Archive for the ‘Digitization Projects’ Category

New Zealand: Papers Past adds more digitised newspapers

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

From the Announcement:

Ever wondered what newspapers reported in the late 1800s? Read all about it in Papers Past.

Papers Past contains 1.3 million, now fully searchable, pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. The collection ranges from 1839 to 1932 and includes 52 varieties of New Zealand publications.

We added seven new titles this week, including the Ellesmere Guardian, Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle, Oxford Observer and Canterbury Democrat, Victoria Times, NZ Truth, Kai Tiaki: the Journal of the Nurses of NZ and more issues of the Poverty Bay Herald.

“It’s great to see New Zealanders and people from overseas exploring Papers Past. A variety of audiences are using it including hobbyists, teachers, drama students and anyone interested in New Zealand’s past.” explained Penny Carnaby, CEO and National Librarian, National Library of New Zealand.

Direct to Papers First Web Site

Source: National Library of New Zealand

International collaboration steers future of mass digitisation

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

From the Announcement:

Mass digitisation has become one of the most prominent issues in the library world over the last 5 years, with a number of experienced libraries in Europe already scanning millions of pages each year. To help establish some standardisation over the course of the project, the British Library’s team will lead work on a set of ‘Decision Support Tools’ in an effort to focus on practical implementation support, providing guidance on digitisation workflow, the capturing of material and the organisation of metadata based on the real world experiences of project partners. These measures, announced at the first IMPACT conference in April will help ensure new material can be digitised successfully and feed into existing workflows.

Source: British Library

A New Version of the Google Book Search Bibliography is Now Online

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Word from Charles W. Bailey, Jr that a new version (#4) of his Google Book Search Bibliography is now available online.

Direct to Bibliography

This bibliography presents selected English-language articles and other works that are useful in understanding Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it. Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories. Note that e-prints and published articles may not be identical.

Source: Charles W. Bailey, Jr. (via ERIL-L)

New from the Library of Congress: Chronicling America Topic Guides

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

From an E-Mail Announcement:

The Library of Congress has recently launched a series of “topic guides” to the newspapers included in Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ ). Each topic guide (e.g., Baseball’s Modern World Series, Ellis Island, or the Russo-Japanese War) includes subject-specific terms (including name usage, historical language, unusual spellings, etc.) and dates that can be readily used to search this topic in Chronicling America, as well as a list of sample articles found in Chronicling America. These topic guides are presented by the Library’s Newspaper and Current Periodicals Reading Room. More topics will be added over time as the Chronicling America site continues to make new mat

Direct to Topic Guides

Source: LC

See Also: Milestones: Library of Congress, National Endowment for the Humanities Celebrate Millionth Page in Chronicling America Program

New Online from Northwestern University: A Collection of Historic East African Photographs

Friday, June 26th, 2009

From the Article:

Northwestern University has put online more than 7,000 rare photographs of East Africa that document the European colonization of the area from 1860 through 1960.

The images made available to the public today in the Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs were purchased by the university in 2002 for an undisclosed price.

Direct to Humphrey Winterton Collection

Source: Wired Campus

Leader of Authors Guild Defends Google Book Settlement

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

From a Blog Post:

Google’s settlement with authors and publishers over its scanning of millions of books contained in several university libraries has come under fire recently from critics who argue that Google is effectively creating a monopoly of digital versions of books.

The criticism has centered on so-called orphan books, out-of-print books that are still in copyright but for which rights holders cannot be found.

On Wednesday, in an open letter to members, Roy Blount, the president of the Authors Guild, argued that such criticism was unwarranted.

Read the Full Text of the Open Letter

Source: Media Decoder Blog (NY Times)

American Archivist in JSTOR

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

From the SAA Web Site:

SAA signed an agreement in April to have American Archivist participate in JSTOR, an independent not-for-profit organization that is dedicated to making a wide range of intellectual content available in a trusted digital archive. Currently the JSTOR archive includes the complete back runs of more than 800 journals, which are available to libraries. American Archivist would be part of the newly developing Arts and Sciences VII collection under “Library and Information Sciences.” The entire run of the journal is projected to debut in 2010. The recently retired Charles Schultz has generously donated his back issues of the journal (1963 through 2008) to SAA for use by JSTOR. Issues prior to 1963 will dovetail with the OCLC digitization project.

Source: Society of American Archivists

See Also: Learn More About the OCLC Project Mentioned in the Post

New: 19th Century Digitised Newspapers from the UK Go Live on the Web

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

From an Announcement:

Two million online digitised pages of 19th century newspaper, take researchers back to the future.

