This is a very popular blog post from Jeremiah Owyang, a web strategist and analyst in SF CA.  He spends most of his time traveling from tech conference to tech summit and hobnobs with the industry leaders. 

I have been following his posts through a variety of platforms and get lots of great info from him.  Anyway, this link is about the various software apps and platforms that are termed "white label", or easily integrated into, or used as the basis of, an existing brand and website.  They include lots of social networking platforms as well as the CMS standards like Drupal, Joomla, Movable Type, Sharepoint, etc. The current PALNI website runs on a pre-packaged version of Drupal called CivicSpace.

Anyway, this is mainly just a "best of" list and a nice introduction to Jeremiah's blog.  I know several librarians who follow his work and see more and more systems and web services librarians using web strategies like he describes to improve library integration and "market penetration".

As of yesterday, Google is now allowing full book downloads of some classic works in public domain. I was just perusing my PDF download of a roughly 240 page volume of Charles Dickens' letters.

I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about Google Books. As an IT professional, I love it. The more information I can get at my desktop, the better. And I'm also in graduate school, so I'm a student. I'll admit that I'm just as much a part of the if-I-can't-get-it-full-text-at-my-desktop-then-it-doesn't-exist student mentality that frustrates most librarians. So, from a research point-of-view this is great.

As a personal user of the information, I'm not so thrilled. I have a lot of trouble reading large amounts of text form a desktop screen, and I know I'm not in a minority on this. I'm not going to read a novel on my desktop. I have trouble even with small e-books with regard to this. And I'm certainly not going to print out 240+ pages to read it (although I can picture environmentally unconscious people doing this). Rather, I'm more likely to skim through it and decide whether I want to own a copy or get it from a library.

I'm certainly not opposed to putting full text documents on the web. In fact, I like to consider myself a pioneer in this area. Yes, that's right. As far back as 1994 I was involved with a project at Hanover College called the Hanover Historical Texts Project which is actually still in existence if you want to follow the link. Myself and my fellow student works spent hours manually transcribing Old English documents and out-of-copyright authors like Petrarch and Dante to make transcripts of works. It's really not that different than Google Books, just that we didn't have the images to go with it. And it was extremely labor intensive. Ah, but just to think what could have happened if we could have turned that into a successful business model at the time. I could have been a Google guy!

The Washington Post today has a nice article on the Google Digital Library project. Nothing particularly new that I could tell, but it does give a nice summary of the history of the project and status of where things are today. Well worth the reading.

Amazon is now into the library processing business. Libraries can get books ordered from Amazon ready to go on to the shelf. Also, through partnerships with The Library Corporation, Marcive, and OCLC, libraries can get MARC records for itmes they order from Amazon, have them spine labeled with covers for the shelf, and even have their holdings sent to Worldcat automatically.