From the Council on Library and Information Resources: The author provides a summative and recent overview of the use of digital technologies in classical studies, focusing on classical Greece, Rome, and the ancient Middle and Near East, and generally on the period up to about 600 AD. The report explores what projects exist and how they are used, examines the infrastructure that currently exists to support digital classics as a discipline, and investigates larger humanities cyberinfrastructure projects and existing tools or services that might be repurposed for the digital classics. The report is available, for...

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 Until now those images, as well as hundreds of other historical documents, could be seen only in the archives of the National Library.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...

From the press release: Today, the European Commission and the DCA consortium, comprising 25 partners from 10 EU member states and the 2 associated countries, Croatia and Iceland, have officially launched the project Digitising Contemporary Art (DCA) initiating a significant increase in the presence of contemporary art in Europeana, the single access point to Europe’s cultural heritage. Over 30 months 21 museums and art institutions will digitise approximately 27,000 contemporary artworks and 2,000 contextual documents, making them available through the Europeana portal. With the co-funding of the European Commission under the CIP-ICT PSP programme and the commitment of the 25 partners, the DCA...

Some great images of the digitization process are available and will continue to be available on this blog. Worth a look From a University of Manchester/John Rylands Library Announcement: Technology is to enable scholars for the first time to study a complete manuscript of one of the world’s most important and largest Korans. The book's ornate 88 x 60 x 18 cm pages - the size of a large plasma television - are kept at The University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library. Experts at the John Rylands Library are using digital technology and the internet to...

That's the title of an article in the Guardian: The European Union and its member states must take more responsibility for the digitisation of Europe's cultural heritage if it is to avoid a "digital Dark Age," according to a new report written for the European Commission The report, the work of German national library head Elisabeth Niggeman, advertising chief Maurice Levy and Belgian author Jacques de Decker, recommends much greater focus on the EU's online library Europeana and the fostering of competitors to Google, which currently dominates the digitisation agenda. "Can Europe afford to be inactive and wait, or leave it to...

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...

It looks as if the Japanese are in the forefront again. According to The Mainichi Daily News, personal digitization is catching on and services are springing up to cater to the need. Digitization of personal books is permitted under Japanese copyright law. In June, Internet research company Macromill Inc. surveyed 300 iPad owners and found that 20 percent of them had digitized their own books, while roughly 30 percent were interested in doing so. Reasons people gave for digitizing their books themselves included that digital versions of the books were not available and that it was easier to read...

From the Original Announcement from the Tennessee Secretary of State The State Library and Archives, which is part of the Tennessee Department of State, has been preserving newspapers on microfilm since 1957. The two-year process of converting those microfilmed documents into digital records will be managed by the University of Tennessee. Eventually, the digital images of Tennessee newspapers will be part of the Chronicling of America [from the Library of Congress] website: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ Newspapers from 15 other states are already available for use on the site. “We are delighted to be a part of this project,” Secretary of State ...

From the Article: Leading educational institutes and libraries are making books immortal – virtually. Rare books and publications are now in the focus of many local and national-level projects of digitization. On academic front, projects like INFLIBNET, acronym for Information and Library Network Centre, hold great promise, believe experts. Dr Jagdish Arora, director of the project, told TOI that despite some glitches, the project was very much in shape. “Apart from providing over 70,000 books and 2,000 journals online, we have started a project called National Library and Information Services Infrastructure for scholarly content (N-LIST) from...

From the Article: The Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods are partnering with Wabash Valley Vision and Voices (WV3) to digitize more than 1,000 Civil War era items in an effort to preserve content of original documents and promote local renewed research as the nation prepares for the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. Also partnering in the project are the Indiana State University’s Cunningham Memorial Library, the Vigo County Public Library and the Vigo County Historical Society. Group members plan to digitize field journals, letters, discharge papers,...

On Saturday, Publishing Perspectives had an interesting story about the problem of digitizing orphan works in Europe. It’s a little hard to count them, given that different countries use different standards for orphanhood, but a European Commission report (PDF) guesses that there are about three million orphan books—books that are still in copyright but whose owners are difficult or impossible to locate—across its member countries. Among the key findings of the report, which also considers orphan films, photographs, newspapers and music, was that the biggest obstacle to digitization is not the cost of the digitization...

From Resource Shelf: The Strategic Advisory Board on Intellectual Property (SABIP) have published a report this week entitled “The Economics of Copyright and Digitisation: A Report on the Literature and the Need for Further Research” . The report undertakes a critical overview of the theoretical and empirical economic literature on copyright and unauthorised copying. This report highlights two issues which are in particular need of further research in order to inform copyright policy: + How does digital copying affect the supply of copyright works? + Does the copyright system entail obstacles to desirable aspects of technological transition? On the issue of copyright and digitisation the report...