College of Information and Computer Science, Long Island University
Published by July 26th, 2008
in libraries and collections.
0 Comments
The Reed Memorial Library in Ravenna, Ohio, has a collection of oddly shaped cake pans that it loans out to its members. Not only that, it also provides OPAC access to them. Sophie Brookover writes: “Obviously, I had to know more about this collection, so I emailed the library and was granted this interview with Esther Cross, head of children’s services, and the creator/maintainer of the cake pan collections.” They were featured last year in a nearby newspaper.
Read the full article here
Published by July 26th, 2008
in libraries and collections.
0 Comments
It contains farm laborers’ Shakespeare-inspired expressions and the reasons why Pembrokeshire is called “Little England”. It took more than 40 years to compile and will form an epic record of Anglo-Welsh dialects for generations to come. Because now the new audio encyclopedia – a fascinating series of recorded interviews studying the English spoken by people in Wales – has been presented to the British Library’s vast sound archive in London. Featuring conversations with individuals across the spectrum of Welsh life, including cockle pickers, school children, farm hands and Tiger Bay residents, the collection was started in 1968 by dialect specialist David Parry. It was completed by fellow expert, Dr Robert Penhallurick of Swansea University.
Read the full article here
Published by July 19th, 2008
in web sites and collections.
0 Comments
Small collection of annotated links to websites about ice cream, covering history, safety of homemade ice cream, photos, scientific aspects, and ice cream sundaes. Includes historical photos. From the Science Reference Section, Library of Congress.
Ice Cream: Selected Internet Resources website
Published by July 19th, 2008
in libraries, digital, collections and Library of Congress.
0 Comments
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein announced today that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has become a founding partner in the World Digital Library (WDL).
NARA will contribute digital versions of important documents from its collections to the WDL, which will be launched for the international public in early 2009. These documents include the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, Civil War photographs, naturalization and immigration records of famous Americans, and photographs by Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine.
Read the full article here
The airy WiFi-enabled atrium of the British Library befits a modern national library at the beginning of a millennium that is already being called the Information Age. But it is in the smaller, anonymous back-offices that history is being made. Almost 600 years after the advent of the printing press, work is under way on digitizing important books, newspapers and sound recordings as a first step to offering unprecedented access to hard-to-access materials. The British Library has digitization projects going on all fronts: 19th century newspapers, archive sound recordings, manuscripts from Central Asia (as part of the International Dunhuang Project) and UK theses for the Ethos e-thesis service. With its mass digitization of 19th century English literature nearing completion, the British Library faces some tough decisions about what to digitize next. Three of its projects are funded by JISC, which is supporting 16 digitization schemes in the UK to the tune of £10m. Sound, moving pictures, newspapers, census data, journals and parliamentary papers are all in the process of digitization.
Read the full article here
Published by July 12th, 2008
in China, digital and collections.
0 Comments
Published by July 12th, 2008
in research, collections and Library of Congress.
0 Comments
The Library of Congress has awarded $300,000 to Middle Tennessee State University to provide access to some of America’s most important historical documents. The grant to MTSU’s Center for Historic Preservation provides an opportunity to work with “one of the world’s greatest resources,” said Dr. Carroll Van West, the center’s director. The grant will allow the center to focus on several aspects of American history that also are key in Tennessee’s past, said Stacey Graham, research professor at the center and project coordinator. Among them are the eras of Andrew Jackson, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Depression, World War II and the civil rights movement.Graham said folk life, art, music and architecture are other possible topics of study.
Read the full article here
Published by July 5th, 2008
in libraries and collections.
0 Comments
Syracuse University has acquired a major collection of 78 r.p.m. records from the family of a Manhattan dealer, giving the university what it says is the second-largest collection of 78s in the United States, after the Library of Congress’s. Doubling the holdings of 78s at the university’s Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive, the collection of more than 200,000 records was donated by the family of Morton J. Savada, who ran the Records Revisited store on West 33rd Street in Manhattan for 29 years and died in February. Particularly strong in jazz and big bands, the Savada collection contains a wide swath of popular music from the first half of the 20th century, with country, blues, gospel, polka, folk, Broadway and Hawaiian music. It also has a strong selection of V-Disc records, which were produced for American military personnel overseas in the 1940s. Now in transit in 1,300 boxes, the collection will be cataloged once it reaches Syracuse, said Suzanne Thorin, the dean of libraries.
