comfortably without so we can hardly boycott them.

What would YOU do?

[ Found via "Open letter to the library community from John Barnes, Gale" from Against-the-grain.com ]

Catalog2Delicious widget idea

I've had the item "Consider how to contibute to the organization of global goods (primarily information)." in my RTM to do list for quite a while but I keep postponing it, not knowing exactly how to accomplish such a task. Some of the more popular ways the general public find information (such as checking Google or asking their friends) don't really allow for such outside assistance. The creation of a new tool or method wouldn't really help unless it somehow fits into what they're using already.

One area of possibility is through the use of del.icio.us. I like del.icio.us and I think, despite the fact that the majority of people don't use it directly, let alone know what it is, that it is such a valuable storehouse of "tags" (along with other similar tools) and therefore metadata that could support future/behind-the-scenes organization of information, that it might be a good place to focus my efforts. Then I was thinking about how libraries and librarians use delicious: not very much. But how COULD we?

Not wanting to redo all the work that is put into the catalog, perhaps what could be created is a plug-in that automatically creates and updates a del.icio.us bookmark that corresponds to each record in the catalog (and vice versa) so that the work is only done once but the content reaps the benefits of being both controlled within the catalog and "out there for the world to see" in del.icio.us.

I don't have the programming expertise to develop something (yet) but perhaps someone out there does? I give this idea away into the public domain... Have at it!