The complete archive (browse) is free for subscribers to the publication. FA just announced two new subscription plans. From FishbowlNY: The portal contains 8,000 articles from nearly 400 issues. There are also more than 300 images and maps. To help with navigation, and well, where to begin, the editors have organized articles into nine collections. In all, digitization was a project that took nearly a year to complete. At the present time a selection of articles organized into nine curated collections are available for free to ALL visitors. Foreign Affairs is published by the Council on Foreign Relations. Direct to Online Archive/Curated Collections See Also: Reference: Iran Crisis Guide, Global...

From an Article by Michael Kelley at Library Journal: Librarians’ passionate advocacy of our titles is vital to our efforts  and we remain committed to keeping our ebooks available in the library channel,” said Josh Marwell, Harper’s president of sales. Marwell said that the 26-loan cap remains a work in progress, but no other business model has emerged in the past year that makes more sense to the company. [Clip] The Municipal Library Consortium of St. Louis County (MLC), which consists of nine independent community libraries in Missouri, has now changed its mind about the boycott it approved last year. “A couple of months ago we started purchasing...

From ICv2: ICv2 has released its estimate for the digital comics market in 2011: $25 million.  That’s over triple the sales in the channel in 2010, when ICv2 estimated the digital comics market at $8 million.  That’s a total for the English language market, as sales are not restricted by territory and a significant percentage of those sales are from consumers outside North America. The growth rate accelerated in the second half of the year. ICv2 had estimated that the growth rate at mid-year 2011 was roughly twice 2010 but by the end of the year, growth was significantly faster. Read the Complete Article and...

From LIBER: A group of 17 European partner institutions have joined forces in the “European Newspapers” project and will, over the next 3 years, provide more than 10 million newspaper pages to the EUROPEANA service. The European Newspapers project (funded under EC’s CIP 2007 – 2013) aims at the aggregation and refinement of newspapers for The European Library and Europeana. [Clip] Each library participating in the project will distribute digitized newspapers and full-texts free of any legal restrictions to Europeana. There will be a special focus on newspapers published during the First World War, thus providing a meaningful addition to the resources aggregated by the current Europeana 1914-1918 project. Additional Details in the Complete...

From a BML/ProQuest News Release: E-book sales are rising to offset a decline in physical book purchases, but only in volume. With the lower price points of e-books versus their print counterparts, the value of book sales is shrinking.” “The Books & Consumers survey shows that in the 48 weeks ending 27th November 2011, compared to the same period the previous year, British consumers’ purchases of physical books declined by 4%, with value down some 6%. However, with e-book purchases included, the total consumer book market grew very slightly in volume terms, up 0.4%, with a market value drop of 3% overall. “The survey...

From a Radio Netherlands Report: The YouTube generation has gained an ally in the worldwide “copyright wars.” The Dutch government wants to change copyright law so new media users can continue to do “creative remixes” of protected content. The Hague will no longer wait for the European Commission to find a compromise. [Clip] [Bent] Hugenholtz, copyright law professor at the University of Amsterdam [and member of the Dutch state committee on copyright law] , discussed his views last Friday with representatives of European governments, the entertainment industry, internet entrepreneurs, legal experts, journalists and librarians. They were gathered in The Hague for “Towards Flexible Copyright,”...

Why did Penguin terminate their contract with OverDrive? Here’s what we’ve learned from an INFOdocket source. We are told that publisher contracts with OverDrive allow them to store and serve library end users ebooks. That’s it. OverDrive does NOT have permission to first authorize the lending of an ebook to a library end user and then forward the request for actual distribution and tracking of the title to Amazon.com or ANY other retailer. Similarly, in most situations*, publishers do not permit retailers to lend ebooks directly to end users. Finally, in November and again yesterday we noted an LJ article (November 23, 2011) that...

UPDATE: Penguin Group Terminating Its Contract with OverDrive (by Michael Kelley, LJ) “In a stunning development, Penguin Group has extricated itself from its contract with OverDrive, the primary supplier of ebooks to public libraries. ‘Looking ahead, we are continuing to talk about our future plans for ebook and digital audiobook availability for library lending with a number of partners providing these services,’ said Erica Glass, in a prepared statement. Penguin is negotiating a “continuance agreement” with OverDrive, which will allow libraries that have Penguin ebooks in their catalog to continue to have access to those titles.” From an E-Mail to OverDrive Partners Starting tomorrow (February 10, 2012),...

From the National Library of Israel Web Site The manuscripts found at the National Library are from the collection of Abraham Shalom Yehuda (1877-1951), an expert in Middle Eastern affairs. Professor Shalom Yehuda purchased the manuscripts at a public auction at London’s Sotheby’s in 1936. Other manuscripts in the collection, dealing mostly with the topic of alchemy, were purchased by the well-known economist, John Maynard Keynes, and are located at King’s College in Cambridge University. The National Library’s collection of the Newton Papers is now available to the general public in digital format. All of the papers are also linked to the Newton Project, where they...

The video was recorded during the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Fall 2011 Membership Meeting. Title: “Preservation Status of e-Resources: A Potential Crisis in Electronic Journal Preservation” Direct to Video (59 minutes) Direct to Slides (.ppt) Presenters: Oya Y. Rieger Associate University Librarian Digital Scholarship Services Cornell University Robert Wolven Associate University Librarian Bibliographic Services and Collection Development Columbia University E-journals have replaced the majority of titles formerly produced in paper format. Academic libraries are increasingly dependent on commercially produced, born-digital content that is purchased or licensed. The purpose of this presentation is to share the findings of a 2CUL study that assesses the role of LOCKSS and PORTICO in preserving each institution’s...

A new article by Peter Brantley from the Publisher’s Weekly web site. From the Article: There is a growing crisis in the academic monograph marketplace. College and university libraries are experiencing budget cuts; there are too many presses publishing too many titles; there’s growing pressure to figure out open access (OA) solutions, particularly in the face of the outrageous Research Works Act; and, aside from crossover or trade titles from the larger presses like Oxford, there is a sense that the barely adequate supply of funding will soon start to slide off a cliff. [Clip] Libraries, presses, and scholars are pressing forward with several interesting proposals...

A new iOS and Android app for all poetry lovers from the Columbia University Press. The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry is a leading web and print resource for anyone with an interest in the world of poetry. The Granger’s World of Poetry app delivers the Granger’s Poem of the Day and Daily Trivia Question, for people who enjoy staying in touch with their poetic nature. The Granger’s Poem of the Day app is a product of Columbia University Press. Download the App (Free to Download and Use) Direct to Android Market Direct to iTunes App Store [Via INFOdocket]...