Ellyssa Kroski suggests, among other things, creating librarian trading cards or badges, Animoto music videos, a coffee table book, an online portfolio, social networking slideshows, or photo widgets.
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Archive for the 'digital' Category
17 Things To Do With Your Online Photos
Published by July 26th, 2008
in web 2.0, digital and photos.
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Library of Congress, National Archives Form World Digital Library Partnership
Published by July 19th, 2008
in libraries, digital, collections and Library of Congress.
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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.
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A Thaw in Franco-Google Relations? Google Books Signs First French Library
Published by July 19th, 2008
in libraries, books, digital and Google.
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Sacre Bleu! While some librarians at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference were left wondering whether Google “had used them,” for their book collections after the search giant did not exhibit in Anaheim, the company this week announced that it had signed its 29th library partner for Google Book Search. Google officials announced that the Lyon Municipal Library, France’s second largest library after the national library in Paris, and the project’s first partner in France, has signed on to make more than 500,000 books available online as part of Google’s Book Search Library project.
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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.
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The New Digital Awareness
Published by July 19th, 2008
in libraries, library services, digital, technology and digital divide.
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Reference librarian Shannon Bohle says that with the constant bombardment of new twists on technology, “we need to take a step back and consider how librarians in the last decade have found themselves on the fast track from the sequestered content villas of subscription databases to the sprawling information architecture of our new socially networked digital environment.” Moreover she conflates digital awareness with social awareness, even pointing to the digital divide “among us as librarians and among our own institutions.”
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New Online: Searchable Collection: 5,000 Historic Photos of China
Published by July 12th, 2008
in China, digital and collections.
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Good and Evil in the Garden of Digitization
Published by July 12th, 2008
in information, digital and Google.
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Wallace Koehler writes: “The Google book digitization project has caused something of a furor, perhaps even a firestorm, in the realm of intellectual property management. This issue is not solely for lawyers and academics; it can touch all of us in the information professions. On the one hand, Google may well provide researchers, users, and readers with an ever-widening and invaluable resource. On the other hand, it also may mean that a single economic for-profit entity could gain effective centralized control over much of the world’s information.”
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Digital Archive Getting Started Guide from OCLC
Published by June 29th, 2008
in digital, OCLC and archives.
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This 14-page document is a user guide for collection administrators using OCLC’s Digital Archive. It provides instructions for using each of the Digital Archive features to manage your content. The three primary functions of the Digital Archive are covered in this Guide:Ingestion. The process of moving your content into the Archive. Reporting. Getting feedback from the system in order to manage your content. Dissemination. The process of getting copies of your content out of the Archive.
Read the Digital Archive Getting Started Guide here
Using Optical Music Recognition
Published by June 29th, 2008
in digital, software and music.
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Andrew H. Bullen writes: “As an (admittedly amateur) local historian, it has been frustrating to be presented with spectacular examples of sheet music that give shape and depth to history yet be totally inept at playing the tunes on a piano or other musical instrument. Happily, as it turns out, through a combination of Optical Music Recognition (OMR) and music composing software, I can scan the music, ‘read’ it to detect the notes, time signature, etc., and tweak its playback to get just the right sound I want.”
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Ingram Digital Survey Examines Key Drivers of Digital Textbooks Usage Growth
Published by June 29th, 2008
in education, digital, publishing and e-books.
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Digital content services provider Ingram Digital has announced a new survey of e-book users conducted by its Education Solutions unit. The survey is seen to confirm the top three factors driving a surge in adoption of digital textbooks that led Ingram’s January-May sales to surpass 2007 results by more than 400 percent. Data from the survey’s 680 respondents revealed that when deciding whether to purchase a digital title, 47 percent believe that ‘cost in relation to print copies’ is very important. A similar proportion of respondents identified the convenience of e-books and interactive features as also being very important.
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Portico and Ithaka Release Results of Digital Preservation Survey of US Library Directors
Published by June 21st, 2008
in digital, archives and preservation.
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In September 2005, library directors from 17 universities and colleges met to discuss the current state of electronic journal preservation and endorsed a statement calling for ‘Urgent Action’ to preserve scholarly e-journals. Over two years later in January 2008, Portico and Ithaka invited 1,371 library directors of four-year colleges and universities in the US to respond to a survey examining current perspectives on the preservation of e-journals. Both parties have now released the results of the Digital Preservation Survey of US library directors. The survey finds widespread agreement that the potential loss of e-journals is unacceptable, and a significant majority of library directors believe their own institution has a responsibility to take action to prevent intolerable loss of scholarly records.
