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Library Journal’s Reference 2009: E-Reference Ratings

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Published by rwatstein November 23rd, 2008 in libraries, library services, digital and reference. 0 Comments

This year’s annual Reference supplement introduces a new resource that is every reference librarian’s dream: E-Reference Ratings, a master list of nearly 180 subscription-based electronic resources in 14 categories evaluated by scope, writing, design, bells & whistles, ease of use, and linking. To be updated quarterly; you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

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Library of Congress, National Library of China Sign World Digital Library Agreement

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Published by rwatstein November 23rd, 2008 in China, digital and Library of Congress. 0 Comments

The Library of Congress and the National Library of China have concluded an agreement to cooperate in developing the World Digital Library. The two libraries agreed to provide content to the World Digital Library and to cooperate in such areas as the development and maintenance of the Chinese-language interface, the convening of international working groups to plan and develop the project, and the formation of an advisory committee of leading scholars and curators to recommend important collections about the culture and history of China for inclusion in the World Digital Library.

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European Online Library Launches

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Published by rwatstein November 23rd, 2008 in libraries, digital, Europe and Europeana. 0 Comments

The British Library in London is among more than 1,000 cultural organizations making contributions to a European online library. The free multimedia venture, Europeana, will also see input from the European Commission and the Louvre Museum. Internet users will be able to access more than two million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archive documents, paintings, and films. These will be sourced from institutions across the EU’s member states.

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Life 2.0: The Evolution of Our Digital DNA

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Published by rwatstein November 23rd, 2008 in digital and technology. 0 Comments

In Life 2.0, people move into a shared network space that drives work, research, education, entertainment, social activities—essentially everything they do. They use digital tools—PDA, MP3, laptop, cell phone, camera, PC—to tell their stories and interact with the world. They are always online, connected to one another and to the Web.

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Scan on Demand: Open Library and Boston Public Library Put a Twist on Scanning Projects

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Published by rwatstein November 23rd, 2008 in libraries, library services and digital. 0 Comments

In a demand-driven solution to what to scan first, a patron request to digitize any public domain book on the shelves of Boston Public Library can be submitted via Open Library’s site.

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N.Y. Public Library Puts its ‘Treasures’ Online

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Published by rwatstein November 15th, 2008 in libraries, digital, collections and NYPL. 0 Comments

The New York Public Library quietly rolled out a new video series last month. Titled “Treasures,” it showcases 11 gems of the library’s vast collection of more than 50 million items. And since then it has joined Facebook, broadening an online reach that already included YouTube and iTunes pages to gain more of an audience — which, for one of the world’s largest public libraries, includes “everybody from preschool toddlers to the greatest writers in the world,” says president Paul LeClerc.

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ARL Releases Ithaka Study Report on Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication

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Published by rwatstein November 15th, 2008 in digital, publishing and ARL. 0 Comments

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released the final report of “Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication”, a study that ARL commissioned Ithaka to conduct. The study, conducted by Nancy L. Maron and K. Kirby Smith, comes with the database of exemplars that it produced. The study’s focus was on those projects that are pushing beyond the boundaries of traditional formats and are considered innovative by the faculty who use them. Ithaka’s findings are based on a collection of resources identified by a volunteer field team of over 300 librarians at 46 academic institutions in the US and Canada.

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Paper — A Content Integrity Service for Digital Repositories

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Published by rwatstein November 9th, 2008 in digital, collections and acquisitions/mergers. 0 Comments

We present a “content integrity service” for long- lived digital documents, especially for objects stored in digital repositories. The goal of the service is to demonstrate that information in the repository is authentic and has not been unintentionally or maliciously altered, even after its bit representation in the repository has undergone one or more transformations. We describe our design for an efficient, secure service that achieves this, and our implementations of two prototypes of such a service that we developed, most recently for DSpace. Our solution relies on one-way hashing and digital time- stamping procedures. Our service applies not only to transformations to archival content such as format changes, but also to the introduction of new cryptographic primitives, such as the new one-way hash function family that will be chosen by NIST in the competition that was recently announced [10]. In the face of recent attacks on hash functions, this feature is absolutely necessary to the design of an integrity- preserving system that is meant to endure for decades.

