Shaun Ellis wrote: > [snip] > For example, the reviews of books in the back of scholarly journals are > obviously very different from the reviews on Amazon. On that note, an > Amazon-like review system, created for and by libraries, should not just > be a carbon copy of Amazon's system (don't want to reinvent the wheel!). Back from the conference that Art and I were talking about earlier in this exchange. A couple of specific thoughts (rather than the bigger musings from last time) ... Art indicated that it is not hard to capture the Amazon book reviews and pull them into other environments (as with a variety of other components of Amazon). In the New York Times this morning was an article by John Markoff on the pending IPO and its potential impact on Google and its culture called "The Coming Search Wars". A couple of statements to ponder that seem relevant to this discussion: "The company has also been pushing hard to find new sources of information to index, beyond material that is already stored in a digital form. In December, it began an experiment with book publishers to index parts of books, reviews and other bibliographic information for Web surfers." "And Google has embarked on an ambitious secret effort known as Project Ocean, according to a person involved with the operation. With the cooperation of Stanford University, the company now plans to digitize the entire collection of the vast Stanford Library published before 1923, which is no longer limited by copyright restrictions. The project could add millions of digitized books that would be available exclusively via Google." Just things related to the discussion that sometimes have a chilling effect on our other activities. I guess I should check the Stanford catalogue before I digitize another book :) Walter Lewis Halton Hills Public Library