The British Library, in partnership with JISC and Gale, part of Cengage Learning, has today launched the public version of its 19th century British Library Newspaper website.

Bathing machines, children as young as nine smoking and drinking, Vesta Tilley - London’s very own Pop Idol, the banking collapse of 1878 and zero percent income tax, are just a few of the fascinating items researchers can now look at online.

For the first time ever, users regardless of their location will be able to explore over two million pages of newspaper from 49 national and regional UK titles at the click of a button. With enhanced search capabilities and new imaging techniques, serious and amateur researchers now have access to vivid newspaper reports previously only available via hard copy in Reading Rooms.

Chosen by leading experts and academics to present a cross section of 19th century society, the website offers its users highly illustrated materials on topics as diverse as business and sport, politics and entertainment. The collection focuses on national newspapers such as the Daily News, English regional papers, for example the Manchester Times, home country newspapers from Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, weekly titles such as Penny Illustrated Paper and Graphic and specialist titles such that covered Victorian radicalism and Chartism such as Charter.

Users are now able to read first-hand factual reporting of the Battle of Trafalgar in the Examiner and the gory details of the Whitechapel murders in the melodramatic Illustrated Police News. Alternatively, researchers can access reports directly at their desktops on the first FA Cup final between Wanderers and Royal Engineers at the Kenington Oval in 1872 or the first England-Australia Test match in 1877. Some of the most famous authors of the 19th century are also represented, including Dickens and Thackeray.

Searches of the site are free and downloads of full-text articles are available by purchasing either a 24-hour or seven-day pass. Users can buy a 24-hour pass (up to 100 downloads) for £6.99 or a seven-day pass (up to 200 downloads) for £9.99. Access to The Graphic and The Penny Illustrated Paper is free. The newspapers are still free for colleges and universities - who can continue to access the site via their institutional gateways.

Direct to Website

Source: JISC

New Features and Tools from Google Book Search

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Seven new and updated features and tools from Google Books today. You can read about them here. Here are a few highlights:

Embeds and links - This new toolbar option allows you to embed a preview of a full view or partner book in any of your websites or blogs–all with a simple html snippet. It’s a lot like the embed tag that makes it so easy to share YouTube videos.

Better search within each book - You’ve always been able to search inside books you find on Google Book Search. Now, for public domain and partner books, we’ve made it easier to see exactly where your search term appears within the book by showing you more context around the term, including an image from the part of the page on which it appears.

Thumbnail view - Click on the thumbnail view button in the toolbar to see an overview of all the pages in a public domain book or in a magazine

Contents drop-down menu - Above the book itself, you’ll find a Contents drop-down that allows you to jump to chapters within the book–or articles within a magazine.

Page Turn Button and Animation - In addition to scrolling through the book, you can now also click the page turn button at the bottom of the screen, even if you haven’t yet finished the page.

Improved Book Overview Page On the Overview page you’ll find an assortment of useful data about the book, including reviews, ratings, summaries, related books, key words and phrases, references from the web, places mentioned in the book, publisher information, etc.

Source: Inside Google Book Search
Hat Tip: Barry S.

Milestones: Library of Congress, National Endowment for the Humanities Celebrate Millionth Page in Chronicling America Program

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

From an Announcement:

The Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities today marked a major milestone in their partnership to digitize historic U.S. newspapers and make them widely available to the public on the Internet. During an event held at the Newseum, Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress, announced that the Chronicling America website (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/)—a free, national, searchable database of historic American newspaper pages published between 1880 and 1922—recently posted its millionth page.

Launched by the NEH and the Library of Congress in March 2007, Chronicling America is a part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the two agencies to provide enhanced access to historically significant United States newspapers. NEH Acting Chairman Carole M. Watson announced grant awards to seven new NDNP state projects during the event, as well. New state partners in Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon, and South Carolina will select historically important newspapers published in their respective states and oversee the digitization of those newspapers for posting to the Chronicling America website.

This online resource will eventually contain 20 million pages of historic American newspapers from 1836 to 1922, and in addition to the digitized pages, Chronicling America offers educational essays on every title represented and a directory of all newspapers published in the United States from 1690 to the present.

