A caveat first. The Digital Public Library of America is evolving. What’s more, I’m a booster of the organization and of the people behind it, including the new executive director, Dan Cohen, who so decently reacted after the Boston Marathon bombings. But for now, the academic-and-hacker mindset is prevailing at the DPLA over the traditional public library one, judging from the demo’s worthy but rather limited debut yesterday. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. But then, why insist on the P word in the organization’s name? Also, the K-12 appeal so far is not quite as great as I’d hoped despite some...

"Over the years I've often quoted David H. Rothman of Alexandria, Va., a pioneer in the entire field of electronic reading devices," writes James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, in an article about U.S. infrastructure that was published earlier this morning on The Atlantic's website. "[Rothman] was talking about his "Teleread" proposal many, many years [before] products like the Kindle, Nook, or iPad had been conceived." [caption id="attachment_79310" align="alignright" width="130"] David Rothman[/caption] In the same post, Fallows also emphasizes Rothman's philosophy of e-readers as "'public goods' and indispensable parts of the modern infrastructure of the 21st century, in much the way public libraries...

Two good websites on learning disabilities show the need for separate but tightly intertwined national digital library systems. One system public, one academic. Neither site is a library’s. Friends of Quinn is a grassroots nonprofit featuring Quinn Bradlee, son of Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee—the legendary society columnist and the Watergate editor. LD OnLine is from WETA, a public broadcasting station in the Washington, D.C., area. Friends is livelier and folksier. It’s a “must” starting point for any library patron eager to find out about a child’s learning disability or maybe her own. LD OnLine is stodgier but more comprehensive, and many academics would favor it over Friends. Viva la difference! In...

According to a story in yesterday's Navy Times, the Navy Library Service (who even knew there was such a thing?) is currently in the process of  "working to put e-library systems on ships, allowing sailors to choose from thousands of digital books to read while at sea." "This is a challenge," the story continues, "because limited bandwidth on surface ships and the complete lack of it on submarines prevents seamless e-book downloads while at sea." Bids will soon be solicited from companies that provide e-library services to large-scale organizations. Once a service provider is chosen, a test run "tentatively scheduled for next spring"...

While libraries everywhere are scrambling to come up with an ebook plan that can satisfy both their patrons as well as their long-term organizational goals, sometimes the greatest resources they can offer are already in their libraries.  What’s this?  Simply put, it’s the utilization of their local resources, of history, genealogy, and local authors.  This is the sort of information that is highly desired, yet sometimes falls off the radar, lost to the deluge of publishers, best-sellers and other more “trendy” technological items. It’s easy to dismiss local materials from any project planning, arguing there’s no budget, no staff and no...

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 –...