The Library of Congress is where not just books but other documents deemed to have great historical significance are stored. And soon those documents will include an archive of every single public Twitter posting ever sent. Twitter and the Library of Congress have reached an agreement whereby an archive of those postings will be transferred to the library for inclusion in its electronic archives. "We were excited to be involved with acquiring the Twitter archives because it's a unique record of our time," [LoC digital initiatives program manager Bill] Lefurgy said. "It's also a unique way...

It’s time for the tri-yearly circus to kick off again. Ars Technica reports that it’s just about time for the Library of Congress to consider granting exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s DRM anti-circumvention provisions. This process comes every three years, and the exemptions last only until the next exemption granting—which means that even already-granted exemptions have to be requested and argued again. The last go-round resulted in six exemptions, including allowing circumvention for incorporating clips into new works for purpose of criticism or comment, including educational purposes. (Apparently the MPAA’s suggestion that professors should just point a...

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...

Here's a very odd quote from James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress. Thanks to Shelf Awareness for publishing it. "The new immigrants don't shoot the old inhabitants when they come in. One technology tends to supplement rather than supplant. How you read is not as important as: will you read? And will you read something that's a book--the sustained train of thought of one person speaking to another? Search techniques are embedded in e-books that invite people to dabble rather than follow a full train of thought. This is part of a general cultural problem." --James H. Billington, Librarian of...

A pair of interesting articles about Google Books came to my attention over the last day or so. First, in The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal looks at how Google has been tweaking and updating its search algorithms to trawl the linkless world of text on paper, where searchers have radically different needs than those who search the web. In the last couple of days, Google has rolled out a new tweak called “Rich Results,” which presents one extra-large search result if Google thinks that you’re searching for a specific book title. Rich Results is the...

The Library of Congress is an important national archive, and has been for hundreds of years. It retains records for posterity—not just books, but other important things, including digital information. And soon those archives will include every public tweet ever posted to Twitter since the service’s inception in 2006. Much as with the Internet Archive’s decision to archive the web, the Library of Congress sees the move to communication on Twitter as an important sea change in the way people communicate—one that should be preserved for the study and understanding of future researchers. ...

For all the effort publishers, reviewers and writers put on the latest best-selling novel, the facts remain that many of us read about (and want) lots of other non-fiction topics.  From history to gardening and even science, there’s a whole world to discover and download to our e-reader of choice.  However, today’s fragmented marketplace and multiple methods of searching can leave the average user searching multiple sites and web pages looking for new titles to download. WorldCat can help and there are a few other index sites as well, but today I thought it would be a great time to introduce...

The new scanner, made by book2net, is the only one of its kind in the US, but there are others in Canada at two other locations. The machine, originally designed for use in the reading rooms of the British Library, was manufactured in Germany. It can capture a JPEG image of an entire newspaper page (or comic book, folio, book, bound volume, etc.) in 0.3 seconds, and it needs only 1.9 seconds of cycling time to scan another page. The scanner has a touchscreen that allows a person to view details close-up, and all it takes to scan a...

Besides ebooks, one of my favorite things to view on my Sony reader is newspapers. Not just today’s newspapers, but historical ones. Being a history fan, it’s a great way to keep up with current topics I’m researching for my blog, Adventures in History (http://history.writingwithtony.com). Do you like old newspapers as well? If so, let me share with you one of my favorite resources as well some tips and tricks on getting the information to your reading device of choice. Chronicling America The Library of Congress Chronicling America Project, located at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/, is my all time favorite...

As if the Kirkus and E&P shutdown announcements aren’t enough for traditionalists, here’s a warning for savvy librarians eager to avoid the fate of this bird---if they want to stay at an academic or public library rather than end up in the corporate world. Project Information Literacy’s recent paper (PDF) says librarians were “rarely” used by eight out of ten college students participating in a survey. And that’s for “course-related assignments,” the very kind of situation where a librarian might make the most difference. The paper isn’t so much about librarians per se as it as about...

Since the early 1990s, I’ve been pushing for a well-stocked national digital library system. The Obama White House so far has ignored the TeleRead idea as recently presented in the Huffington Post (and forwarded to White House staffer Shin Inouye on Oct. 23). But could we be getting there anyway? Via the Reading 2.0 list, here’s an except from Harvard Professor Robert Darnton’s article in the New York Review of Books---about the Google Books controversy: The most ambitious solution would transform Google's digital database into a truly public library. That, of...

Gary Price, who runs that wonderfully informative site Resource Shelf, send me the following email. Nice to see the Library of Congress stepping up to the times. Launching today is a new site from the library called Read.gov. I have an overview post here if you're interested but that's really not the reason I'm writing. http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/09/26/all-sorts-of-features-read-gov-launches-today/ Part of the site is the reason. At the moment they have 29 "classic" books for teens and kids that can be read in their entirety online. Move through a book page-by-page (forward or backwards) by simply clicking on the page you’re currently reading or looking at. The LC Book Reader also...