Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

The 2009 SIIA (Software and Information Industry Association) awards have just been announced. Why should we care? Well, we are part of the information industry, and amidst the winners of awards for Best Supply Chain Solution and Best Vertical Business Market Content Solution, there are some names that will be familiar to reference librarians.

For 2009, the winner in the Best Content Aggregation Service is Factiva.com. In the Best Online General Reference Service category, the winner is Encyclopedia.com.

Not that we need another award, but the library world lacks a way to acknowledge excellence in new forms of publishing. With a few exceptions, like the Odyssey Award, ALA awards in general are still very book-centric.  The fact that reference publishing’s one prize, the Dartmouth Medal, was finally bestowed on a database (Greenwood’s Pop Culture Universe) this year is a sign that our attention may finally be turning away from print.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 25th, 2009 at 10:57 am and is filed under In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.