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Google Makes Scanned Documents Searchable

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Published by rwatstein November 9th, 2008 in search, digital and Google. 0 Comments

Using optical character-recognition technology, Google will make the converted text of scanned PDFs available on its search results pages via the “View as HTML” link.

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Christian Science Monitor Ends Print Edition

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Published by rwatstein November 2nd, 2008 in digital, publishing and newspapers. 0 Comments

After a century of continuous publication, the Christian Science Monitor will abandon its weekday print edition in favor of an online presence, its publisher announced October 28. The cost-cutting measure makes it the first national newspaper to largely give up on print. The Monitor will move to online only in April. Subscribers will receive an emailed PDF edition on weekdays and a print magazine on the weekend.

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Microsoft Showcases Portfolio of Digital Publishing Tools at IFRA Expo

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Published by rwatstein November 2nd, 2008 in digital, Microsoft and publishing. 0 Comments

Software vendor Microsoft Corp. is demonstrating its digital media tools at the ongoing IFRA Expo 2008, October 27-30. The company will showcase how publishers can use technology to stay competitive in the world of online and digital media and evolve their publications into content service offerings by creating better user experiences and adapting their business models. It will exhibit a range of solutions dedicated to media search and monetisation of archive materials, advertising and the digital content experience.

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Agencies Collaborate on Digitization Guidelines

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Published by rwatstein October 25th, 2008 in digital and government. 0 Comments

The Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative, a partnership of a dozen federal agencies that is working to establish a common set of guidelines for the digitization of historical materials, has launched a new Web site. The site, www.digitizationguidelines.gov, includes a glossary of digitization terms and concepts and news from the participating agencies. The initiative has two working groups: one focused on content that can be captured from still images and another on sound, video or motion picture film. The still image working group will focus its efforts on content such as books, manuscripts, maps and photographic prints. Meanwhile, the audio-visual group will address standards and practices for sound, video and film.

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Swiss Abbey Gets a Mellon Grant to Digitize Manuscripts

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Published by rwatstein October 25th, 2008 in digital and collections. 0 Comments

One of the oldest and most valuable collections of handwritten medieval books in the world, housed in the magnificent baroque halls of the Abbey Library of St. Gall in Switzerland, is going online with the help of a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The collection includes material as varied as curses against book thieves, early love ballads, hearty drinking songs, and a hand-drawn ground plan for a medieval monastery, drafted around A.D. 820, the only such document of its kind.

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Portending a Universal Digital Library, HahtiTrust Launches Ambitious Repository

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Published by rwatstein October 19th, 2008 in libraries, digital, collections and HahtiTrust. 0 Comments

In what may be the library community’s most ambitious digital collaboration so far, some two-dozen large research libraries this week announced the launch of a single, shared repository of digital collections, including scanned books, articles, special collections, and a range of “born digital” materials.

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The Library Journal Academic Newswire Newsmaker Interview: John Wilkin, Michigan Associate University Librarian and Executive Director of HathiTrust

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Published by rwatstein October 19th, 2008 in libraries, digital, collections and HahtiTrust. 0 Comments

Library Journal Academic Newswire caught up with Wilkin to get some insight into what may be the library community’s most ambitious digital collaboration so far, the first in a series of Q&As with HathiTrust partners.

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China Opens Digital Library for the Blind

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Published by rwatstein October 19th, 2008 in China, libraries, digital and disabilities. 0 Comments

A digital library for the blind, where the visually impaired can listen to electronic books, music, or online lectures for free, has opened in Beijing. Situated in the National Library, the facility was jointly set up by the Information Center of the China Disabled Persons’ Federation, the National Library, and China Braille Publishing House. It opened October 14, on the eve of the International Day of the Blind.

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Law Professors Put Printed Textbooks on Trial

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Published by rwatstein October 5th, 2008 in books, digital and publishing. 0 Comments

Law professors from around the country gathered in Seattle on Saturday to put the printed textbook on trial. That about 40 people gathered on a sunny Saturday to ponder life beyond print shows that times are changing in publishing. The daylong discussion educed topics ranging from cerebral musings — could information proliferation make lawyers obsolete? — to technical nuance — what’s the difference between open source and open access?

