21-year-old Aaron Swartz is attempting to turn the library world upside down. He is taking on the subscription-based WorldCat, the largest bibliographic database on the planet, by building a free online book catalog that anyone can update. Many academic librarians are wary of Mr. Swartz's project because it will allow nonlibrarians, who may be…

Revitalization is what Morningside College had in mind in 2006, when it lifted a ban against eating in the library. That is when its library cafe, which opened a year earlier, began offering sandwiches and soups that could be carried into study areas and computer labs. Morningside has joined those that are casting aside their libraries' stuffy…

It is hard to imagine a Microsoft venture falling under the weight of a competitor. That's the post-mortem offered by many academic librarians as they ponder the software giant's recent and sudden announcement that it is shutting down its book-digitization project. The librarians' conclusion: Google did it. Microsoft quietly revealed in May that…

Last week the venerable publisher John Wiley & Sons made a surprise announcement that it would purchase Blackwell Publishing Ltd. for about $1.13-billion, an acquisition likely to have broad consequences for the world of academic journals and libraries. Assuming that the deal is completed, Wiley's scientific, technical, and medical division will…

Hoping to do for electronic books what the iPod has done for digital music, a new generation of e-book devices recently hit the market. This article argues that even with improved screens, the new e-book devices are not ready for college. The screen is the big innovation in the new e-book devices, the most prominent example of which is the Sony…

Five of the world's largest libraries have joined Google in a herculean effort to digitize millions of books and make every sentence searchable. The project involves libraries at Harvard and Stanford Universities, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Oxford, in England, as well as the New York Public Library. It could…