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National Pastime Selected as July eBook of the Month

NetLibrary, in partnership with Brookings Institution Press, has selected National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer as the July eBook of the Month. A detailed and thoughtful analysis of the world’s two great sports, National Pastime provides the first in-depth, cross-cultural comparison of these sporting passions and the mega-businesses they have become.

Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist compare the histories, values, and traditions of baseball and soccer and show how much the traditions of each game reveal about the societies and economies that spawned them. By tracing the evolution of both sports, Szymanski and Zimbalist identify some of the problems each faces, and how each sport can look to the other for solutions.

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The world’s most intriguing company?

Google, says an article in The Christian Science Monitor

Impossible dream: Take all the books ever written, digitize them and make them available to the world.

“We had all these cockamamie schemes for how we could get content,” recalls Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web products at Google. “We thought, well, could we just buy books? But then you don't get the old content. We thought maybe we should just buy one of every book, like from Amazon, and scan them all.”

How long would it take to scan all the world’s books? No one knew, so Ms. Mayer and Google cofounder Larry Page decided to experiment with a book, photographing each page so that it could be digitally scanned. “We had a metronome to keep us on rhythm for turning the pages. Larry’s job was to click the shutter, and my job was to turn the pages,” Mayer says. “It took us about 45 minutes to do a 300-page book.”

Current projection: “Maybe inside of the next 10 years we’ll have all the knowledge that’s ever been published in book form available and searchable online,” she says. “It’s really a grand vision.”

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OCLC PICA and Swets provide one-click access to full text

Swets Information Services and OCLC PICA, a European Library Cooperative, have joined forces in a new cooperative agreement that links the OCLC PICA PiCarta end-user reference service with full-text documents in SwetsWise Online Content.

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OCLC welcomes these new member libraries

Fremont County District Library - St. Anthony Branch
Location: St. Anthony, Idaho, USA
OCLC Symbol: IDFCD
OCLC Network: OCLC Western Service Center

Membership guidelines and protocols

WorldCat update

WorldCat is the world’s most comprehensive bibliographic database. Updated at a rate of nearly one new record every 10 seconds, WorldCat contains more than 60 million bibliographic records and holdings information contributed by more than 8,600 libraries around the world. The new Open WorldCat program makes the items in library collections—physical and digital, popular or special—discoverable by people searching the Internet.

See the latest WorldCat record

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