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Organization of American States Join the Library of Congress in Developing the World Digital Library

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Published by rwatstein September 21st, 2008 in libraries, digital and Library of Congress. 0 Comments

The Organization of American States (OAS) has agreed to join the Library of Congress in developing the World Digital Library, which is scheduled for launch in 2009 in Paris. Under the agreement, the OAS’ Columbus Memorial Library will collaborate on the global library project, whose main objectives include promoting international and intercultural understanding and awareness; providing resources to educators; expanding non-English and non-Western content on the Internet; and contributing to scholarly research.

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Smithsonian to Put its 137 Million-Object Collection Online

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Published by rwatstein September 21st, 2008 in museums, digital and collections. 0 Comments

The Smithsonian Institution will work to digitize its collections to make science, history and cultural artifacts accessible online and dramatically expand its outreach to schools, the museum complex’s new chief said recently. “I worry about museums becoming less relevant to society,” said Secretary G. Wayne Clough in his first interviews since taking the Smithsonian’s helm in July. Clough, 66, who was president of the Georgia Institute of Technology for 14 years, says he’s working to bring in video gaming experts and Web gurus to collaborate with curators on creative ways to present artifacts online and make them appealing to kids. “I think we need to take a major step,” Clough said in an earlier interview. “Can we work with outside entities to create a place, for example, where we might demonstrate cutting-edge technologies to use to reach out to school systems all over the country? I think we can do that.”

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Wake Forest University’s Anthropology Museum to Unveil Online Database of Entire Collection

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Published by rwatstein September 14th, 2008 in digital, collections and databases. 0 Comments

From 10,000-year-old American Indian tools and weapons to 20th century African masks, more than 26,000 artifacts in the Wake Forest University Museum of Anthropology’s collections will be accessible online in a searchable database. Beginning Sept. 9, the public will be able to search the online database, www.wfu.edu/moa/database, and find a photograph and description of each object, including information about where it was collected. The collection includes Japanese kimonos, thousand-year-old Egyptian coins, 19th century Inuit dolls, pre-Columbian earthenware pots, and a vast array of other artifacts from cultures around the world.

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Google Copying, Storing More Stories Fit for Print

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Published by rwatstein September 14th, 2008 in search, digital and Google. 0 Comments

Google Inc. is trying to expand the newspaper section of its online library to include billions of articles published during the past 244 years, hoping the added attraction will lure even more traffic to its leading Internet search engine. The project announced Monday extends Google’s crusade to make digital copies of content created before the Internet’s advent, so the information can become more accessible and, ultimately, Google can make more money from ads shown on its Web site.

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Survey of Library Digitization Projects

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Published by rwatstein September 7th, 2008 in libraries, digital and collections. 0 Comments

A new study by Primary Research Group offers data on digitization projects in more than 100 museums and academic, public, and special libraries in several countries. More than 53% have teamed up with another department to work jointly on a project. The mean number of hours spent obtaining rights permissions or copyright clearance was 221. Nearly 49% of the organizations in the sample outsource some form of digitization, in whole or in part, to an outside party.

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Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Makes Digital History

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Published by rwatstein September 7th, 2008 in digital and collections. 0 Comments

A 2008 National Leadership Demonstration Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services will enable the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh to digitally preserve more than 400,000 pages of historic materials related to the iron and steel industry. The $600,000 grant, awarded September 2 by IMLS Director Anne-Imelda M. Radice, will finance “The Legacy of Iron and Steel” project. With this grant, the library will demonstrate how it can use current technology to provide access to and excitement about its historic collections.

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State Digital Resources: Memory Projects, Online Encyclopedias, Historical & Cultural Materials Collections

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Published by rwatstein August 31st, 2008 in digital, collections and Library of Congress. 0 Comments

The Library of Congress American Memory project and other digital initiatives provide free access through the Internet to the treasures of the Library’s collections that document America’s history, culture, and creativity. Across the country, the archives, cultural institutions, museums, and libraries of many states are collaborating to create similar projects. They provide unprecedented access to materials that document local and regional growth and development as well as a look at the cultures and traditions that have made individual states and communities unique. The following is a compilation of state and regional digital projects and collaborations identified thus far. For each project, the primary institution or institutions overseeing the project are noted. The list will expand as new projects become available.

