lfa

Go read this effusive praise of the website for the Lakewood Public Library by Marylaine Block. She describes the great job they have done of targeting various constituent audiences with content, services and engaging marketing. One of my favorites (under the Library column) is letting you send a friend an e-mail postcard about a good book you’ve read lately…of course it’s branded with the library name and sometimes an image of the library (depending on the design you choose. I wonder if there are any ideas here we could incorporate?

Despite the Science in the publisher’s name, the article is about their Russian history journals. We don’t subscribe to these specific journals.

Content of Journals Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. by David Bade

The journal was formerly entitled Political History of Russia, and the first issue of the journal under the new title was volume 9, number 1, published in 1997. In that first volume there are nine articles by Nicholas V. Feodoroff “excerpted from Soviet Communists and Russian History ISBN 1-56072-407-2 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc.” followed by “Bitter memories” by Beloinok and a few poems, all “excerpted from Forced Repatriation ISBN 1-56072-447-1 by Nova Science publishers, Inc.” The issue concludes with a bibliography “Baltic Occupation by Soviets” (no author/editor) which consists of 40 printouts of records formatted as catalog cards from what looks like the Library of Congress catalog. From that first issue of 1997 through the current issue, most of the issues are of the same nature: excerpts from the publisher’s monographs (which are themselves compiled partly or largely from materials in the public domain), excerpts from early 20th century monographs of little scholarly value then or now, and bibliographies which are simply downloaded from the Library of Congress (or elsewhere). And the price, which was 175 US dollars in 1997, is now 875 US dollars (information from the publisher’s website, 21 August 2007).