[WEB4LIB] News story: Publishers gun for Librarians (also new topic)

[Walt_Crawford at notes.rlg.org]

>FYI:
>  http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36584-2001Feb7.html

>Raymond

Amazing.

Not that Pat Schroeder is acting as AAP's attack dog: that's old news. But
that she's being openly anti-library after years of simultaneously Making
Nice and attacking.

So, all you librarians out there who are trying to put honest publishers
out of business: Tsk tsk, shame on you! (Then again, I can't think of any
librarian who fits that description...)

---

On a wildly different topic: has anyone else run into Google's new and
slightly peculiar feature--namely, indexing PDFs?

I encountered it accidentally, doing a vanity search (for "Cites &
Insights," because it took Google so long to show it--at least 6-8 weeks
after it was introduced). Suddenly, the current issue turns up, with a
portion of the text--and a click on a "text version" icon yields...well, a
pretty poor rendition, although most of the text is there somewhere.

This appears to be an effort to "index the invisible Web." I'm not entirely
thrilled about the idea (but not yet ready to set spider repellers). Is
this going to improve retrieval in general?