If you thought the world of Mergers & Acquisitions was hard to follow in the library systems marketplace, well buckle up for content providers.

The Thomson Corporation has sold off its assets in Thomson Learning to Apax Partners and OMERS Capital Partners, for a total of about $7.75 billion in cash. (I love seeing "in cash." . . . "Hey, can you break a trillion? I left my billions in my other wallet.") The transaction includes Thomson Gale, Wadsworth, Delmar Learning, Brooks/Cole, and South-Western, and comes as no surprise since the intent was announced last fall. Details of the plan are laid out in a very long pdf document.

What might be a surprise is the near-simultaneous announcement that Thomson has made a $17.2-billion bid to buy Reuters, a deal that still requires approval. The combination of the two companies would reportedly result in the biggest provider of news and data in professional markets.

Assuming the deal goes through, Reuters CEO Tom Glocer would become CEO of the new company. Thomson President and CEO Richard J. Harrington would retire at the completion of the transaction.

All of this has me thinking about library software valued in the tens to hundreds of millions and its comparison to all that content out there, valued in the tens to hundreds of billions. As equity firms began to gobble up the software side of the house, I kept wondering, who woke up one day and decided "libraries—that's where the money is!"? As a colleague and I were recently discussing, it's not billions they see, but an industry ripe for (continuing) consolidation. Clearly, the folks with the billions see that in the content arena as well.

It got me wondering . . . is consolidation such a bad thing? That's an only slightly rhetorical question that I plan to cover next week.

Nothing major really striking my fancy, but there has been a smattering of interesting news on the library technology front in the last couple of weeks.

Free-gle Scholar
Some scholarly societies are launching something that is either a counter to or a target for Google Scholar. Scitopia.org will launch this summer and include 3 million articles from 13 scholarly societies. The jury has not even gathered yet since it's only April and the site will not launch until June, so I am left only to complain at this point that I don't have any great love for press releases that tell me something is coming in two months, but I cannot see it yet.

Nevertheless, the list of societies is impressive. The service looks to be similar to Elsevier's Scirus and the CiteSeer search engine hosted by Penn State. All three have one of my web pet peeves in common—a URL that has to be spelled when spoken. No one has to spell Google, Amazon, or OCLC.

Making the World Smaller
Speaking of OCLC (no, no more jokes)...the collaborative has just announced a pilot for a scoped version of the WorldCat Catalog, dubbed "WorldCat Local."

Through a locally branded interface, the service will provide libraries the ability to search the entire WorldCat database and present results beginning with items most accessible to the patron. These might include collections from the home library, collections shared in a consortium, and open access collections.

WorldCat Local will offer the same feature set as WorldCat.org, such as a single search box, relevancy ranking of search results, result sets that bring multiple versions of a work together under one record, faceted browse capability, citation formatting options, cover art, and additional evaluative content.

Worldcat Local can also be hooked up to resource sharing applications to facilitate reciprocal borrowing or interlibrary loan. Pilot partners include the University of Washington, the Peninsular Library System in California, and several libraries in Illinois.

With this, OCLC is one step closer to asking all libraries more seriously, "Who needs their own local OPAC?"

My NextGen Catalog
And this just in...Aquabrowser is adding personalization features to its catalog interface. Called My Discoveries^TM, the new 2.0-ness allows for publishable resource lists, tagging, and the creation of personal profiles.

I think LibraryThing is getting more and more interesting, too. A sneak peek at Tim Spalding's Computers in Libraries presentation is on his blog. Tim kindly stepped in for me at the last minute to co-present with Roy Tennant when I could not make it to CIL this year for the first time in several years (thanks, Tim!). I was already hearing great reviews of Tim's Wednesday presentation before the day even ended, and I'm sure it was more refreshing than my ad nauseam attacks on public catalogs. It's good to remember that facets, word clouds, and better relevance don't make an online catalog "2.0" per se. The social aspects will be the clincher in that regard.

