The project was first announced in February.  via LIBER: The newest LIBER’s project’s website has been launched in co-operation with the Berlin State Library, the Europeana Newspapers project leader. The Europeana Newspapers project aims at the aggregation and refinement of newspapers for The European Library and Europeana. Direct to the New Web Site See Also: Europe: More Than 10 Million Digitized Newspaper Pages Coming to Europeana (February 16, 2012) (Via LJ INFOdocket.)...

The project was first announced in February.  via LIBER: The newest LIBER’s project’s website has been launched in co-operation with the Berlin State Library, the Europeana Newspapers project leader. The Europeana Newspapers project aims at the aggregation and refinement of newspapers for The European Library and Europeana. Direct to the New Web Site See Also: Europe: More Than 10 Million Digitized Newspaper Pages Coming to Europeana (February 16, 2012)   (Via LJ INFOdocket.)...

From the Booknet Canada Technology Forum that took place in March. Direct to Video Blurb As publishers get deeper into digital, accessible data is not a niche but an imperative. Matt Garrish, author of the upcoming Accessible EPUB 3 O’Reilly guide will go over EPUB 3’s accessibility features, going over enhancements and how DAISY talking book standards merged into EPUB, while demonstrating what’s now possible thanks to this upgrade. Links to More Video Talks from the Forum (Via LJ INFOdocket.)...

From Oregon Public Radio: Rare, once-lost historic records about pioneer Chinese immigrants to the Northwest have found a new life online. The digital archive is hosted by Oregon State University. A Chinese-American civic group hopes the document trove can help families locate ancestors gone missing early in the last century. This document collection includes names, dates and places where the remains of Chinese immigrant workers were systematically dug up across Oregon. This actually was a custom across the American West decades ago. Mostly bachelor Chinese laborers wished for their remains to be returned and reburied in their home villages. [Clip] The Chinese disinterment document...

From The Omaha World-Herald: A group of University of Nebraska-Lincoln professors is archiving the 19th-century petitions that, as a result of legislation enacted 150 years ago Monday, allowed slave owners in Washington, D.C., to receive government compensation for freeing their slaves. The team has transcribed and put 200 petitions on a UNL website exploring the Civil War’s impact on the nation’s capital. They hope to have the other 800 or so on the site by next summer. A part from the petitions and court documents, official records of U.S. slaves are virtually nonexistent, said Ken Winkle, a UNL history professor who is part...

From an Introductory Blog Post: We are excited to announce the launch of our brand new online picture library containing digital images of paintings, photographs, drawings and prints held in our collections. Browse our special themed galleries or dive straight into the advanced search and explore by subject, date and more! [Clip] Pictures have been catalogued to include detailed descriptions and provenance information; they have also, in many cases, been digitised for the first time. The website is freely available for all to view and we hope it will prove a valuable tool for academic research. The resource also offers an image licensing service...

From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: The St. Paul Public Library will become a beta testing site for a new electronic book lending service on Wednesday. The 3M Cloud Library eBook Lending Service will allow patrons to check out books on their own electronic devices or borrow such devices from the library to use at home. The 3M system includes more than 100,000 titles from 40 publishers including Random House, Sourcebooks and IPG. 3M terminals with touch screens will help library patrons browse the digital collection. Digital readers also are synchronized with the library system. See Also: eBook Usage Soars at St. Paul Libraries, But it’s...

Laura Hazard Owen at paidContent has written an excellent article about Amazon (as in Amazon.com) Publishing. The companies first imprint will launch this Fall. The report is LOADED with details direct from the person in charge, publishing industry veteran, Larry Kirshbaum. Here are a few highlights from a must-read article for those of you interested in publishing. 1. “Our book distribution to libraries is going to be a very important part of our mix too because that’s where a lot of books get started.” (Our Emphasis) 2. “Amazon is publishing ‘a lot of novels. I don’t want to make this a sales presentation,...

OD shared a bit of data last week (we shared a few comments), today more numbers. Meredith Schwartz has details on The Digital Shift. From the Article: OverDrive released its first “Big Data” report at the London Book Fair, a snapshot of the library ebook platform’s March traffic. In that single month, more than 5 million visitors viewed 146 million pages in 12.6 million visits to OverDrive-hosted digital catalog, the company reported. On average, ebook catalogs hosted more than 408,000 visits each day. Visitors viewed 11.6 pages and browsed the site for 9 minutes 34 seconds on average. [Clip] Nearly 60 percent of readers browsed...

A presentation by Kyusik Chung from Goodreads at the Booknet Canada Technology Forum that took place in Toronto a little over a month ago From the Program: Kyusik Chung, VP of Business Development at Goodreads and co-founder of Discovereads, takes us behind the scenes and explains how book recommendation engines work. Learn about the different kinds of book recommendation engines are out there, how they work and what went into the creation of Discovereads. Find out how engines match readers with books and authors and how readers are responding to them, and and learn tips on how to optimize your books for...

From the The Irish Times: The National Library of Ireland has brought forward plans to publish a major collection of James Joyce manuscripts free on the web after a Joycean scholar published the material in editions priced at up to €250. It is the first such Joyce collection to be opened to the public in this way. The library’s move comes in response to the publication by scholar Danis Rose of all the manuscripts, in editions priced between €75 and €250. Mr Rose has also claimed he is now the copyright holder in the EU of these manuscripts. The director of the National Library,...

From The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh has opened a digital archive that will let Internet users worldwide view more than a half million pages of historical documents about the city’s iron and steel heritage. The library’s Pittsburgh Iron and Steel Heritage Collection — now online at www.carnegielibrary.org/ironsteel — contains more than 500,000 pages, including excerpts from books, newspaper articles, maps, journals, photographs, illustrations and trade catalogs. The pages, preserved with microfilm, date back as far as the 1800s, and give viewers a glimpse into the lives of industry tycoons like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew W. Mellon and...