Librarians can make money too!!

Forbes has this article on what a few librarians have done to make more money.

\”The whole New Economy is based on information, but information without access to it is no good,\” says Lynn Boyden, who recently quit as an administrator at the Information Studies Department at UCLA for a job at e-consultancy Arc. \”What they teach you in library school is that you have to process raw data to get information, information to get knowledge, and knowledge to get wisdom.\”

Forbes has this article on what a few librarians have done to make more money.

\”The whole New Economy is based on information, but information without access to it is no good,\” says Lynn Boyden, who recently quit as an administrator at the Information Studies Department at UCLA for a job at e-consultancy Arc. \”What they teach you in library school is that you have to process raw data to get information, information to get knowledge, and knowledge to get wisdom.\”


\”To turn wisdom into money, this new crop of risk-takers is trying to mine a category called \”meta-data,\” jargon for information about information. Anirvan Chatterjee is using the classic form of meta-data–a bibliographic description similar to the ones typed onto those billions of old card catalog entries–to power a popular comparison-shopping engine for books. His Berkeley, Calif.-based company is BookFinder.com.\”

\”Chatterjee, 23, first engineered the site as a class project for an information systems course at the University of California, Berkeley. \”We take books very seriously,\” he says. \”They\’re not just e-commerce products. They\’re for people to read.\” Funded with earnings from a Web development job, the site has been running since 1997–originally on a 486 machine Chatterjee built with partner Charlie Hsu. He and Hsu claim to be profitable on estimated revenues of $8 million. Advertising contributes up to 30% of sales. The rest comes from finder\’s fees, up to 10% of the price of a book sold by any of the 20,000 dealers who have signed on with BookFinder.com. What advantages does Chatterjee offer over Amazon? A greater range of titles, particularly of used and out-of-print books.\”