LISNews: Librarian News

Anonymous Patron writes "Interesting Business News on Reed Elsevier. shares in Reed fell 4% after investors took fright at the prospects for its science division after minimal increases in the budgets of academic libraries.

At the same time, a delay in the launch of a major software product meant some sales growth would be pushed from 2004 into the following year.
A Bit More in another report, and even more with an interesting quote:``We haven't seen any recovery in academic library budgets,'' compared with anticipated spending growth of as much as 1.5 percent this year, he said. ``We are in an environment where budgets are under great pressure.'' No mention of The Prices they charge. though Margins were discussed some."

Carpet One, a retailer in NW Arkansas, ran a contest to donate carpeting to a local school library and the Jefferson Elementary School (Springdale AR) was the winner. But in view of the fact that the school is soon to be replaced with a new building, Carpet One agreed to donate the equivalent sum of cash ($2,000) in lieu of the new carpet.

The article includes some interesting details about possible 'voting irregularities' regarding which school was to receive the carpet (i.e., stuffing the ballot box, no touch screens involved), but the story has a happy ending, from NW Arkansas News.

An Anonymous Patron writes "Indianapolis Bookstore flies in face of chains: Big Hat Books opened to readers last weekend in Broad Ripple. The general-interest store is the latest addition to the list of Indianapolis' tiny pool of independent bookstores.

Booksense.com, the e-commerce marketing arm of American Booksellers Association, lists only five such bookstores in the area."

pv_sapl writes "This Slashdot article informed me that Sybase is releasing for free (as in beer) Enterprise Database for Linux. There are limitations of course, and they are: 1cpu, 2gigs of ram, and a 5gig database size. Although I find this in the similar vein of Microsoft's MSDE, the potential for smaller libraries to be able to buy into Horizon a lot more attractive. That assumes naturally that Dynix gets such license permisions from Sybase. And don't forget about Linux emulation, meaning you can try to run this Enterprise Database on other Operating Systems.."