Archive for the 'Digital Libraries' Category
Woo Hoo! Popular Science Archive Free Online For the Win
March 9th, 2010Research Buzz – “I read an article in Wired last week that made me very happy: Popular Science is now online as entire archive, and it’s free! The magazine has teamed up with Google Books to make its archive available.”
Historical State Web Site Provides Easy Time Travel into NC State’s Past
March 8th, 2010NCSU Library – “The North Carolina State University Libraries today released an enhanced version of its Historical State web site to make it even easier for students, scholars, alumni, and the community to explore and enjoy the history, personalities, and culture of NC State University.”
Also, released today, the new WolfWalk mobile campus tour
UIMA Digital Collection recognized
February 15th, 2010Iowa Library News – “Last week, The Iowa Digital Library’s collection for the UI Museum of Art was named ALA’s Digital Library of the Week!”
The Library, Through Students’ Eyes
February 15th, 2010NYT Room For Debate – “After a Room for Debate discussion last week, “Do School Libraries Need Books?” the comments from readers included some first-hand views from students.”
DSpace at Princeton University is open for business!
January 25th, 2010SciTEchNews – “DataSpace is a digital repository meant for both archiving and publicly disseminating digital data which are the result of research, academic, or administrative work performed by members of the Princeton University community. DataSpace will promote awareness of the data and address concerns for ensuring the long-term availability of data in the repository.”
More here
Five dozen doctoral students chose bits and bytes over ink and paper
January 21st, 2010Stanford News – “The Stanford electronic dissertation program, launched last November, offers doctoral students the option of submitting their dissertations electronically.”
More here
France joins race to digitize world’s books
January 21st, 2010Reuters – “Amid the flat, wide fields of central France, a team of re-trained secretaries and IT experts is packaging Europe’s literary heritage for the digital era.”
UCF Taps U.S. Library of Congress to Energize History Education in Florida
December 15th, 2009UCF – “Thanks to a $300,000 grant, two University of Central Florida researchers will teach Florida teachers how to bring more than 16 million digitized historical treasures from the U.S Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to life for today’s tech-savvy students. The project, TPS @ SUNLINK, focuses on teaching with primary sources — allowing [...]
George Washington U. Experiments With Robotic Book Digitization
December 4th, 2009Wired Campus – “Centuries ago, the best way to reproduce a book was to have a monk in a monastery sit down and rewrite the original, word for word. These days, digitizing one of those ancient texts can seem almost as laborious: It can take hours upon hours of human work to scan just one [...]
Library Nears Deal on Newspaper Archives
November 18th, 2009Ann Arbor Chronicle – “Ann Arbor District Library board meeting (Nov. 17, 2009): Board members were briefed on Monday about a pending deal with the Herald Publishing Co., owners of the former Ann Arbor News, which is allowing the library to digitize the newspaper’s archives of photographs and newspaper clippings dating back decades. The 174-year-old [...]
Digital School Library Leaves Book Stacks Behind
November 9th, 2009NPR – “An elite boarding school in Ashburnham, Mass., just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on renovating its library. But Cushing Academy wasn’t just redoing its walls and carpets. The school is getting rid of the actual, physical books in favor of going digital.”
Bookless Libraries?
November 6th, 2009Inside Higher Ed – “When does a library cease to be a library? What started as a debate over whether brick-and-mortar libraries would survive much further into the 21st century turned into an existential discussion on the definition of libraries, as a gathering of technologists here at the 2009 Educause Conference pondered the evolution of [...]
Bosnia launches atlas of war crimes on Internet
November 3rd, 2009Reuters – “Bosnia’s war crimes researchers presented on Tuesday an ‘atlas of war crimes’ from the country’s 1992-95 war, saying it should help people learn about facts and better understand the past.”
Direct to the resource. Unfortunately, it is not available in English.
LA Public Library Photo Game
October 24th, 200989.3 KPCC – “It’s time to play our favorite game. It’s called, “Go to the LA Public Library Photo Archive and type in a random word.”
