From Publishers Weekly.  More in the article: On April 27, DPLA West brought together over 400 librarians, technologists, public policy advocates, and a very small number of publishers at the Internet Archive in San Francisco to discuss the progress of the most visible effort yet to forge a common digital library for both Americans and the world: the nascent Digital Public Library of America. The best thing about the meeting, the second major public gathering of the DPLA, was that it was full of hope and aspirations. Of course, that was also the worst thing about the DPLA meeting, too. Born of...

From Oregon Public Radio: Rare, once-lost historic records about pioneer Chinese immigrants to the Northwest have found a new life online. The digital archive is hosted by Oregon State University. A Chinese-American civic group hopes the document trove can help families locate ancestors gone missing early in the last century. This document collection includes names, dates and places where the remains of Chinese immigrant workers were systematically dug up across Oregon. This actually was a custom across the American West decades ago. Mostly bachelor Chinese laborers wished for their remains to be returned and reburied in their home villages. [Clip] The Chinese disinterment document...

Is there room in the library e-book field for a competitor to Overdrive? Wired reports that tape and media manufacturer 3M thinks so, and is launching a library e-book lending initiative called the 3M Cloud Library with 40 publishers (including Random House, HarperCollins, Harlequin, and Wiley) and over 100,000 titles. (Last year we covered 3M’s investment in the txtr e-book company and its plans to create a library program.) The biggest difference to the Overdrive model is that it will also be producing its own e-ink e-reader devices that libraries can buy and lend out to patrons with the...

That's the title of an article in The Digital Shift.  Here's a bit of it: The decision on Tuesday by Tom Doherty Associates, publishers of Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape, and Tor Teen imprints, to make its entire list of ebooks available DRM-free by early July 2012, caused a tremendous amount of discussion in publishing circles with little reference to the library market. From a librarian perspective, such news is secondary to the ongoing battle to convince publishers such as Macmillan, which is the parent of Tom Doherty Associates, to make even DRM’d content available to the library channel.  Something Macmillan has steadfastly refused to...

(Via bookofjoe.) ...

From Boston.com: The Milton Library announced this week that it has joined ‘Freading,’ an electronic book service. Freading will allow the library to increase the size of its collection by adding thousands of books to the library website, a news release said. Any Milton resident with a library card can download books each week and the library pays only a ‘modest cost’ of the 200,000 options available. ‘Freading is the only way to quickly give Milton library cardholders a selection of over 200,000 e-books,’ Library Director Philip McNulty said in a statement. ‘While a number of books someone can read in any given...

From The Omaha World-Herald: A group of University of Nebraska-Lincoln professors is archiving the 19th-century petitions that, as a result of legislation enacted 150 years ago Monday, allowed slave owners in Washington, D.C., to receive government compensation for freeing their slaves. The team has transcribed and put 200 petitions on a UNL website exploring the Civil War’s impact on the nation’s capital. They hope to have the other 800 or so on the site by next summer. A part from the petitions and court documents, official records of U.S. slaves are virtually nonexistent, said Ken Winkle, a UNL history professor who is part...

On the Horn Book, a site devoted to children’s and young adults’ books, editor in chief Roger Sutton has an editorial adapting a speech he gave a year ago at the Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival. In main, the article is about the change in children’s literature and adults’ appreciation of children’s reading habits since Harry Potter debuted in 1998. Sutton points out that The Horn Book Guide reviewed 652 novels for children in 1998 but 1,298 in 2010, twice as many. It also represented a near-doubling of the percentage of children’s books made up by fiction...

From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: The St. Paul Public Library will become a beta testing site for a new electronic book lending service on Wednesday. The 3M Cloud Library eBook Lending Service will allow patrons to check out books on their own electronic devices or borrow such devices from the library to use at home. The 3M system includes more than 100,000 titles from 40 publishers including Random House, Sourcebooks and IPG. 3M terminals with touch screens will help library patrons browse the digital collection. Digital readers also are synchronized with the library system. See Also: eBook Usage Soars at St. Paul Libraries, But it’s...

The Digital Shift has an article by Sue Polanka which this title.  Sue, known for her No Shelf Required blog, is Head, Reference & Instruction at Wright State University Libraries. (Library Journal is presenting a series of articles, Exploring Ebook Options, that takes an indepth look at some of the ebook platforms that are now in the marketplace. Baker & Taylor’s Axis 360 and Freading from Library Ideas have already been profiled. This story provides an environmental scan.) According to a survey conducted by the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA) in the summer of 2011, 39 percent of public libraries had not...

From an ebrary press release: April 16, 2012 – Palo Alto, CA, USA –  Publishers that distribute e-books to libraries under subscription in addition to other models will receive the greatest value, according to ebrary®, a ProQuest business.  ebrary today announced that Wiley along with over 50 newly signed publishers such as American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Leuven University Press, and University of Illinois Press will distribute e-books in Academic Complete™ as well as other models including perpetual archive, patron driven acquisition, and short-term loan.  Academic Complete subscribers will soon benefit from a growing selection of more than 75,000 quality...

The first part of this series, The Portal Problem and the Britannica, was mentioned on TeleRead here.  Now comes the second from The Scholarly Kitchen.  It's by Rick Anderson, Assoicate Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collection in the J. Willar Marriott Library at the University of Utah.  Here's an excerpt: In my previous posting, I focused on what I believe to be dim prospects for the Encyclopedia Britannica as it transforms from a set of printed volumes into a networked online information portal. My skepticism stems from the fact that although the EB claims to offer “the breadth of the world’s knowledge,” its coverage...