A post by Robert McCrum on the Guardian books blog on “the power of paper in the digital era” didn’t turn out the way I thought it was going to from the headline. I expected it to be another one of those “paper books rule, e-books drool” stories we’ve been seeing with increasing frequency lately, but instead it took quite a different approach. McCrum discusses the dichotomy of paper archives and digitization. Thanks to digital copies of records, author Sarah Thornhill was able to do much of the research for a historical novel based on her ancestors without ever...

Digitization of public-domain works is a good thing, right? Most literature fans would be quick to agree. However, Glyn Moody writes on Techdirt that some of the new public digitization projects have terms and conditions that seem to be right out of the dark ages. The Cambridge University’s Digital Library, for example, places strict limits on what users can do with the books—non-commercial use only, no modification, no passing it on to third parties, and so on. A number of the works in Cambridge’s library date from well before the 1710 Statute of Anne invented modern copyright, suggesting that...

John D. Podesta and Carl Malamud (of FedFlix) have written an open letter to President Obama calling upon him to launch an initiative to find out what it would take to scan and post the entire contents of the public-domain government archives so that more people would have access to them. Imagine if the riches contained in the National Archives, Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, Government Printing Office, National Library of Medicine, National Agricultural Library, National Technical Information Service, and scores of other federal organizations were made available, becoming the core of a national effort to...

President Obama has issued a 3-page memo directing government agencies to start using electronic record management. Digitizing records will provide better archives for future generations to study, and will also help reduce costs. Another goal is to give the general public better digital access to the workings of their government. The directive gives agencies one month to designate the official who will be in charge of the effort, and four months to come up with plans to do it. Computerworld notes that the government does not have a good track record with digitization, pointing to the failed ten-year effort...

Here's part of a fascinating blog post from Future Ebook on the problems with digitizing a backlist. Maybe you will think I am naive, or just hopefully optimistic, but when I took on the challenge of heading up the digital development of DBP I thought that we could have our entire monochrome backlist converted into ebooks and on sale within 6 months, and then we could start on our illustrated list. Now as we approach the end of the year (some 8 months after I began this adventure) I am about halfway through the list...

From NARAtions: Over the last year and a half, our Digitization Services Branch has developed a number of software applications to facilitate digitization workflows.  These applications have significantly increased our productivity and improved the accuracy and completeness of our digitization work. We shared our experiences with these applications with colleagues at other institutions such as the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution, and they expressed interest in trying these applications within their own digitization workflows.  We have made two digitization applications, “File Analyzer and Metadata Harvester” and “Video Frame Analyzer” available on GitHub, and they are now available for use by...

From an article in Publishers Weekly: … In The New Republic, Laura Bennet writes of the increasing mutability of the book , the sense that digital text, trivially easy to update, becomes a “perpetual work-in-progress.”  She writes: At stake here, some might say, is the question of the integrity of the book: When is a text finished? Any published book is necessarily a somewhat arbitrary product; most authors could tinker forever. But going to press demands that a book be done, at least for the moment. … There is another key difference between the updated e-book and the revised...

Will we ever have an eBook written by Albert Einstein?  YES!  Springer announced today plans to digitize their entire backlist, approximately 65,000 titles dating back to 1840.  Included are prominent authors  like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Sir John Eccles, Lise Meitner, Werner Siemens, and Rudolf Diesel.  They anticipate the digitization process to be complete at the end of 2012, culminating into the Springer Book Archives (SBA). Here’s more information from the press release: Springer Science+Business Media has started its extensive digitization project, Springer Book Archives (SBA). The SBA initiative will include nearly all books that have been published since the 1840s. Springer...

From the Los Angeles Times: Does Vogue magazine have a digital archive in the works -- one would stretch all the way back to its original 1892 issue? Rumors say that's exactly what the long-lived fashion magazine is up to. The blog Fashionista reads the tea leaves: Vogue editor Anna Wintour attending the Webbys in June, accepting her magazine's "People's Voice" award by saying, "Sometimes, geeks can be chic." (Webby Award winners must give five-word speeches). Vogue publisher Susan Plagemann telling AdWeek that the magazine will be rolling out a new Web property in December. She declined to specify what that might be. A "reliable...

From the Bodleian Library at Oxford University: A fifteen-month research project of the earliest surviving geographically recognizable map of Great Britain, known as the Gough Map, provides some revealing insights into one of the most enigmatic cartographic pieces from the Bodleian collections. The findings are recorded on a newly-launched website www.goughmap.org. The fifteen-month AHRC-funded [Arts and Humanities Research Council] project used an innovative approach that explores the map's 'linguistic geographies', that is the writing used on the map by the scribes who created it, with the aim of offering a re-interpretation of the Gough Map's origins, provenance, purpose and creation of which...

From The Wellcome Library Blog: As part of the Wellcome Digital Library pilot project, we’re joining forces with ProQuest to digitise over fifteen thousand volumes from our rare book collection. They will be made available through ProQuest’s new Early European Books (EEB) database – a sister project to the long-established and successful Early English Books Online. As its name suggests, EEB will trace the history of printing in continental Europe from its origins up to 1700. A number of other libraries have already contributed to the project, including the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. We’ll be...

Here are three questions and answers from the complete interview that appears in the July 24, 2011 edition of the Boston Globe: IDEAS: So why not leave it to Google? DARNTON: It became clear, as Google's project evolved, that it would be a commercial enterprise, and in fact an enterprise attached to a gigantic monopoly. A monopoly, perhaps, with the best intentions, but that would not necessarily serve the public good, because of course Google's primary responsibility would be to its shareholders .[Clip] IDEAS: So what would a digital public library be like? What would it do? DARNTON: It doesn't look like everybody's image of...