attached mail follows:
When you're buying digital information -- bytes are bytes, it doesn't matter what they are called as long as you can provide appropriate access to that piece of information, and supply appropriate provenance and authorship. From a librarian's point of view I don't see how this varies from purchasing aggregated periodical content from Lexis/Nexis or ProQuest. In these cases the user is given one article out of context, while in the original periodical that article may have been part of a several on the topic which when taken together presented a balanced whole. Our students accept the disaggregated article because it meets their needs and because it is accompanied by cited provenance (journal/author). A chapter when it's read alone loses it's original context, but it may also be able to stand alone just fine. Hmm picking and choosing useful content ... sounds a lot like Hypertext and the Web. Sounds like what television editors do when they use a 5 second sound bite, or what journalists do when they report on only part of a speech, or like web sites that allow you to personalize which news stories and weather etc. you see on your own page. As librarians we have always dealt with different levels of granularity - cataloging both monographic sets and single sheet broadsides. Disaggregation of a bibliographic unit into pieces and re-aggregation of those pieces into a new bibliographic unit is something we've been dealing with for years (ProQuest/Lexis). If it is convenient for library users, and fills a needed niche, more power to them. --Dennis Dillon Head, Collections and Information Resources University of Texas at Austin ------------------------------------- > From: Gerry Mckiernan <GMCKIERN_at_gwgate.lib.iastate.edu> >Subject: Pieces of the Pies: Customized Books, or Slice 'Em and Dice'Em >MIME-version: 1.0 >Content-type: text/plain >Content-transfer-encoding: 8BIT >Content-disposition: inline > > _Pieces of the Pies: Customized Books_ > > On July 18, the New York Times published a most interesting article on >soon-to-be-available customized books > >[ "Books by the Chapter or Verse Arrive on the Internet this Fall / by >Lisa Guernsey" >(http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/07/biztech/articles/18book.html) > >NOTE: A free account must be established to access this item]. > >Here are some excerpts from the article > > "This fall, ...[The Frommer's guide to France] and a few hundred others >will take a new form on the Internet. They will be sold in component parts >-- chapters, maps and even paragraphs -- that can be mixed and matched. >Readers will be invited to create customized books by picking >pieces of content à la carte from an array of already-published guides" > >"Under this model, books have not only turned into streams of electronic >bits that are downloaded to hand-held devices or printed on demand. They >have also turned into databases -- pools of digital information that >people can extract and >combine on their own terms. " > >"Travel books, textbooks, cookbooks and how-to guides will be some of the >first books chopped into interchangeable parts, according to officials at >publishing and software companies experimenting with the concept." > >"If a book is going to be chopped into digital pieces for mixing and >matching, those pieces need to be technologically compatible with parts of >other books. And to make those pieces searchable across databases, >companies will have to establish a standard means to identify the >piecemeal content, just as the International Standard Book Number, or >ISBN, enables books to be catalogued, tracked and bought quickly. " > >"Most of the progress so far has come from the realm of education and >research. College professors, after all, have been mixing chunks of >editorial content for decades by assigning "course packs" that are >typically compilations of photocopied pages from magazines, anthologies >and nonfiction books. Now, with advances in copyright-protection software >and the recent drive to create electronic books, many publishers have >embraced the idea of selling individual chapters from multiple academic >books. " > > With these pending scenarios in mind, I am very interested in >initiating a list discussion of the implications and ramifications of such >developments for libraries and librarians and our clientele. >[I am particularly interested in the impacts on selection, acquisition and >cataloging.] > > As Always, Any and All comments, critiques, questions, contributions, >commentary, etc. etc. etc. are Most Welcome! > >/Gerry McKiernan >Theoretical Librarian >Iowa State University >Ames IA 50011 > >gerrymck_at_iastate.edu > > "Life is What Happens While You're Making Other Plans" >Received on Mon Jul 31 2000 - 07:51:03 EDT