LISNews: Librarian News

Jill O'Neill passed along This IT-Analysis Story on divine, who you probably know filed a petition to reorganise under Chapter 11 of the US bankruptcy rules on Tuesday.
They cover some history, and say that Rowecom had collected some $50m worth of subscriptions for magazines and other publications on behalf of a variety of publishers but had then used the money to pay off its own debts and to cover running costs rather than coughing up to the publishers.

I don't know enough about this to make any judgements, but apparently the story missed some points, or made some mistakes.

I received this short email today with no other details.There\'s also no mention on the Cancerlit Site.

\"We regret to inform you that NCI is discontinuing the
CANCERLIT bibliographic database. Therefore, no more updates
will be distributed to licensees. This decision is the
result of a reassessment and prioritization of NCI cancer
information products and services, given limited resources.

Thank you for your interest in helping distribute
cancer-related information to the widest possible audience.
If you do not already license other NCI products and
services, we encourage you to explore those possibilities.
Information is available on the Web at
http://www.cancer.gov/licensing. In the near future, we will
be calling you to answer any questions you may have.\"

See Also??

Steve writes \"I found This Story from eWeek to be so ironic as to be funny. In it, Microsoft cautions that significant damage may be done to its business model by the open source software movement. Hmmmmm, why can\'t I shed any tears for Microsoft? And why do I inwardly shout Hip Hip Hooray for open source?!\"

Slashdot has it too, with more than a few good comments. As always, check out OSS4LIB, or usrlib.info to see how you can use Open Source stuff in your library.

A bit more on The Divine Story from The Chicago Tribune.
They say Chicago-based Divine Inc. is in negotiations with a handful of publishers and a Dutch competitor to resolve a problem that threatens to interrupt the flow of periodicals to thousands of libraries across the nation.

A Divine subsidiary, RoweCom, collected at least $50 million from as many as 4,000 libraries for subscriptions last year, but failed to pay the publishers. The money was used to pay RoweCom\'s operating costs and debts, Divine executives have said.

\"Our strategy is to structure this so that a portion of the money would be put forward by the RoweCom side,\" Hess said. \"Swets Blackwell would put together some of the money. And concessions, discounts, by the publishers would cover part of the cost.\"