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...

From The Canadian Jewish News Thousands of hours of Yiddish audio books and literary programming taped at the Jewish Public Library (JPL) from at least the early 1950s are about to enter the digital age. [Clip] The Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., has embarked on a two-year project to remaster and digitize these cassettes and older reel-to-reel tapes and put them online where they may be heard free of charge anywhere in the world. “We believe this to be the world’s largest remaining collection of unabridged recordings of modern Yiddish literature,” said the book centre’s founder and president Aaron Lansky about the audio books....

From the press release: Gale, part of Cengage Learning and a leading publisher of research and reference resources for libraries, schools and businesses, today announced the source libraries, collections and plans for the first four modules of Nineteenth Century Collections Online, its global digitization and publishing program that brings together rare nineteenth-century primary source content. Currently still in development, the modules will be available this spring. Nineteenth Century Collections Online is an ongoing publishing program with content and partner libraries being added continuously. The British Library, The National Archives (United States), The National...

From the Asheville Citizen-Times: America’s most beloved national park site, the Blue Ridge Parkway, was built for scenic driving. But thanks to nearly three years of devoted digitizing by UNC Chapel Hill Library staff and graduate students, it is now open for driving back in time. The just-launched “Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina,” created through a collaborative project based at UNC’s library puts everyone in the driver’s seat of the parkway’s 77-year history. [Clip] The site allows users to explore parkway history chronologically, geographically or by dozens of topics, from access roads to wildlife. The “GeoBrowser” feature is one...

From Research Buzz: The state of Delaware has announced a new online photo collection — over 2000 images of Delaware in the 1920s and 1930s, taken from the state’s Board of Agriculture glass negative collection. The collection is available here (giant messy URL alert.) These pictures are wonderfully random. Stones marking the corners of Delaware? Check. Shipment of chickens going to Argentina? Check. All kinds of buildings? Check. Two guys holding a huge fish? Check. Electrical meter from 1936? Check. Tomato inspection shed? Check. ...

From ResearchBuzz: CyArk, the World Monuments Fund, and the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office have gotten together with University of Redlands associate professor Dr. Wesley Bernardini to launch the Hopi Petroglyph Sites Digital Preservation Project Website. (Say that three times fast.) This site contains multimedia, a virtual tour, and educational plans related to Tutuveni, which means newspaper rock in Hopi. Tutuveni contains 5,000 petroglyphs of Hopi clan symbols in its 150 sandstone boulders. You can access the site at http://archive.cyark.org/hopi-petroglyph-sites-intro. The site starts off with a slideshow but you can access a menu of available content on the main page. The multimedia page contains drawings,...

From the Press Information Bureau, Government of India: The Minister for Culture and Housing & Urban Poverty Alleviation Kumari Selja has said that digitisation of rare books and other print material is done selectively taking into account copyright and other issues. It is a part of the Annual Action Plan of the National Library, Kolkata. No article from the rare books division of the National Library has been reported to be lost or stolen in the last decade. In a written reply in the Rajya Sabha today she said, under the 3rd phase of digitisation project 20,00,000 pages i.e. 6000 books are envisaged to be...

You can find it all here.  ...

From the Wall St. Journal (Subs Only) or Free via Google Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, has turned Vogue’s glossy pages into a digital database and is opening it to the public for a hefty fee. Voilà: the Vogue Archive. Kept under a cloak of secrecy for two years as the publisher scanned a truckload of paper into digital bytes, the archive was expected to be unveiled online Wednesday evening. The result is a pop-culture data mine covering 120 years of American desires and aspirations. More than 425,000 images, 300,000 ads, and 100,000 articles, dating back to 1892, have been fully indexed and are...

Voynich Manuscript online: Avi sez, "Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has put complete high resolution scans of the enigmatic, undeciphered Voynich Manuscript online." Written in Central Europe at the end of the 15th or during the 16th century, the origin, language, and date of the Voynich Manuscript—named after the Polish-American antiquarian bookseller, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912—are still being debated as vigorously as its puzzling drawings and undeciphered text. Described as a magical or scientific text, nearly every page contains botanical, figurative, and scientific drawings of a provincial but lively character, drawn in ink with vibrant...

From the Devil’s Tale Blog (David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University): The Internet Archive just reached an important milestone by digitizing 5,000 books at Duke. The 5,000th book, The British Album: In Two Volumes, contains poetry by “Della Crusca, Anna Matilda, Arley, Benedict, The Bard” and other writers on themes including love, horror, jealousy, and death, and is part of the general collections of the Rubenstein Library. The “Ode to Death” begins “THOU, whose remorseless rage, Nor vows, nor tears assuage, TRIUMPHANT DEATH!—to thee I raise, The bursting notes of dauntless praise!” The second volume can be found here. [Clip] The...