Direct to Chronicling America Database

See Also: New Flickr Photo Set from the Library of Congress: Historic Newspapers

See Also: Newspapers Digitization: LC’s “Chronicling America” Receives Update

Source: Library of Congress

Google Books Mutilates the Printed Past

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

The author, a medieval historian, thinks Google Book Search is a “revolution in research” but…

From the Article:

In its frenzy to digitize the holdings of its partner collections, in this case those of the Stanford University Libraries, Google Books has pursued a “good enough” scanning strategy. The books’ pages were hurriedly reproduced: No apparent quality control was employed, either during or after scanning. The result is that 29 percent of the pages in Volume 1 and 38 percent of the pages in Volume 2 are either skewed, blurred, swooshed, folded back, misplaced, or just plain missing. A few images even contain the fingers of the human page-turner. (Like a medieval scribe, he left his own pointing hand on the page!) Not bad, one might argue, for no charge and on your desktop. But now I’m dealing with a mutilated edition of a mutilated selection of a mutilated archive of a mutilated history of a mutilated kingdom — hardly the stuff of the positivist, empirical method I was trained in a generation ago.

A random spot-check of other Google-scanned books has yielded some better results, but the general drift is clear: good enough for our mutilated view of the past, rushed through the scanning process so that Google could lay claim to as many artifacts of our cultural past in as short a time and with as small a budget as possible.

But why complain? What’s left over is more than enough. Like anyone else, I can now glean dozens of Latin archival documents while in my slippers. Of course, if I wanted reliable texts, I would be at the Columbia, Fordham, or Princeton library, poring through the print volumes, and would make sure I could see the surviving archival remnants. But the point is that Google Books has represented to us that its massive digitization project will offer a valuable, reliable, open-access research tool that would make the digital at least the equivalent and — through its ubiquity and ease — the clear superior of print. It is, after all, the “public good,” not the “public good enough,” that lies behind all of Google Books’ claims for fair-use rights to its digitization schemes.

If Google Books were undertaking this for the few dozen of us knowledgeable and interested in a particular specialized field, why do so at all? Those are not its claims. Its claims are that it is providing the most knowledge for the most good, in the best available form, with the best available means. Thus its right to turn copyright on its head.

But that’s just not so.

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Hat Tip: :LISNews

See Also: Podcast: Adam Smith: What’s Next for Google Book Search? (Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed)
Hat Tip: Library Stuff

New Issue of ‘JISC Inform’ highlights digitisation and technology for education

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

From an Announcement:

Social media and how Web 2.0 technologies are impacting education are the main themes of the new JISC Inform published this week.

Direct to JISC Inform Report

Source: JISC

New ‘JISC (UK) Inform’ highlights digitisation and technology for education

Monday, June 15th, 2009

From a Summary:

Social media and how Web 2.0 technologies are impacting education are the main themes of the new JISC Inform published this week.

Ewan McIntosh, digital media manager with Channel 4’s Innovation for the Public (4iP) shares his thoughts on the issues he thinks will resonate for the future of educational and public-funded technologies and Sir David Melville, Chair of the Committee of Inquiry behind the ‘HE in a Web 2.0 World’ report writes about its key findings.

The details of JISC’s digitisation programme are highlighted by Michelle Pauli, who gives an overview on how over £22 million has been spent to digitise over 6.5 million items for teaching, learning and research.

Opening up resources continues with a summary of JISC’s most successful annual conference – Opening Digital Doors and a review by David Flanders, a self-proclaimed ‘alpha geek’ working for JISC as a programme manager, on the organisation’s first developer happiness day.

Direct to Complete Issue

Source: JISC

New Flickr Photo Set from the Library of Congress: Historic Newspapers

Friday, June 12th, 2009

From a Blog Post by Matt Raymond:

Today the Library launched a new photostream on our Flickr page to celebrate this [newspaper imagery] visual heritage. It is a series of 52 weekly supplements in the New-York Tribune, beginning 100 years ago in 1909. About 50 new pages will be added to the stream every month.

Learn more here.

Direct to Library of Congress Photo Stream on Flickr

On a Related Note: Newspapers Digitazation: LC’s “Chronicling America” Receives Update

Source: Library of Congress

Newspapers Digitazation: LC’s “Chronicling America” Receives Update

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

From the Announcement:

Over recent weeks the Library of Congress has implemented changes to the Chronicling America web site that improve and expand use of historic American newspapers digitized for the National Digital Newspaper Program. Most changes are behind-the-scenes, but users will notice some differences - search results as thumbnail images, increased performance, and persistent (i.e., “bookmarkable”) URLs in use throughout the site. In addition, we’ve improved the site to provide open access through standard protocols. Check out the Upgrade Details page linked above for more information!

Direct to Chronicling America (Historic U.S. Newspaper Database)

Source: Library of Congress