EU launches digital library at Frankfut Book Fair
October 19th, 2009AFP – “The European Union used the world’s biggest book fair to launch the EU Bookshop’s digital library, making more than 50 years of documents in about 50 languages available for free on the Internet. Individuals, companies and isolated libraries from Australia to Zambia can download files dating back to 1952 when six countries created [...]
Editorial: Going beyond Google Books
October 19th, 2009Daily Princetonion – “One way to both reconcile this disparity between the profit motives of Google and the academic goals of Princeton, as well as to contribute to a more stable, long-term initiative, is for Princeton to join the HathiTrust. This promising nonprofit database started by Indiana University and the University of Michigan now includes [...]
Welcome the Jewish Women’s Archive into The Commons!
October 15th, 2009Flickr Blog – “Based in Brookline, Massachusetts, the Archive is a virtual, not a physical, repository. We’re excited to help them extend their mission of “uncovering, chronicling, and transmitting to a broad public the rich history of American Jewish women.”
More here
You gotta love Flickr for these partnerships!
Levy Foundation Helps Archives to Go Online
October 14th, 2009NYT – “The foundation’s archives and catalogs program has awarded more than $10.3 million, including two grants this week: $3.5 million to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., to collect and conserve the papers of its present and former scholars, including George F. Kennan, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein; and $2.4 million [...]
Cincinnati records to digitize in UC library
October 14th, 2009Cincinnati News Record – “Cincinnati’s birth and death records located in the University of Cincinnat’s Archives and Rare Books Library expects a major overhaul with the funding from a $140,437 Library Service and Technology Act grant. The project is the result of six to seven years of work. It allows university libraries to digitize records, [...]
BBC opens world’s biggest online zoo
September 29th, 2009Guardian – “Caught at night with infrared cameras, deep underwater with huge floodlights, and under microscopes which distinguish different sorts of microbe, the BBC’s Wildlife Finder is the product of years of planning – and dreaming. Technology and funding have finally made possible the corporation’s ambition to give its spectacular natural history photography and film [...]
Gale and The British Library Bring Nineteenth-Century Events to Life with Online Newspaper Archive
September 24th, 2009Press Release – “Gale, part of Cengage Learning, along with The British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), have made nineteenth-century British newspapers available on the internet. The database, known as “British Newspapers, 1800-1900″ and available at http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs/, gives users access to over two million newspaper pages from 49 different national and regional [...]
Next Age of Discovery
May 8th, 2009WSJ – “In a 21st-century version of the age of discovery, teams of computer scientists, conservationists and scholars are fanning out across the globe in a race to digitize crumbling literary treasures. In the process, theyre uncovering unexpected troves of new finds, including never-before-seen versions of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries [...]
Readers Overwhelm Europe’s New Digital Library
November 20th, 2008PC Magazine – “Europe’s heritage went digital Thursday when the European Union launched an online library putting famous works such as Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony just a mouse click away.”
Library to digitise Middle English manuscripts
September 22nd, 2008Crain’s Manchester Business – “The University of Manchester’s John Rylands University Library is to digitise its internationally renowned collection of more than 40 Middle English manuscripts, making some of the world’s greatest medieval literary riches available on the internet”
CAPTCHAs work—for digitizing old, damaged texts, manuscripts
August 14th, 2008Artstechnica – “[T]he works that are most in need of preservation are likely to already be damaged or distorted, making the use of automated scanning and text processing less likely to succeed. Researchers are now reporting on a successful way to identify the words that computers can’t handle: turn them into CAPTCHAs, and get people [...]
The Really Modern Library
October 8th, 2007Ben Vershblow – “This is a request for comments. We’re in the very early stages of devising, in partnership with Peter Brantley and the Digital Library Federation, what could become a major initiative around the question of mass digitization. It’s called “The Really Modern Library.”
In the Age of Digital Libraries
August 18th, 2007Welcome to the Future – “After the last book was sealed into a storage vacuum, the last librarians on earth were given the honorable task of guarding mankind’s most delicate treasures. Thankfully we of the future had been training our librarians in combat techniques as cataloging books became much more difficult.”
Click through to see the [...]
