John D. Podesta and Carl Malamud (of FedFlix) have written an open letter to President Obama calling upon him to launch an initiative to find out what it would take to scan and post the entire contents of the public-domain government archives so that more people would have access to them. Imagine if the riches contained in the National Archives, Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, Government Printing Office, National Library of Medicine, National Agricultural Library, National Technical Information Service, and scores of other federal organizations were made available, becoming the core of a national effort to...

From The Wellcome Library Blog: As part of the Wellcome Digital Library pilot project, we’re joining forces with ProQuest to digitise over fifteen thousand volumes from our rare book collection. They will be made available through ProQuest’s new Early European Books (EEB) database – a sister project to the long-established and successful Early English Books Online. As its name suggests, EEB will trace the history of printing in continental Europe from its origins up to 1700. A number of other libraries have already contributed to the project, including the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. We’ll be...

Here are three questions and answers from the complete interview that appears in the July 24, 2011 edition of the Boston Globe: IDEAS: So why not leave it to Google? DARNTON: It became clear, as Google's project evolved, that it would be a commercial enterprise, and in fact an enterprise attached to a gigantic monopoly. A monopoly, perhaps, with the best intentions, but that would not necessarily serve the public good, because of course Google's primary responsibility would be to its shareholders .[Clip] IDEAS: So what would a digital public library be like? What would it do? DARNTON: It doesn't look like everybody's image of...

Egypt's Library of Alexandria has announced that it's placed 19,000 works from its collection on the Espresso Book Machine (EBM) network, and plans to add another 150,000 Arabic titles soon. The library operates three EBMs, but this also means people around the world can print replicas of the library's titles from their nearest EBM. You can read the press release on On Demand Books' News page. Via INFOdocket...

You forgot to record Monday night's premiere of the new C-SPAN documentary on the Library of Congress, didn't you? Well, you can watch it online for free at C-SPAN's LOC minisite. The 90 minute film takes a holistic approach to its subject, covering everything from the library's founding to its architecture to its vast collection (including a Braille copy of "Mein Kampf"). If you just want to watch the section about how the library uses technology to preserve and study manuscripts, jump to 1:15:45 and watch the part about the Preservation Division. If you're even more impatient, jump straight to 1:20:45, which...

From the Khaleej Times: Dubai's and the Middle East's first electronic library is a far cry from those of another era which housed dusty books on rusty bookshelves. "This is just an idea, the first step towards something big and different. The library has many e-services like different online databases that offer access to different technologies and has more computers and fewer books. The response towards the library in terms of members and visitors has been very good," said Eissa Abdulla Khalaf Abdulla, Library Services Officer, Public Libraries Department, Dubai Culture and Arts Authority. Being the first electronic library in the Middle East,...

Sue Polanka of No Shelf Required participated in an ebook summit yesterday in New Jersey, sponsored by that state's major library organizations. Other speakers included Robert Miller of the Internet Archive and Eli Neiburger of Ann Arbor District Library, and the panel discussed issues of licensing, copyright and DRM. Polanka's summaries are posted in two parts on her blog (Part I, Part II), but here are some of the highlights. Eli Neiburger, Ann Arbor District Library — "The eReader as a device is a flash in the pan. It’s not about the hardware/software and not really about the content –...

From a News Release: The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH) will receive a grant of $150,000 from energy company, Dominion Resources to build the Commonwealth's only online historical and cultural archive about Virginia's Indian communities. The grant matches an additional award from the Mary Morton Parsons Foundation of $75,000. Virginia Indian Heritage Online will be a collaborative project between two programs at the VFH--the Virginia Indian Heritage Program and Encyclopedia Virginia. It will create a comprehensive record of Virginia Indian history, interpreted and delivered, which anyone can access at any time. Through this two-year project, VFH will visit tribal communities to scan...

From the opening paragraph: "The bookless library has finally arrived, making a beachhead on college campuses. At Drexel University's new Library Learning Terrace, which opened just last month, there is nary a bound volume, just rows of computers and plenty of seating." However, what TIME doesn't mention is that the Learning Terrace is essentially a modern, library-connected study space in the middle of a University residence hall, and not simply a library gutted of printed books by some digitally starry-eyed administrators. In fact, the Drexel University Library's student guide explicitly points out that its actual libraries do still have printed...

From a LeMonde Article (In French, Mechanical Translation via Google): The National Library of France announced Wednesday, July 6, launching an appeal to private partners for the digitization and enhancement of its collections. “Today is a historic step,” said President BNF, Bruno Racine, during a joint press conference in Paris with the Minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, and the Commissioner General for investment, René Ricol. The BNF has identified 12 areas that can be scanned in partnership with private actors. These include ancient books from 1470 to 1700, a set of 300 000 French and 500 000 printed in the public domain,...

In his recent talk at the ALA conference last month, Eric Hellman focused on how libraries can best enable discovery, especially as increasing computational power makes it easy for patrons to perform sophisticated searches. He suggests two options: One alternative is to insist on getting the full text for everything they offer. (Unglued ebooks offer that, that's what we're working on at Gluejar.) The other alternative for libraries is to feed their bibliographic data to search engines so that library users can discover books in libraries. Outside libraries, this process is known as "Search Engine Optimization". When I said during my talk...

On Monday July 4th, the World Public Library's annual World eBook Fair launches, which will combine works from Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and other public collections to create a massive 6.5 million title catalog. The collection will include not just ebooks but other media like music and movies, as well as sheet music and dance choreography. EBookNewser points out that there don't seem to be any events scheduled during the fair to increase visibility, which seems too bad. At any rate it runs until August 4th....