Sliced from the Cutting Edge

Servings of hot technology from ALA's Annual Conference

Staff -- School Library Journal, 8/1/2000

At the ALA Annual conference, technology briefings and dot-com announcements were everywhere. Here are a few slices of news and product information from the cutting edge:

Questia (www.questia.com) is a company that has no intention of selling anything to libraries. Beginning in the first quarter of 2001, Questia will sell subscriptions--some of them possibly as brief as an hour--to its database of academic- and research-oriented books and periodicals. Subscribers won't be able to print documents fully, but they will be able to copy and paste excerpts from the documents--complete with easy-to-paste footnotes and bibliographic citations. Questia's target market is undergraduate students racing to complete research papers for college classes. But because the dot-com plans to advertise on MTV and in other teen-friendly venues, a Questia representative at the conference said that high school students may well use it, too. If libraries aren't going to be Questia customers, why did the dot-com exhibit at ALA? "So librarians will know about us," the Questia rep explained, "and not be afraid of what we're doing."

World Book Encyclopedia (www.worldbook.com) will introduce its new Global Edition by the end of this summer. Subscribers to the North American edition of World Book Online will have the option of purchasing access to its international edition as well, which contains 4,000 additional articles. The added articles focus on politics, biography, and culture in English-speaking nations outside of North America. For example, the Global Edition article on Ireland includes many more subtopics than its North American equivalent.

Physicist Nick Sheridon displays an e-newspaper.

E-books stimulated great interest at the conference. A session discussing the implications of e-book, e-paper, and e-ink technology, sponsored by the Library and Information Technology Association, was so crowded that hundreds of attendees strained to stuff themselves into a standing-room-only space at the back of the room. The hit of the session was a presentation by Nick Sheridon of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), who described the operation of one variety of e-paper. Xerox's e-paper, a flexible plastic sheet filled with minuscule spheres--white on one half, black on the other--becomes a readable sheet of print and images when a wand, filled with a document downloaded from the Net, is passed over it. Sheridon displayed a future e-newspaper, rolled up into a combination wand/carrying case that resembled a window shade.

CERF (Curriculum & Education Resource Finder at www.cerfinfo.com) is a new subscription Web site directory featuring thousands of curriculum-based K-12 sites selected by the CERF staff. The targeted audience of teachers and other educators will be able to search the sites by subject or curriculum area (such as science or geography), keyword, topic, title, and grade level. Plans are also in the works to link sites in the CERF directory to national and state education standards.

Espiral (www.espiral.com) is a site that is out to become the Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble of Latin American booksellers. It offers 300,000 titles in Spanish, and 100,000 in Portuguese, including many titles for children and young adults. Although the site currently is not available en Ingles, there will be an English-language version available this fall.

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a law passed by Congress and recently challenged in the courts, aims to prevent children from giving away personal information to Internet businesses. How does the act affect library Web sites, which sometimes collect personal information for contests and reference services? Learn the facts from a new COPPA Web site from ALA's Office for Information Technology Policy at www.ala.org/oitp/privacy.html. --Walter Minkel