If you can’t find the right library e-books for your new Kindle, Nook, iPad or other gizmo, you’re not alone. More than 100 patrons of the District of Columbia Public Library were lined up electronically today for 10 e-book copies of The Racketeer, John Grisham’s new novel about the murder of a federal judge. Some 400+ D.C. library users awaited 60 electronic copies of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, the best-selling fiction title on the New York Times list. And a digital version of The Casual Vacancy, by J.K. Rowling, was not even in the catalog of the D.C. public library system. Could a well-stocked national digital library system—in...

John S. Knight Jr. and his brother supplied the first name in Knight Ridder, one of America’s best newspaper chains. Pre- and post-merger, the company’s papers won a total of at least 84 Pulitzer prizes. Years before most competitors, Knight Ridder’s people were envisioning digital newspapers displayed on iPad-style tablets. Knight himself, in character for the chain at its greatest, was fact- and conscience-driven. He was a conservative Republican, but his columns against the Vietnam war helped win one of the Pulitzers. The chain is gone now. But the brothers’ legacy lives on through the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, with something like $2 billion in assets. Last week,...

From the Costa Rica Star: Thanks to an initiative by the National Printing Office, public school students in Costa Rica will soon be able to access all their mandatory reading assignments online. The project named ‘Editorial Digital’ was presented to the government weeks ago, and according to Jarmon Noguera Gonzalez of La Prensa Libre, the initiative also aims to foster good reading habits among citizens of Costa Rica. The project started with four main categories of literature in its digital library: Laws and judicial matters Classic literature Child and adolescent literature Literature from Costa Rica [Clip] Among some of the titles already on the shelves are The Little...

From the NYPL Announcement: Thousands of historical documents at The New York Public Library – including material handwritten by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and papers from authors such as Mark Twain – will soon be accessible to the public online, thanks in large part due to a generous gift of $500,000 from The Polonsky Foundation. The project, which began in January and will continue through 2014, will digitize documents from the Thomas Addis Emmet Collection, located within the Manuscripts and Archives Division, and almost all the papers of several major American authors in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and...

via Bikya Masr: To preserve and provide access to centuries of Egyptian and Middle East history, The American University in Cairo recently launched the Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library (RBSCDL). [Clip] The digital library is open and globally accessible, and will feature ancient and medieval cultural-heritage materials, in addition to contemporary contributions from the University on the Square: Documenting Egypt’s 21st-Century Revolution project. “Before digital libraries, researchers had to visit special collections libraries during limited hours and could not check out materials for closer study at home,” said Carolyn Runyon, digital collections archivist. [Clip] The University on the Square is one of the featured holdings of...

From LIBER: A group of 17 European partner institutions have joined forces in the “European Newspapers” project and will, over the next 3 years, provide more than 10 million newspaper pages to the EUROPEANA service. The European Newspapers project (funded under EC’s CIP 2007 – 2013) aims at the aggregation and refinement of newspapers for The European Library and Europeana. [Clip] Each library participating in the project will distribute digitized newspapers and full-texts free of any legal restrictions to Europeana. There will be a special focus on newspapers published during the First World War, thus providing a meaningful addition to the resources aggregated by the current Europeana 1914-1918 project. Additional Details in the Complete...

From The Guardian: The heads of more than 4,000 public libraries across the UK have agreed to national digital standards, which include providing free internet access in every library, and the ability to join a library and renew and reserve items online. The Society of Chief Librarians (SCL) said that National Digital Promise will set the minimum standard for online services provided by public libraries in Wales, England and Northern Ireland. Learn More: National Digital Promise for Public Libraries (via SCL) Key promises made in the National Digital Promise include: free access to the internet in every library (for a minimum period) 24/7 access to a...

How long would I keep my Kindle Fire tablet? I’d bought it mostly just to stay in touch with popular e-book tech. The Fire is hobbled with onerous digital rights management, favors a proprietary e-book format, and in certain ways is just a cash register for Amazon.Regardless of the millions of Kindles purchased over the holidays, many reviewers hate it. Amazon’s actual hardware isn’t that great for the money if you compare the Fire with the not-so-locked wares from my favorite Chinese tablet store. I sold my Fire on eBay to a telecommunications engineer in Belarus. But guess what? Having suffered a soul-wrenching case of seller’s...

Title: ebrary’s Download Survey (17 pages; PDF) by: Allen M. McKiel, Ph.D., Dean of Library Services, Western Oregon University. Beginning today [December 14], the report is available direct from ebrary, no registration required. Previously, you were required to complete an online registration form. We first posted about the report at the end of October and shared a few key findings: The growing demand for downloading has been substantiated by a recent ebrary survey of more than 1,000 librarians, which indicated 92% found providing offline access to e-books more or equally important than providing online access. “The ability to keep pace with the ever-evolving ways that patrons expect...

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...

The library is taking a giant leap to the web. By using NASA technology, it’s planning on scanning 80,000 of its manuscripts. The technology used is called FITS, which stands for Flexible Image Transport System. So far the process was divided in three stages. The first included scanning 8,000 of the 80,000 manuscripts. The second was the actual digitizing and lastly, the program stored all the information in high resolution. Among those selected is the Bodmer Papyri. The priceless manuscript is the first known transcription of the Gospel. Since most of the manuscripts are extremely delicate, they can only be partially opened to...

Ignorant U.S. electorate? Absolutely. Read libertarian professor’s study. Could digital libraries help fix this and reduce political polarization?: " Maybe one person—excluding me—entirely read the Digital libraries vs. our national dumb-down: Could ‘civic dashboards’ and other innovations help America break out of an endless loop? That person, however, was Peter Levine, director of the Center for Civic Engagement and Community Engagement at Tufts University, who, besides supplying me with an essential citation, which I’ve happily incorporated in the Web version, said he liked my essay. "Your piece takes this general idea in important new directions that I hadn’t considered," he said. Now...