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Woodrow Wilson: A Resource Guide

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Published by rwatstein August 31st, 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 Woodrow Wilson. This resource guide compiles links to digital materials related to Wilson such as manuscripts, broadsides, government documents, images, sheet music, and films that are available throughout the Library of Congress Web site. In addition, it provides links to external Web sites focusing on Wilson and a bibliography containing selected works for both a general audience and younger readers.

View the Woodrow Wilson site here

Israel to Display Dead Sea Scrolls Online

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Published by rwatstein August 31st, 2008 in digital and collections. 0 Comments

In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half-a-dozen specialists embarked this week on a historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file—among the most sought-after and examined documents on earth—available to all on the internet. Scholars continually ask the Israel Antiquities Authority, the custodian of the scrolls, for access to them. The process will probably take one to two years—more before it is available online—and is being led by former Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Greg Bearman.

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10 Reasons Not to Write Off Reading From a Screen

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Published by rwatstein August 31st, 2008 in digital, Kindle and e-books. 0 Comments

Michael Bhaskar writes: “Over the past few months there has been much discussion of an impending digital revolution in the way we read books. While much of this is hyperbole, there has been incredulity in many quarters that anyone would ever want to read from a screen. We are all attached to books, and the idea seems at first glance anachronistic. However there are some good reasons why it might not go away as quickly as you’d think. Here’s why.”

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17 Things To Do With Your Online Photos

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Published by rwatstein July 26th, 2008 in web 2.0, digital and photos. 0 Comments

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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Library of Congress, National Archives Form World Digital Library Partnership

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Published by rwatstein 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.

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A Thaw in Franco-Google Relations? Google Books Signs First French Library

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Published by rwatstein July 19th, 2008 in libraries, books, digital and Google. 0 Comments

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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Scan and Deliver

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Published by rwatstein July 19th, 2008 in libraries, digital and collections. 0 Comments

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

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Published by rwatstein July 19th, 2008 in libraries, library services, digital, technology and digital divide. 0 Comments

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

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Published by rwatstein July 12th, 2008 in China, digital and collections. 0 Comments

The Duke University Libraries has launched a digital collection of about 5,000 photographs shot primarily in China between 1917 and 1932 by Sidney Gamble, grandson of Proctor and Gamble co-founder James Gamble.

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The searchable collection is online here

Good and Evil in the Garden of Digitization

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Published by rwatstein July 12th, 2008 in information, digital and Google. 0 Comments

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

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Published by rwatstein June 29th, 2008 in digital, OCLC and archives. 0 Comments

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

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Published by rwatstein June 29th, 2008 in digital, software and music. 0 Comments

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

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Published by rwatstein June 29th, 2008 in education, digital, publishing and e-books. 0 Comments

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

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Published by rwatstein June 21st, 2008 in digital, archives and preservation. 0 Comments

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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Read the full report here

Aggre-Culture: What do e-book Aggregators Offer? Lonsdale & Armstrong

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Published by rwatstein June 21st, 2008 in digital and aggregators. 0 Comments

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

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Published by rwatstein June 21st, 2008 in libraries and digital. 0 Comments

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

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Published by rwatstein June 7th, 2008 in libraries, library services, books and digital. 0 Comments

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

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Published by rwatstein June 1st, 2008 in libraries, web sites and digital. 0 Comments

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

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Published by rwatstein May 26th, 2008 in digital, Google and OCLC. 0 Comments

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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Logo Launches Online Library

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Published by rwatstein May 26th, 2008 in video and digital. 0 Comments

Logo has launched the world’s largest library on online video aimed at the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. LOGOonline.com is now home to more than 1,200 video clips, spanning an array of programming genres.

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Logo online website

Pope Goes Digital to Better Connect with Youth

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Published by rwatstein May 26th, 2008 in digital and trends. 0 Comments

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

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Published by rwatstein 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.”

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Migrants in a Digital Land

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Published by rwatstein May 4th, 2008 in mobile/cell phones, innovation, information, digital and technology. 0 Comments

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

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Published by rwatstein April 27th, 2008 in libraries, information and digital. 1 Comment

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

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Published by rwatstein April 27th, 2008 in libraries, sources, research and digital. 0 Comments

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

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Published by rwatstein April 27th, 2008 in libraries, library services, books and digital. 0 Comments

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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