LISNews: Librarian News

Carol Ann Hughes, the head of collections at Questia.com, has a new article out in Dlib called Information Services for Higher Education
A New Competitive Space. She writes, \"Any organization that undertakes an educational mission in our society is now and will increasingly be surrounded by alternative information service suppliers ... it is likely that ... alternatives will come from the for-profit sector.\"

COLLIB-L, the listserv of the ACRL College Libraries Section, is giving us a lot of good material here at LISNews. As a sort of a sequel to my article in Library Juice 3:27, Questioning Questia, I published (with permission) a thread of discussion on that listserv about Questia, the virtual library product that will bypass academic libraries themselves and go straight to the student. (You don\'t need a musty, crusty old institution, fork over your beer money and get your books in e-form, all set for cutting and pasting!) I\'m worried about Questia and I hope they change their business plan and become a vendor to libraries.

What do you think?

Charles Davis writes \"The British Library has suspended sales of historic newspapers after a public outcry.
It had disposed of up to 60,000 bound volumes of newspapers in
unpublicised deals in the past four years. All the newspapers were foreign.
The library said it had not broken its legal obligation to collect and maintain
British printed material.
The library, caught out by the controversy, said yesterday that it would make
no further disposals until it had undertaken \"a complete review of microfilm copies\". The recent disposals include long runs of newspapers from most
European countries, the United States, Latin America and pre-revolutionary
Russia.
Story from \"Daily Telegraph\" 24 November 2000
http://www.telegraph.co.uk -- Read More

Someone writes \"Can a library system oversee a \'Contemporary Art\' museum? It looks like the University of Arizona is trying to figure this out:

The Wildcat from the U of Arizona has a
Story on by a decison to keep The Center for Creative Photography under contol of university libraries.

Some say that its function as a museum would best be served if \"liberated from control of the university library system\".

I like that term \"liberated\", like it\'s being held hostage.