From Resource Shelf. Worth reprinting in full: Earlier this week we posted about a “just announced” 10 year project from the British Library to digitize 40+ million newspaper pages. From the Official Announcement: Digitised material will include extensive coverage of local, regional and national press across three and a half centuries. It will focus on specific geographic areas, along with periods such as the census years between 1841 and 1911. Regarding copyright issues it goes on to say: Along with out-of-copyright material from the newspaper archive – defined in this context as pre-1900 newspaper material – the partnership will also seek to digitise a...

Picked this up from a tweet by librarian Sue Polanka of the No Shelf Required blog. It's an article with the above title from The Chronicle of Higher Education about Marilyn Johnson's new book This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All (HarperCollins, 2010). The article mentions the problem of preserving digital archives, something I have a great concern about. Here's an excerpt: Unfortunately, much of our born-digital era will ultimately be lost to history because it was never recorded in the more stable medium of paper. Librarians can observe problems in physical libraries (such as...

From Resource Shelf: Gary here. As a native and proud Chicagoan (I sure could go for a “Chicago Style” hot dog about now), the name and work of Studs Terkel are a part of what Chicago is all about or as some might say, “it’s part of of the fabric of the city.” So, for every Chicagoan and their memories (just about everyone has one) of Studs, it’s very exciting to read in the Chicago Tribune that an archive of radio interviews that Terkel conducted will soon begin being digitization process and then made available online. The opportunity to do this comes from...

The original manuscript of Alice in Wonderland had been digitized at the British Library's Online Gallery. Here's a screen shot of the first page: Thanks to Librarian in Black for the link. ...

From Resource Shelf: A unique collaboration between the University of Kent, Canterbury Cathedral Archives [1] and researchers in Rouen has laid the foundations for a new and exciting project through which Canterbury residents and visitors may in the future gain easy access to some of the older and/or more fragile documents held in the Cathedral Archives. Known as DocExplore, the project aims to develop an interactive system which allows digitised versions of valuable historical documents to be explored via a touch-screen, simulating, as far as possible, the experience of accessing the physical object itself. But users can see much more than the...

Google has established a "collaborative research program to explore the digital humanities using the Google Books corpus." Evidently they sent out a notice to a select group of scholars, offering grants of up to $50,000 for one year with the possibility of a renewal for a second year. The disciplines selected were literature, linguistics, history, classics, philosophy, sociology, archeology and anthropology. They are looking for such things as: building software for tracking changes in language over time; creating utilities to discover books and passages of interest to a particular discipline; developing systems for crowd-sourced corrections to book data and...

The 22 new titles cover a range of both regional and metropolitan publications including the Cheshire Observer, the Royal Cornwall Gazette, the Isle of Man Times and the Nottinghamshire Guardian. Adding to an existing selection of 49 titles, the 22 additional publications have been chosen by leading experts and academics to significantly extend the geographical coverage of the resource including a whole range of both regional and metropolitan titles. The additions to the archive have also sought to provide a more comprehensive picture of the political spectrum in the 19th century and include the entire runs of two additional major London...

From Resource Shelf. We echo their congratulations! Ås we’ve said many times we are big fans of all of the work Brewster, Peter, and the rest of the team at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. Last Saturday evening, the Internet Archive received the Project of Social Benefit Award from the Free Software Foundation. IA Founder, Brewster Kahle, was at the presentation and said: “We are trying to follow in the footsteps of the the free software movement and apply these ideas to the cultural materials layer, building organizations that are founded on these principals.” Since the Internet Archive provides access to so much...

Daniel Reetz- an artist and a Ph.D student studying visual neuroscience – recently developed a high-speed book scanning system using open source technology, cheap cameras, and garbage (which we covered here). Now Harvard has a video of a talk by him at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Unfortunately it can't be embedded so take a look here. Thanks to Resource Shelf for the heads up....

I reproduce the following from Sue Polanka's No Shelf Required blog: I was introduced to a company at the TOC Conference by the name of Digital Divide Data. I had no idea what they did, but upon learning more about them, became very impressed with them. DDD is an international non-profit organization involved in the conversion and digitization of books, journals, and other content. They can create eBooks in ePUB and formats to fit with the Kindle, iPhone, and other eReading devices. But the most impressive part of DDD is how they digitize. They recruit and...

The Smith Papyrus was written in Egyptian hieratic script around the 17th century BCE but probably based on material from a thousand years earlier. The papyrus is a textbook on trauma surgery, and describes anatomical observations and the examination, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of numerous injuries in exquisite detail. “The technical challenges of digitally transforming and making this scroll available on a personal computer were enormous,” said George Thoma, PhD, chief of the Communications Engineering Branch at Lister Hill Center at NLM. Thoma led the technical efforts and team at NLM. “The memory requirements were immense, so we had to...

ABC-CLIO – along with its imprints Greenwood, Libraries Unlimited and Praeger – have submitted 250 titles to the Gale eBook platform. These additions expand Gale’s existing collection of eBooks from Greenwood and Linworth Publishing, an imprint of Libraries Unlimited, and introduce to the platform resources from ABC-CLIO and Praeger. The partnership will allow users to now find such titles covering history, humanities and general-interest topics across the secondary and higher education curriculum. Gale currently has approximately 5,000 titles in the Gale Virtual Reference Library from more than 80 partners. More information at Resource Shelf....