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...

You can find it all here.  ...

From Information Age: The Bibliothèque nationale de France has revamped the search engine for its online library, Gallica. Founded in 1997, the site contains over 120,000 volumes and thousands of image and recordings. In a bid to improve the accessibility of Gallica, the institution selected search software from French vendor Exalead. According to the supplier, the chosen search platform contains semantic functionality and the ability to index unstructured data. From Exalead: To date, the BnF has digitized more than one million works, including books, maps, manuscripts, images, periodicals, scores and sound recordings, and made...

Here's what they say about themselves: Welcome to the portal page of the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)! We at the IMSLP believe that music should be something that is easily accessible for everyone. For this purpose we have created a music library to provide music scores free of charge to anyone with internet access, with several other projects in planning. IMSLP is also entirely collaborative, and all contributions are greatly welcome. You can browse by composer (aphabetical), composer (time period), instrumentation, genre, recordings by composer.  As of March 15, they have 88,000 scores and 5,000...

From an Article by Ben Hartman (Jerusalem Post): Albert Einstein will go digital in the coming months, as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem begins a project to digitize the German-Jewish physicist’s archives. The digitization is expected to take around one year and then the over 80,000 documents will be available on the Albert Einstein Archives website. News of the initiative, which will be made possible by a $500,000 grant from the Polonsky Foundation of London, was announced on Monday, the 131st anniversary of Einstein’s birth in the town of Ulm in what is today Southern Germany. [Clip] He left his entire archives to...

From an Article in The National (Abu Dhabi): To the outside world, familiar with the UAE for its modern skyscrapers and luxury hotels, rare colour snapshots of the capital taken almost 50 years ago provide a valuable insight into the country’s past. Until now those images, as well as hundreds of other historical documents, could be seen only in the archives of the National Library. Now, thanks to an agreement between the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (Adach) and the World Digital Library (WDL), more of this invaluable historical material will be available...

The National Library of Finland is trying to digitize its archives and has asked the public for help. Digitalkoot is a joint project with the National Library of Finland and Microtask. Our goal is to index these archives so that they are searchable on the Internet. This will enable everyone to easily access our cultural heritage. You can help us by playing games. In the games, you fix words of old Finnish newspapers stored in the newspaper archive of the National Library. This greatly increases the accuracy of text-bases searches in the newspaper archive. Most of the material of the newspaper archive has already...

From the Internet Archive Blog: Þorsteinn Hallgrímsson, formerly of the National Library of Iceland had a big idea:  digitize all Icelandic literature all the way to the current day and make it available to everyone interested in reading it. The Internet Archive was eager to be a part of this bold vision. I am in Iceland now, and because the financial crisis and Icelandic reaction to theUS Department of Justice’s subpoenaing the tweets and facebook account of a sitting member of the Icelandic Parliament, this project may have the momentum it needs to happen. Ingibjörg Steinunn Sverrisdóttir the National Librarian, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the Minister...

From a NY Times Article by Patricia Cohen: The painstakingly slow job of transcribing often hard-to-decipher handwritten documents from history’s lead players — not to mention a lack of funds — has meant that most originals are seen by a just a handful of scholars and kept out of the public’s reach altogether. After more than five decades, only slightly more than half of James Madison’s papers have been transcribed and published, while work on Thomas Jefferson’s papers, begun in 1943, probably won’t be finished until around 2025. Now the scholars behind the Bentham Project think they may have come up with a better...

Most of the the press and commentary we've seen about Google's new Ngram Viewer has been extremely positive (here’s our post from last week with links to several articles). However, today we came across a very interesting and very well written/documented blog post by Natalie Binder, a librarian and information science student at Florida St. University. "Google’s word engine isn’t ready for prime time" (by Natalie Binder, The Binder Blog) Here are two brief paragraphs from the blog post: The whole idea of Ngrams is built on a shaky foundation: the accuracy of Google’s optical character recognition (OCR) software. OCR is how a...

From the JISC release: The German National Library, Oxford University and Europeana have signed an agreement to digitise family papers and memorabilia from the First World War. The collaboration will bring German soldiers’ stories online alongside their British counterparts in a 1914-18 archive. JISC planted the seed in 2008 when it funded the The Great War Archive which is run by Oxford University Computing Services. People across Britain contributed family letters, photographs and keepsakes from the War to be digitised. The success of the idea has encouraged Europeana, Europe’s digital archive, library and museum, to bring the German National Library into an...

The Library of Congress has placed 700 Civil War portraits on Flickr, according to Research Buzz. They are available here. This collection is all from one place — the Liljenquist family — and includes the frames of the pictures as well as the ambrotype and tintype photographs themselves. Many of the pictures are soldiers (including some portraits of African-American soldiers) but there are some civilian pictures here as well. There are also many group pictures, both of civilians and soldiers. Some of the pictures are fairly dark and hard to see — or maybe it’s my monitor. If you want more...