Library Stuff

LAtimes – “Powerful scanners allow for the preservation and easy dissemination of ancient texts, but the volume of material waiting to be processed is enormous.”

Reuters – “The British Library in London has posted over a quarter of its Greek manuscripts, equating to more than 280 volumes, online, the latest step toward digitizing important ancient documents.”

latimes.com – “Johnny Carson is getting an upgrade for the YouTube era. Carson Entertainment Group, which owns the archive of the late-night host’s 30 years on “The Tonight Show,” is set to announce Wednesday that it has digitized all 3,300 hours of existing footage from the program and created a searchable online database for producers and researchers.”

NYT – “Under the deal, the entire Churchill archive, currently stored in 2,500 boxes at the center’s home in the quiet, grassy precincts of Cambridge university’s Churchill College, is to be digitized and made available on a pay-as-you-go basis to those with an Internet connection.”

Los Angeles Times – “The Getty Research Institute is receiving grant money from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a joint project that involves the digital archiving of German auction catalogs from 1930 to 1945. The archives are intended to help establish the origins of artistic and cultural assets that were taken from their legal owners during the Nazi regime.”

TechSoup for Libraries – “I am so excited about our first, brand new, easy-to-use digital catalog. With interactive search tools and intuitive browsing, choosing donated products and finding technology resources for your library just got easier. This catalog pulls together valuable information about our donated products and library/nonprofit tech issues from our articles, webinars and community discussions.”

SF Chronicle – “On a family vacation in Washington, technology was proving to be our NBF. Not only had we avoided epic queues to see the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by making online reservations, we’d nabbed discount museum tickets, downloaded free audio tours to our cell phone, reported live from the lunar surface, signed the Declaration of Independence and thwarted a terrorist plot on a GPS-guided spy mission in the Penn Quarter. This was clearly not the D.C. of my grad school days – the (somewhat hazy) memories of which all involve giant stuffed woolly mammoths, grainy movies with colonials in powdered wigs and Rolling Rock beer. Like Washington crossing the Delaware, D.C. has successfully bridged the digital divide. In the course of a week, we discovered that the revolution these days is indeed being televised – in 4-D and Surround Sound.”

British Library – “16 of Europe’s top Libraries, Archives, Universities and Technology Institutions collaborate to map the ‘Digital Genome’ – preserving the electronic building blocks required to unlock our digital heritage. Over the last decade the digital age has seen an explosion in the rate of data creation.Estimates from 2009 suggest that over 100 GB of data has already been created for every single individual on the planet ranging from holiday snaps to health records – that’s over 1 trillion CDs worth of data, equivalent to 24 tons of books per person!”

Research 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.”

NCSU 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