South Korea's Education Ministry has announced that it will convert all textbooks to digital format by 2015, reports eSchoolNews. The digital textbooks will include supplemental teaching materials and "two-way study methods," and be available across multiple platforms. (Thanks to Michael von Glahn for the tip.) (Photo: rob.wall)...

From the Iowa City Press-Citizen: A collection of pocket-sized diaries from the 1860s has created an Internet sensation for the University of Iowa library. The diaries are part of the library’s Civil War collection employees have been working on for more than two years, digitizing pages in time for the war’s 150th anniversary in April. “The idea is to make it as accessible as possible and not have us try to decide what people should see but make the whole body of work available to people,” said Greg Prickman, assistant head of Special Collections and University Archives who helped oversee the project. Now library employees...

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 Until now those images, as well as hundreds of other historical documents, could be seen only in the archives of the National Library.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

“We left Grafton-Underwood at 1700 hours 26 June 1943 to bomb Villacoublay. After making landfall over France we encountered flak and were attacked by FW-190’s….The whole ship was shaking violently…” Recently released by the National Archives, digitized Escape and Evasion Reports are now available for download in PDF format to your eReader of choice. Detailed firsthand accounts of harrowing escapes and near-captures by Axis occupiers, Allied aircrew no longer remain faceless.  Instead, we learn their names, hometowns and quite possibly a new view of World War II that up until now was not available online. The fastest way of getting to the...

From a Ghent University Library Announcement: Ghent University Library today became the first in Europe to contribute public domain works scanned by Google to Europeana, Europe’s culture heritage. Readers using Europeana can now enjoy more than 30 million newly-added pages of historical, scientific, anthropological and literary works, from over 100,000 volumes, spanning four centuries, in French, Dutch, German and other languages. Joke Schauvliege, Flemish Minister of Environment, Nature and Culture and chair of the European Council of Environment is pleased that the unique and large collection of Ghent University leads the way....

In a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched the repeated claims by the content industry that some new copyright violation is going to “kill” their business, a study on the economic impact of Google Book Search shows that having a searchable catalog of books has apparently helped publishers a lot more than it has hurt. Mike Masnick at Techdirt posts a summary of the study, which shows that affected publishers’ profits grew faster on average in the years after the project than the years before. Publishers who did not opt out of the publishing partner agreement also...

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...

The Bookseller reports that Bloomsbury is going to digitize and e-publish the million-page personal archive of World War II prime minister Sir Winston Churchill. The archive reportedly includes “drafts and notes for his speeches, and key correspondence and papers." The article does not mention whether this archive includes any books, either public-domain or still under copyright. It’s hard to imagine any single person’s archive being a million pages in size without them—but then, it’s hard to imagine it even with them. If any are included, I wonder what copyright issues Bloomsbury would have to clear? The archive...