From the Article: In the special collections department of the University of Vermont [UVM] library, you can find newspapers dating back to the mid 1800s. All those years of handling have left some of the papers damaged. So 10 years ago the library embarked on a project to convert as many newspapers from across the state as it could find into microfilms. [Clip] Nowadays, microfilm– like newspapers– is being replaced by online information. So the Library of Congress and National Endowment for the Humanities teamed up to create the Chronicling America...

From the NPR site: In the late 1950s, English students at the University of Virginia got the opportunity that most American literature scholars would kill for — to speak with William Faulkner. Faulkner spent two years as the writer-in-residence at UVA, where he gave lectures and readings and took questions from students. The lectures were recorded on reel-to-reel tapes, which have now been digitized and published online. Personally, I agree with Stephan Pastis, the cartoonist, in the article that we republished: The Sound of My Fury Toward Overrated Authors Who Confuse Me by Stephan Pastis...

From the announcement: Hundreds of thousands of eighteenth-century Londoners will be brought to life by a unique online resource… London Lives (www.londonlives.org) provides access to the largest set of handwritten manuscripts ever posted on the internet. The ‘London Lives’ website is a fully searchable edition of 240,000 pages (40 million words) of handwritten documents from criminal justice and local government. It will bring to life the working people who inhabited this first ‘world city’, to facilitate a new kind of history. Evidence from a murder or a petty theft, petitions to relieve distress, accounts of money distributed to the poor and the records...

DigitalKoans has an excerpt from the Smithsonian's Strategic Plan for digitization: How long will digitization take? How much will it cost? Right now, we are not sure, and the plan’s number-one task is to determine timelines, cost parameters, and guidelines for setting priorities about what will be digitized when. While we will not digitize all of our collections, the price tag is still daunting, especially considering that many of our objects are three-dimensional and therefore more difficult to digitize. Added to the direct cost of digitization are the staff hours needed to find and research objects and data and the rights...

Bletchley Park was the site of the British codebreaking project during World War 2. It broke the encryption of the famous German Enigma machine and contributed mightily to the winning of the war. According to The Register: At the moment the extensive paper and card files held at the site are difficult to use. It's thought likely that the archives hold clues to many wartime secrets - for instance Allied intelligence on critical Nazi weaknesses such as scarce supplies of rubber. There may also be further revelations about the "greatest double agent" of the war, the fake German intelligence spymaster codenamed...

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...

A major gift is enabling Cambridge University to undertake a major digitization project. The library houses some of most important collections in existence, including those of Newton and Darwin. The library also holds the some of the oldest and most significant Qur’ans ever to be uncovered, as well an eighth century copy of Surat al-Anfal, as well as the world’s largest and most important collection of Jewish Genizah materials, including the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection – 193,000 fragments of manuscripts as significant as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Its Christian holdings include the Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis, one of the most important...

The British Library is teaming with online publisher Brightsolid to parter in a 10 year venture to digitize three centuries of 52,000 local, regional, national and international newspapers. Digitized 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. Additional categories will be developed looking at key events and themes such as the Crimean War, the Boer War and the suffragette movement. The aim will be to build a ‘critical mass’ of material for researchers...

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...

A number of books of Tunisian National Library recently joined the digital era. Electronic books in Arabic and French as part of the eBooks Project in Tunisia can be downloaded via smart phones such as iPod, iPhone and iPad, says allAfrica.com. The Library announced on its website that " it is proud to put online the first online iPhone application for reading eBooks". According to Resource Shelf the app is downloaded from the library, not from Apple. It is unclear what they mean about it being the first ebook app. Thanks to Resource Shelf for the heads up....

Fascinating post from Resource Shelf: …this year, the “Digital Universe,” the total amount of data stored in the world’s computers, will surpass a zettabyte. One zettabyte is equal to a million million gigabytes, a number so large it is hard to get our minds around it. In fact, humans will produce more data this year alone than in thousands of years of civilization. The total amount of data stored by academic libraries in the US today is about half a million times less than a zettabyte. In 2009, the Digital Universe amounted to 0.8 zettabytes, according to a report by IDC. In...

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. ...