Librarians and Publishers Try Out a Plan to Simplify Negotiations Over Electronic Resources

From the Chronicle (subscription required) | Librarians and Publishers Try Out a Plan to Simplify Negotiations Over Electronic Resources. Worth a read if you can access it via your library.

For many college librarians, the annual process of placing orders and negotiating licenses for online journals and other electronic resources is far too cumbersome and time-consuming.

"Part of the problem is that libraries often negotiate different license agreements with each entity that provides them electronic content," says Deborah R. Gerhardt, copyright and scholarly-communications director of libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Each license can contain dozens of intricate provisions: Are faculty members permitted to place journal articles on electronic course reserve? Under what circumstances, if any, will off-campus users have access to the material?

...[R]elief may be on the horizon. Several weeks ago, a coalition of librarians and publishers began to experiment with a radically simplified method of purchasing electronic materials. Libraries and publishers can now agree to use the "Shared E-Resource Understanding," or SERU, a five-page document that lists a few dozen stipulated points. (For example: "The subscribing institution will employ appropriate measures to ensure that access is limited to authorized users and will not knowingly allow unauthorized users to gain access.")...

Free company profiles

Infotoday reports

Zoom Information, Inc. unveiled a new ZoomInfo.com that now provides free access to information on millions of companies, people, and jobs. Some of the information was previously available only by subscription. Its newly improved business-oriented semantic search service helps users find information about companies and their employees—it will be available to any Internet user under an advertisement-supported model. The site offers more powerful searching, the ability to save and forward searches, and the integration of Indeed’s (www.indeed.com) job search feature.

The ZoomInfo.com engine continually crawls the business Web—millions of corporate Web sites, press releases, electronic news services, Securities and Exchange Commission filings, and other online sources—and then semantically tags, aggregates, and organizes the information into easy-to-digest and easy-to-search profiles optimized for business users searching for information on people, companies, products and services, and industries.

Business users can search for companies by name, product category, industry, market niche, and more and can expand or narrow their searches using ZoomInfo.com’s automatically generated recommendations. Once a specific company or list of companies is identified, users can quickly conduct a “pivot” search to find people or jobs at those companies. For a monthly fee, users can also conduct searches to identify names, titles, and contact information for executives at those companies.

Munseys | Free E-books

Found this via TeleRead

A wealth of e-formats

I applied the acid test to Munseys (no apostrophe in the name, by the way). Sure enough, an obscure George Gissing title came up—with options for HTML, eBookwise 1150, Plucker, Rocket eBook, Isilo, Adobe Acrobat, Sony Reader, Mobipocket and MS-Reader. No iLiad-customized books, alas, but maybe they’ll be along later. The site looks a little unfinished—a tip from the sharp-eyed Jurd sent me to it, after she wistfully typed in blackmask.com. But I bet that more design work will happen before an official unveiling, and meanwhile the author and title searches seem to work just fine. Between them and the category list, plus tags, you’ll feel at home.
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Update, 12:43 a.m., March 15: Just heard from David after e-mailing him. The site will apparently be in beta for months, because of various technical issues. So not to worry if things get bumpy—this isn’t the final version of Munsys. While the delay is frustrating, it’s good that Blackmask will live on under a different name.

Database of US Congress votes

Found this via the Law Librarian Blog

"This site, washingtonpost.com's U.S. Congress Votes Database, is a deep database of every vote in the United States Congress since the 102nd Congress (1991). It lets you browse votes in a variety of ways -- both in aggregate and for individual members of Congress.

Browse the database by drilling down to a particular Congress (e.g. 109th Congress) or particular member (e.g. 109th Congress senators).

This site publishes an RSS feed of recent votes by each member of Congress, and a feed of the most recent votes in both chambers. See the RSS page for full details."