Technology Bites (via American Libraries Online) writes about using PrintWhatYouLike.com, which lets you type in a URL and then select only the parts of the page you want to print.  Don’t want ads? Zap ‘em out.  Don’t want navigation bars? Gone.

A nifty little tool!

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From yesterday’s Publisher’s Weekly email comes an article about Google Previews.

Yesterday, Google announced a new feature tied to its Book Search program, a widget-like tool called Google Previews. By adding simple code to their Web sites, publishers, retailers or anyone with sufficient technical knowledge can embed a Google-hosted preview of up to 20% of any book that has been included in the Google Book Search database.

Several retailers, including Books-A-Million and Blackwell Bookshop, have already enabled the service, and Borders and Powell’s plan to implement it soon. Google has partnership agreements with these retailers stipulating that the retailers will enable Google Preview for all books in the Book Search Index; in exchange, Google provides a more heavyweight version of the Preview software, with update and support, than is available to general Web site developers, according to Tom Turvey, director of Google Book Search partnerships.

Widgets that embed book content into Web sites are nothing new—LibreDigital, and Ingram both offer similar services to their clients—but Google’s service is free and accessible to any publisher, or Web site developer, who would like to show a preview of a book in the Google database.

CNET also has a good overview.

I have a feeling that there’s some powerfully good ways to use this tool in school libraries.  There’s something about how this could help users know if a book out there might be right if we got it for them? Not sure.  The old brain is tired today — anybody want to take a stab at this?

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So … we’re a few weeks into school … and how is the wrestling with the new standards going? Here’s the first outside-of-SchoolLibraryLand article I’ve seen about the October 2007 AASL Standards, which appeared recently in eSchool News.  As the article points out, it’s a challenge to promote the radical shift in library learning required by the AASL Standards when you’re struggling just to keep your job.  That’s why it’s so important that we show the Standards in the context of what others have visioned for 21st century learning — it shows that we’re part of the process and hip on what’s best for this generation of learners.Â

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