Read the full article here
Published by June 1st, 2008
in search, books, collections and Microsoft.
0 Comments
Microsoft last week announced that it will pull the plug on its book and scholarly article scan plans, Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, and that both sites will be taken down. “We recognize that this decision comes as disappointing news to our partners, the publishing and academic communities, and Live Search users,” reads a Microsoft blog post from Satya Nadella, Microsoft senior VP search, portal and advertising. “We believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner.” Nadella said that books digitized under the programs would now be included in MSN search results.b
Read the full article here
Published by June 1st, 2008
in libraries, collections, Microsoft and United Kingdom.
0 Comments
The British Library’s ongoing projects to make thousands of books and other resources available digitally won’t slow down significantly, despite the ending last week of a partnership with Microsoft, a senior library official said recently. Microsoft formed a partnership with the library in November 2005 to fund the scanning of up to 100,000 out-of-copyright 19th century books, or around 20 million pages. The scanning work will continue for a while longer until the last 40,000 books are finished, said Neil Fitzgerald, digitization project manager.
Read the full article here
Published by May 26th, 2008
in libraries and collections.
0 Comments
To feed the need to weed, NYPL senior librarian and self-described weeding “life coach” Lauren Lampasone provides a simple guide on what reference materials to toss and what to keep, as well as advice on mentally preparing to let go.
Read the full article here
Published by May 26th, 2008
in books and collections.
0 Comments
Imagine owning a copy of Galileo’s 1632 book, Dialogo di Galileo Galilei (Galileo’s Dialogue), challenging the traditional thinking that the universe revolves around the earth. At the time, the book and its concepts were so controversial, that Galileo was convicted of heresy in 1633 and the book was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Or perhaps a first-edition, autographed copy of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine is a more suitable choice for your own personal library? These books and more will be made available to the public, beginning this fall, through a unique partnership between Canada’s McMaster University Library and U.S.-based companies Kirtas Technologies, Inc. and Lulu.com.
Read the full article here
Published by May 26th, 2008
in digital and collections.
0 Comments
On Tuesday, May 6, 2008, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein submitted a report, entitled The Founders Online, to the Committees on Appropriations of the U.S. Congress. This report is the National Archives response to concerns raised by the Committees that the complete papers of America’s Founding Fathers are not available online. The Founders Online is a plan for providing online access, within a reasonable timeframe, to researchers, students and the general public. The report is available electronically at the National Archives website. In announcing the completion of the report, Professor Weinstein said, “We feel this plan would provide scholars and the public access to the best available versions of the complete papers; it would also protect the longstanding interests of the publishers and host organizations which along with the Federal government have invested great resources in the past four decades. Most importantly, it would build a monument to the Founders of our nation in their own words.”
Read the full article here
Published by May 4th, 2008
in collections, Library of Congress and comics.
0 Comments
In a deed of superheroic proportions, an anonymous donor has given the Library of Congress the original artwork by Steve Ditko for Marvel Comics’ “Amazing Fantasy #15″ — the comic book that introduced Spider-Man in August 1962. This unique set of drawings for 24 pages features the story of the origin of Spider-Man along with three other short stories — also written by Stan Lee and drawn by Steve Ditko — for the same issue: “The Bell-Ringer,” “Man in the Mummy Case” and “There Are Martians Among Us”
Read the full article here
Published by May 4th, 2008
in books, Google, collections and preservation.
0 Comments
In a dimly lit back room on the second level of the University of Michigan library’s book-shelving department, Courtney Mitchel helps a giant desktop machine digest a rare, centuries-old Bible. Mitchel is among hundreds of librarians from Minnesota to England making digital versions of the most fragile of the books to be included in Google Book Search. The manual scanning is much slower than Google’s normal process.
