Library Stuff

NYT – “Before you text “I luv u” to your partner on this Valentine’s Day, you might want to visit the newly digitized collection of correspondence between the Victorian poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett for inspiration. (Warning: These letters are likely to make you far less sanguine about your own relationship’s fire.) Wellesley College and Baylor University collaborated on the project, which began today with more than 1,400 letters by the poets available online. Of those, 573 represent the complete set of love letters, and at least 1,500 additional pieces of correspondence to other people the couple knew are to be up by summer.”

Techcrunch – “While efforts to digitize the contents of libraries has been going on for years now by organizations such as the Internet Archive and Google, the Library of Congress and, in fact, the U.S. Government, has yet to embark on its own comprehensive digitization program. There are efforts here and there, but nothing tackling all the books, film, and other content owned by the United States. While the topic didn’t make its way into President Obama’s Sate of the Union speech last night, Mr. Obama’s former transition team co-chair, John Podesta, thinks creating a “Digital Library of Congress” comprised of “the vast holdings of the federal government” deserves executive level attention.”

Lifehacker – “Got a lot of books crowding your home or feel buried under paper clutter, without the time or the equipment to scan everything? 1DollarScan is a service that will digitize it all for you starting at just $1. For a buck, you can get a 100 book pages, 10 business cards, 10 photos, 10 business document pages, or 1 greeting card converted to PDF and available for download or on DVD. You can make your eBooks or other digital docs searchable by adding OCR for another buck.”

Campus Technology – “The debate over electronic textbooks and ever-increasing costs for traditional textbooks continues to rage. Part of these Web-era dilemmas ironically involves the willingness to face contradictions from the university’s past.

Reliance on textbooks is the rub. It can be understood as a legacy of the post-WWII GI bill. Schools needed industrial-strength solutions to handle the unprecedented waves of new students. Publishers stepped to the fore to offer a commoditized solution, albeit with the best of intentions. They would work with a select group of faculty to produce a wide variety of textbooks, they would entice other instructors with free review copies, and students would incur reasonable shipping and costs. “

NYT – ” “I cannot imagine someone hanging out their underwear and having it immortalized.”

Katrina Marshall, the digital services team leader of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, was awestruck by the sight of a pair of 163-year-old bloomers on a balcony clothesline, a detail in the library’s newly conserved daguerreotype of two miles of Cincinnati riverfront. The cityscape was photographed by Charles Fontayne and William S. Porter on a Sunday in September 1848.

At a ceremony on Saturday, after the daguerreotype spent decades in storage, the library returned its jewel to public view, where it will be permanently displayed alongside new touch-screen computer displays that can zoom in on its details.”