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Reed Elsevier Selling Business Information Division

The Reed Business Information division is mainly trade publications such as New Scientist and Library Journal. Reed Elsevier indicated that the sale of the division has to do with it’s advertising-based model, among other reasons. Last year, 60% of their income came from advertising. At this point in time, there are no buyers for the division, but the private equity investment group Apax Partners has indicated some interest.

ChaCha Guided Searching Goes Mobile

A search that uses human guides didn’t make much sense in a world of libraries with IM service, and when ChaCha debuted in 2006, the buzz died down quickly. Expect to see a revival now that they’ve started providing text message services. Still powered by human guides, the service will likely be a hit with folks unwilling to pay for Internet access on their phones. It’s free for now, but the company plans to charge $5-10/mo. for the service in the future, which may effectively kill any interest from users without smart phones.

Wall Street Journal Might Move to Free Access, Too

Yesterday it was announced that the New York Times would be removing the pay-for-access wall from their online archives, and now it seems that News Corp. is considering something similar for the Wall Street Journal.

“I haven’t made up my mind yet,” [News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch] said, although he added that making the site free “looks like the way we’re going.”

He predicted that would lead to a small circulation drop of perhaps 15,000 for the print edition and a loss of perhaps $30 million in subscription revenue, but “if the site is good,” greater dollars would come via contextual search–and an audience perhaps 10 times higher of “the most affluent, the most influential people in the world” that advertisers would hunger to reach and pay a premium for.

Joan Didion and Terry Gross to be Honored at National Book Awards

The National Book Foundation has announced that novelist Joan Didion and radio host Terry Gross will be honored at the National Book Awards ceremony on November 14, which will be hosted by writer and humorist Fran Lebowitz. Didion, who won the National Book Award in 2005 for her last book, The Year of Magical Thinking, will be presented with the 2007 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham. Radio host and producer Ira Glass will be presenting the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community to Terry Gross, host and producer of National Public Radio's Fresh Air.

The National Book Foundation has announced that novelist Joan Didion and radio host Terry Gross will be honored at the National Book Awards ceremony on November 14, which will be hosted by writer and humorist Fran Lebowitz. Didion, who won the National Book Award in 2005 for her last book, The Year of Magical Thinking, will be presented with the 2007 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham. Radio host and producer Ira Glass will be presenting the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community to Terry Gross, host and producer of National Public Radio's Fresh Air.Regarding the selection of the honorees, Executive director Harold Augenbraum stated, "These two women are icons in the literary world and their contributions are now legendary…. Both women are fearless in their questioning and their insights on the page and on the air have informed our understanding of America and of America's writers for decades."

The twenty finalists for the 2007 National Book Awards will be announced by Camille Paglia on October 10. The award categories are: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature. The National Book Foundation has been recognizing contributions to American literature for over fifty years. This will be the eleventh ceremony since the awards were organized in their current form, with the emphasis on them being given by writers to writers.

Project Muse Offers RSS Feeds

From an email sent to subscribers:

Project MUSE is very pleased to announce the implementation of RSS feeds for all journals in MUSE. The RSS feed is an alert tool that provides users with instant notification about news, updates and additions to titles within the MUSE collection. The RSS feeds complement our e-mail journal alert service. Both offer students, librarians, researchers and faculty valuable tools for staying current with information about their favorite titles from the over 300 journals in the MUSE collection. The new RSS feed for Latest Issues enables users to easily survey the contents of the four most recent issues of a journal by linking to the corresponding Tables of Contents. MUSE subscribers have direct access to the full text articles from the RSS feeds. Information about subscribing to the feeds is found at the Project MUSE RSS Syndication page (http://feeds.muse.jhu.edu). Please visit this page often, as additional feeds will be added soon.

New FGI Discussions: May 29, 2006

This week was a light one for our guest blogger Cindi Wolff and our regular Free Government Information volunteers, but we still managed to post the following stories:

Cindi’s postings:

Volunteer postings:

As always we hope that you will stop by and join our conversation.

If you haven’t already, please vote in our poll on archiving gov’t e-docs at http://freegovinfo.info/node/476. We’ve got 87 votes and nine comments, and we’d like to see all 229 depository libraries who gave a positive response to question 65 to weigh in.

No FDSys related activity has been observed either at the main FDSys site during the past week.

If you use Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/) or some other RSS reader, consider subscribing to the FGI Feed at
http://freegovinfo.info/blog/feed to get FGI stories as they are posted.

I & B Ministry plans Digital Delhi Project

The Television Point reports that the Information and Brodcasting Mininstry (India) has drawn a new plan to phase out all analogue transmissions and to turn India completely digital in the coming Five Year plan (2007-12. The deadline for the project, Digital Delhi, has been set as 2010 and thereby India will go completely digital by 2015, The Economic Times has reported. Read the full article at:
I & B Ministry plans Digital Delhi project.