I've always had a hard time explaining my position on e-books. Some of my esteemed colleagues are quick to point out the minor dent that e-books have made in overall book sales in this country and others. But when I started evangelizing about e-books back in the late 1990s, we were still talking about what I call the "curl-up factor." I grew so tired of hearing people complain about not wanting to curl up with an e-book, or the inability to take an e-book to the beach, that as soon as I read either phrase in e-book commentary, I simply stopped. [WARNING: rhetorical question ahead. No need to flood comments.] How many laptop owners can say they've never curled up with theirs in bed, and who hasn't seen a Blackberry at the beach?

The interesting thing to me is that much of the debate about whether to do e-books ended when Google made its now-famous announcement. "Whether or not" to digitize became "how, which, and whose books" nearly overnight. I still find it ironic that despite publishers and middleware providers' valiant efforts to digitize books, it took a press release about Google digitizing millions of books for which it had no rights to turn the tide of e-book production.

There are a couple of interesting new things out there. First, the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) is announcing a conference in New York City for May 9, 2007. Digital Book 2007 will feature digital publishing and mobile device innovations. Librarians might remember the IDPF as the OeBF, or Open eBook Forum. It dropped the old moniker when it became clear that the group was essentially a trade organization, and not primarily an effort to create an open e-book standard—a goal that I still believe was thwarted by the conflict of interest of some of its participants in maintaining the strong footing of proprietary technology in the e-books market space. Anyway, the conference will likely include a better look at e-ink technologies, Adobe's new Flash-based e-book reader, and more.

The conference's confirmed speaker list includes the Digital Library Federation's new executive director, Peter Brantley. Brantley recently shook up the e-book world a little with a Google e-book apologia related to recent library dealings with the Google Books project. The original post is a poetic read; its follow-up, "Reprise with Clarity," is also excellent.

Back to my position on e-books. It's not a "more digital books" position, but what I like to call "books more digital." That is, the more digital the book is, the more options publishers, libraries, patrons, and shoppers will have for consuming them and building services upon them. Whether e-ink, cell-phone, or print-on-demand paperback, a more digital book is a more readable book. Now that the "whether or not" debate is coming to an end, it may be time (or it may be too late) for libraries to reinvest their time in investigating standards, pressuring publishers to release content for digitization, and playing with the technology that will soon be (or already is) in the hands of our patrons.

It's the holiday season. What do you buy for the content provider who already has everything (or at least a strong stake in natural sciences, social sciences, technology, arts, and humanities)? Well, if you had $222 million you could have bought ProQuest Information and Learning (PQIL) for the Cambridge Information Group. But you probably don't have that kind of cash lying around. No worries, CIG bought PQIL for itself.

In a press release issued yesterday morning, CIG announced its intention to combine its subsidiary, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA), with the ProQuest division, which includes ProQuest, Chadwyck-Healey, UMI, Micromedia ProQuest, Serials Solutions, SIRS, eLibrary, and CultureGrams. The new privately held company will maintain operations in both CIG's Bethesda, Maryland, and PQ's Ann Arbor, Michigan, locations.

Voyager Expanded Learning, ProQuest Learning Page (Reading A-Z), and ExploreLearning are ProQuest Education product brands and are not affected by the pending acquisition.

Martin Kahn, former chairman of business and financial information aggregator OneSource Information Services, Inc., will take the reins as CEO of the integrated organization in Ann Arbor; Matt Dunie, president of CSA, will become president of the newly combined organization and work from Bethesda. Skip Prichard, president of PQIL, will manage PQIL until the closing of the deal and then pursue other opportunities.

In a financial turnaround, ProQuest's earnings look to be in the black for 2006, following the company's self-disclosure last year of accounting irregularities that overstated earnings for the years 2000-2005. The sale of such a large division, rumored to be in the works for some time now, will certainly help improve the murky financial picture for ProQuest company. Nevertheless, ProQuest shares dropped to a new 52-week low of $9.50 on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, before moving up to $10.24, down $3.43 or 25 percent overall for the day.

So the information world continues to get a little smaller--or a little bigger, I guess, depending on how you look at it or which side of the transaction one stands on. These combined companies will support a customer base of more than 25,000 libraries, in dozens of countries, serving up hundreds of data sources and several software solutions. Looking at our industry from a purely business perspective, I would still challenge anyone who suggests that content is no longer king.