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Aggre-Culture: What do e-book Aggregators Offer? Lonsdale & Armstrong
Published by June 21st, 2008
in digital and aggregators.
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The market for e-books has taken off, particularly in the world of education. Aggregators provide easy access to large collections of titles from many publishers, through a single interface. Consultants Ray Lonsdale and Chris Armstrong compare the offerings of the largest providers, and point to emerging trends. During the last decade, e-books have grown to become a significant library resource; a 2007 international e-book survey showed that 88 per cent of respondents ‘answered that they own or subscribe to e-books’ and nearly half of the respondents (45 per cent) have had access ‘to more than 10,000 e-books’. 1 Although annual US wholesale e-book sales rose by 23.6 per cent in 2007, 2 take-up has remained uneven in the UK. Higher and further education continues to dominate sales, with a number of public and special libraries also committing themselves to the format. Other sectors − such as schools − are only just becoming aware of the possibilities.
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Czech Digital Mathematics Library to be Launched on Internet
Published by June 21st, 2008
in libraries and digital.
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The Academy of Sciences’ press division has announced that the Czech digital mathematics library (DML-CZ) is set to launch a pilot project on the Internet. The library is the result of a project launched in 2005, in which a team of researchers from the Academy of Sciences and various universities participated within the Information Society programme. In the future, this library will become part of the digital libraries network created in Europe and all over the world.
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Research Libraries Embrace E-Books
Published by June 7th, 2008
in libraries, library services, books and digital.
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Sixty-nine percent of university research libraries plan to increase spending on e-books over the next two years, according to a recent study published by Primary Research Group Inc. This finding and others were based on a survey of 45 research libraries in countries around the world, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Japan. Clearly e-book technology has improved dramatically in a short period of time. Only a year-and-a-half-ago college librarians were saying that e-books were not ready for the campus environment.
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Welcome to the Civil Rights Digital Library
Published by June 1st, 2008
in libraries, web sites and digital.
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The struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s is among the most far-reaching social movements in the nation’s history, and it represents a crucial step in the evolution of American democracy. The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale. The CRDL features a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries. The CRDL provides educator resources and contextual materials, including Freedom on Film, relating instructive stories and discussion questions from the Civil Rights Movement in Georgia, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia,
delivering engaging online articles and multimedia.
Civil Rights Digital Library website
OCLC and Google to Exchange Data, Link Digitized Books to WorldCat
Published by May 26th, 2008
in digital, Google and OCLC.
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OCLC and Google Inc. have signed an agreement to exchange data that will facilitate the discovery of library collections through Google search services.Under terms of the agreement, OCLC member libraries participating in the Google Book Search™ program, which makes the full text of more than one million books searchable, may share their WorldCat-derived MARC records with Google to better facilitate discovery of library collections through Google. Google will link from Google Book Search to WorldCat.org, which will drive traffic to library OPACs and other library services. Google will share data and links to digitized books with OCLC, which will make it possible for OCLC to represent the digitized collections of OCLC member libraries in WorldCat.
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Pope Goes Digital to Better Connect with Youth
Published by May 26th, 2008
in digital and trends.
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Pope Benedict will text message thousands of young Catholics on their mobile phones during World Youth Day in Sydney in July, hoping going digital will help him connect better with a younger audience. The Pope will text daily messages of inspiration and hope during the six-day Sydney event while digital prayer walls will be erected at event sites and the church will set up a Catholic social networking Web site akin to a Catholic Facebook.
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National Archives Creates Plan for Online Access to Founding Fathers Papers
Published by May 26th, 2008
in digital and collections.
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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.”
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Migrants in a Digital Land
Published by May 4th, 2008
in mobile/cell phones, innovation, information, digital and technology.
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Today we are migrants to a digital land, but it is our children who are growing up as digital natives. The rules of doing business and governing society as it evolves are challenging, with many misguided laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and social fallacies such as the concept of identity. Delivering the keynote address at the Gartner mobile and wireless summit in London, Nick Jones, research vice-president at Gartner, spoke of how difficult it was to predict how new technologies would be used. Today, prepaid mobile credits are emerging as a new form of currency in many countries, and the most popular way to dump a boyfriend among today’s teenagers is by a text message. “It’s a $450 billion industry, and politicians and lawyers are interested,” he said.
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Digital Information 250 Years from Now
Published by April 27th, 2008
in libraries, information and digital.