Read the full article here
Published by April 27th, 2008
in libraries, collections and Library of Congress.
0 Comments
If you think that your business is having a tough time coping with the data explosion, then spare a thought for the Library of Congress, which has to find some way of tackling a mind-blowing amount of information. ”The digital revolution is comparable to the one started by Gutenberg more 500 years ago,” said Laura Campbell, the archive’s associate librarian, referring to the first book printed with movable type. In its 208-year history, the library has collected more than 138 million items in 450 languages, ranging from manuscripts to maps and sound recordings, but the Internet era poses a whole new set of challenges. ”We estimate that in the current digital age, the amount of information produced every 15 minutes is equivalent to all the data and information now in the Library of Congress,” explained Campbell, during a keynote. “The library can no longer collect everything.”
Read the full article here
Published by April 27th, 2008
in collections and Library of Congress.
0 Comments
Tatiana Fessenko (1915-1995) was a cataloger at the Library of Congress for several decades, retiring in the early 1980s. A native of Kiev with an educational background in Russian language and literature, Ms. Fessenko was particularly interested in the Library’s Yudin Collection, acquired in 1906. It was she who cataloged most of the 18th and early 19th century materials from the 80,000 volume Yudin Collection, in many cases doing extensive bibliographical and biographical detective work to discover the authors of pseudonymous and anonymous works, and the original titles of works originally published in French, German, or English.
Read the full article here
Published by April 27th, 2008
in education and collections.
0 Comments
E-book technology firm ebrary has announced that it will provide librarians as well as students and faculty in library science and related programmes with complimentary access to its Library Center for one year in support of National Library Week. Subsidised by ebrary, the Library Center includes more than 85 full-text e-books.
Read the full article here
Published by April 6th, 2008
in digital, collections and Library of Congress.
0 Comments
The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of material associated with John Adams. This resource guide compiles links to digital materials related to Adams such as manuscripts, letters, broadsides, government documents, and images that are available throughout the Library of Congress Web.
John Adams Resource Guide
Published by April 6th, 2008
in tagging, collections, applications, Flickr and collaboration.
0 Comments
Tagcow is a newly launched photo tagging service that is generating a lot of buzz for the way it categorizes photos, allowing people to quickly find their favorite images of family members, pets, natural landmarks and more. Basically, it makes massive numbers of photos housed on Flickr or in a personal photo folder easily searchable by what appears in the photo.
Read the full article here
Published by March 29th, 2008
in web sites, museums, digital, collections and cataloging.
0 Comments
This virtual museum is for the new generation of librarians who may not be familiar with the tools and methods used before technology and the digitization of library catalogs stepped in. It is also for those experienced librarians who have been in the profession for many years; perhaps the museum will bring back a bit of nostalgia. This site provides a look inside the history of libraries and librarianship. Librarians have always worked hard to adapt to the constantly changing technology that is meant to make libraries more efficient. The changes vary from the methods used to catalog items to the tools used to catalog them. Within these pages can be seen the transition, innovation, and the differences from one method or tool to the next.
Virtual Museum of Cataloging & Acquisitions Artifacts web site
Published by March 29th, 2008
in libraries, digital and collections.
0 Comments
The Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC are to put all 75 editions of William Shakespeare’s plays from before 1641 online. The quartos are the earliest printed editions of the plays and are the closest to what Shakespeare actually wrote still in existence. The project is intended to give the public greater access to the plays and downloading of the quartos will begin next month.
Read the full article here
Published by March 23rd, 2008
in archives and collections.
0 Comments
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) $4.27 million to conduct “a national competition” to identify and catalog hidden special collections and archives. CLIR officials said they will issue a request for proposals by early June, with the first round of winners to be announced in fall 2008. CLIR expects to distribute about $4 million in the first cycle. The awards will go to institutions holding collections of “high scholarly value that are difficult or impossible to locate through finding aids.”
