LISNews: Librarian News

The AGORA program, set up by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) together with major publishers, enables developing countries to gain access to an outstanding digital library collection in the fields of food, agriculture, environmental science and related social sciences. AGORA provides a collection of 849 journals to institutions in 69 countries. AGORA is designed to enhance the scholarship of the many thousands of students, faculty and researchers in agriculture and life sciences in the developing world.

Anonymous Patron writes "BBC News looks at Lulu.com, who has just announced plans for five new European sites as part of its global expansion.
Lulu allows readers to download single copies of books stored on its site without needing huge print runs, and thus helps would-be authors into print.

The five new sites, to be phased in, will be in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Holland.
What eBay did for auctions - "enabling the hidden 90% of would-be sellers" - the 51-year-old from Hamilton, Ontario, hopes to do for publishing and would-be authors."

Amanda French writes "ProQuest, the provider of Dissertation Abstracts, announced (rather quietly) a partnership with Amazon to sell dissertations through Amazon.com. Dissertations were briefly available through Amazon.com (roughly from December 2005 to February 2006), but they have since disappeared. Dissertations that cost $45 to order from ProQuest were available as downloadable PDFs for $55 through Amazon. Only the astute librarians at Case Western Reserve University noticed, evidently.

The sudden and silent disappearance of dissertations from Amazon might or might not be due to ProQuest's new legal and financial trouble. ProQuest announced February 8th or 9th that it had discovered accounting irregularities in its Information and Learning division. Several lawsuits on behalf of shareholders have followed."

Here's A Report on The Abraham Lincoln Book Shop. It is basically Abe Lincoln from his youth in Springfield on up through his presidency. Almost everything that has been written about him is in stock and so are some of the things he wrote himself.

"It's an archeological dig through the strata of American history. You'll see things on the Civil War and Lincoln and other presidents. Books and autographs, original oil paintings. Original material from the times," said Dan Weinberg, owner of Abraham Lincoln Book Shop.