Library Stuff

“Thousands of pages of documents, photos and other exhibits from the war crimes trial of 28 Japanese defendants have been digitally preserved and placed online by the University of Virginia Law Library. The collection was donated by the family of 1927 U.Va. law school graduate Frank Tavenner Jr., one of the prosecutors in the trial of Japanese government and military leaders accused of plotting the start of World War II. The Military Tribunal for the Far East, commonly known as the Tokyo war crimes trial, ended in 1948 with death sentences for seven men and prison terms for the rest.”

via The Sierra Vista Herald.

LA Times – “Since 2002, at first in secret and later with great fanfare, Google has been working to create a digital collection of all the world’s books, a library that it hopes will last forever and make knowledge far more universally accessible. But from the beginning, there has been an obstacle even more daunting than the project’s many technical challenges: copyright law. Ideally, a digital library would provide access not only to books free from copyright constraints (those published before 1923), but also to the tens of millions of books that are still in copyright but no longer in print.”

Tennessee Department of State Press Releases – “For more than 100 years the Tennessee State Library and Archives has been collecting and microfilming historical newspapers. Now through the Chronicling America project, selected papers from cities and towns across the state are being converted to digital format and made available for free searching online. Thanks to a recent partnership with the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Tennessee, dozens of Tennessee newspaper titles have been scanned, indexed, and posted on the Internet. The focus is on papers from the Civil War era. All three of the state’s grand divisions are represented, with available newspapers from towns as small as Athens and as large as Memphis. More than 60,000 pages of Tennessee newspapers dating from 1850 to 1876 are now online.”

NYTimes.com.

“Letters written by George Washington, Henry David Thoreau’s pencil-drawn map of Walden Pond and Mark Twain’s manuscript of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” are among the items from the New York Public Library’s American collections that will soon be digitized and made available to the public online, the library announced on Thursday.”

WSJ – “There are 232 surviving First Folios of the works of William Shakespeare, and the world’s largest collection of them—82—is not in London, Oxford or anywhere else in England. The volumes are deep in the bowels of the Folger Shakespeare Library, a building tucked in among the U.S. Capitol, the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. “Without these Folios, published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, 18 of his plays—including ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Julius Caesar,’ ‘Twelfth Night,’ ‘The Tempest’ and ‘As You Like It’—would have been lost,” says Michael Witmore, the Folger’s director since July, as we tour the underground stacks. “They originally sold for one British pound, worth around $200 present value,” he adds. But the price has gone up in the nearly 400 years since. “In 2001,” he says, “a single First Folio sold at Christie’s for $6.2 million.” I gingerly return the Folio I’ve been holding to its shelf.”

Crain’s – “When it comes to aggregating information, Patrick Spain knows his stuff. The co-founder of business database Hoover’s Inc., Mr. Spain went on to launch HighBeam Research Inc., a repository of news articles, and Newser LLC, a Chicago-based feed of news summaries. Now he is testing another information service. Called First Stop Health, his venture provides members with electronic health records, 24/7 access to physicians for advice and diagnosis and help in navigating insurance to get coverage. Members also have access to thousands of articles on disease and treatment and a database of almost 800,000 physicians and 18,000 urgent care facilities. The cost starts at $250 a year.”

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. “