Read the full article here
Published by March 16th, 2008
in digital and collections.
0 Comments
Plans for a “virtual library” of Theodore Roosevelt’s papers have a boost from Washington. Senator Byron Dorgan says Dickinson State University and the Library of Congress have reached an agreement to digitize Roosevelt’s papers. That clears the way for a Theodore Roosevelt Library at Dickinson State, near the Badlands where the nation’s 26th president ranched. Dorgan says Roosevelt’s papers are on 485 rolls of microfilm at the Library of Congress. Under the agreement, library officials will use $50,000 in federal money to make digital copies of the papers that can be studied in Dickinson .
Read the full article here
Published by March 16th, 2008
in digital and collections.
0 Comments
Barely a year into the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suggested buying slaves for $400 (euro264) apiece under a ”gradual emancipation” plan that would bring peace at less cost than several months of hostilities.The proposal was outlined in one of 72 letters penned by Lincoln that ended up in the University of Rochester’s archives. The correspondence was digitally scanned and posted online along with easier-to-read transcriptions.
Read the full article here
Published by March 3rd, 2008
in Second Life, collections and mapping.
0 Comments
A new installation inside Second Life is bringing alive one of the world’s largest collections of antique maps. Called the David Rumsey Maps Island (registration required), the Second Life site is San Francisco map collector David Rumsey’s latest high-technology plan to share his collection with as large an audience as possible.
Read the full article here
Published by March 3rd, 2008
in digital and collections.
0 Comments
Cultural institutions in the UK are repositories of a wealth of historical material. The scholarly importance of such resources is at the basis of the numerous digitization projects aimed at widening their access worldwide. The lack of national policies has left those institutions alone in engaging in dissemination activities and in raising awareness of their own online material. Of particular interest to the author are the digital special collections hosted in the English Universities. The main activities of these institutions differ from others, such as museums, archives and public libraries, as they do not have the main institutional duties of preserving and the exploiting of their holdings. This article highlights related issues and suggests some of the possible measures to effectively promote and disseminate universities’ online digital special collections.
Read the full article here
A project “that collects, summarizes, and gives context to some of the best self-published content found on blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, and videoblogs from around the world, with a particular emphasis on countries outside of Europe and North America.” Browse by country, topics, or contributors. Available in several languages. Founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Global Voices website
Published by January 5th, 2008
in libraries and collections.
0 Comments
More than 30 rare, antique maps stolen from the Boston Public Library by a Martha’s Vineyard map dealer were returned to the library in 2007, library president Bernard Margolis said this week, part of the conclusion of an international scandal that rocked the staid world of map collecting. Not all has been resolved, however. More than 30 other missing maps, losses that have not been linked to confessed map thief E. Forbes Smiley III, have yet to be recovered by the Boston library more than a year after their disappearance was discovered.
Read the full article here
Published by December 29th, 2007
in collections and Library of Congress.
0 Comments
From “The Naked City” to “In a Lonely Place” and “Oklahoma!” the Library of Congress is adding 25 more classic American films to its national registry. There are “12 Angry Men” to be heard, “The Strong Man” to be viewed and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” to be dealt with. Even as Americans fill the movie theaters to see the latest releases, few are aware that up to half the films produced in this country before 1950 — and as much as 90 percent of those made before 1920 — are lost forever,” said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington in announcing the selections.
Read the full article here
Published by December 29th, 2007
in collections and Library of Congress.
0 Comments
Todd Harvey spins Louisiana’s historical records. The Library of Congress reference librarian serves as the caretaker of what he simply calls “Louisiana’s treasures,” recordings of the state’s blues, folk and jazz pioneers in the 1930s and 1940s. The samples, now on compact disc, are part of a broader collection known as the Archives of American Song, part of the library’s American Folklife Center Archive.
Read the full article here
Published by December 16th, 2007
in collections, open access and journals.
0 Comments
The sponsors of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) have announced that the directory now contains 3,000 quality controlled scientific and scholarly electronic journals that