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The US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has apparently decided to end its policy of taking a “digital snapshot” of all public congressional and federal web sites after each congressional and presidential term. According to NARA, which is understandably drawing heat for the policy change, they shouldn’t need to archive those web sites because federal agencies and congress should be doing their own archiving. I read about NARA after reading a very timely piece from Leland Rucker about the nature of information archiving in a totally digital world, and it got me wondering: what happens to all this content on the web 250 years in the future? Last year Google’s archives touched 100 exabytes of data from the web. To put that in perspective, that’s about 107 billion gigabytes (or, over a half a million 200 GB hard drives). The entire catalog of the Library of Congress is about 136 terabytes — which makes Google’s archive the data equivalent of 771,000 Libraries of Congress.
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British Library Releases Result of Survey on Online Access to Research Material
Published by April 27th, 2008
in libraries, sources, research and digital.
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The British Library recently conducted a survey on researchers’ attitudes and needs in the digital age. Of the respondents, 93 percent stated that access to online research material should be the same as for books. A majority of the survey participants agreed that, in the age of the Internet, anyone involved in non-commercial research should be allowed to copy parts of electronically published works. These include online articles, news broadcasts, film or sound recordings.
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OverDrive Offering Downloadable MP3s Sans DRM - More than 3000 Titles to be iPod Compatible; Cuts Huge ebook Deal with Random House
Published by April 27th, 2008
in libraries, library services, books and digital.
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OverDrive has hit the mother load of e-texts: the company in late March answered the prayers of librarians and patrons by announcing it will begin offering MP3-compatible audio downloads (yes, that means iPods), as well as cutting a massive distribution deal for more than 6500 Random House ebooks. The company will release at least 3000 downloadable audiobook titles—about 15 percent of its catalog—in MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM), to provide compatibility with nearly every MP3 player and mobile phone. OverDrive MP3 Audiobooks go on sale in May at Borders.com and should be available to libraries by June’s end, to be followed by the release of OverDrive Media Console for the Mac.
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E-Book Publishing has Strong Growth Potential, Says Publisher
Published by April 27th, 2008
in digital, publishing and reference.
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The future of reference and e-book publishing remains strong, according to Rolf Janke, Vice President and Publisher of Sage Reference. According to the publisher, the prospect of reference and e-book publishing remains strong despite continued concerns from the publishing industry over the growing popularity of social networking and online peer-reference sources such as Wikipedia.
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Study Group Issues Report Recommending Changes in Copyright Law to Reflect Digital Technologies
Published by April 6th, 2008
in digital, Library of Congress and copyright.
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After nearly three years of intensive work, the independent Section 108 Study Group has issued its report and recommendations on exceptions to copyright law to address how libraries, archives and museums deal with copyrighted materials in fulfilling their missions in the digital environment
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Read the full report here
Student Speech Rights in the Digital Age
Published by April 6th, 2008
in education, digital and censorship.
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Last year, the Court ducked an opportunity to determine in Morse v. Frederick whether public schools have authority to restrict student speech that occurs off of school grounds. The Court’s refusal to address this issue was unfortunate. For several decades lower courts have struggled to determine when, if ever, public schools should have the power to restrict student expression that does not occur on school grounds during school hours. In the last several years, however, courts have struggled with this same question in a new context — the digital media. Around the country, increasing numbers of courts have been forced to confront the authority of public schools to punish students for speech on the Internet. In most cases, students are challenging punishments they received for creating fake websites mocking their teachers or school administrators or for making offensive comments on websites or instant messages. More often than not, the lower courts are ruling in favor of the schools.
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Research Guide from The Library of Congress: John Adams
Published by April 6th, 2008
in digital, collections and Library of Congress.
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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
Virtual Museum of Cataloging & Acquisitions Artifacts
Published by March 29th, 2008
in web sites, museums, digital, collections and cataloging.
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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
Libraries to Create Shakespeare Web Resource
Published by March 29th, 2008
in libraries, digital and collections.
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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.
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After four years of intense study and research, Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant discovered six breakthrough practices that largely determine the impact a nonprofit organization can deliver. Can libraries apply these practices both individually and collectively to make a difference in the digital age?
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US Library of Congress Puts Knowledge on the Web
Published by March 23rd, 2008
in digital and Library of Congress.
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The Library of Congress has been preparing for the digital age since the 1960’s, when it used early technology to create and share its bibliographic information in electronic form. In the 1990’s, the library started distributing digitized versions of its treasures to schools and libraries across the United States. Now, there are millions of digitized contents available on the library’s web site for users across the world. Voice of America’s Mohamed Elshinnawi has more.
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Teddy Roosevelt’s Papers Going Digital
Published by March 16th, 2008
in digital and collections.
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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 .
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