National library of the Netherlands plans to digitize all publications of Dutch

The National Library of the Netherlands has released its Strategic Plan 2010-2013 announcing that the library intends to ultimately "digitize all Dutch books, newspapers and periodicals from 1470." WOW

How digitization democratizes knowledge

An interesting article to read: How digitized contents democratizes knowledge by Mike Elgan. It is an exciting trend. It is happening though it might be a bumpy ride.

Here again: all digital?

This is a constant topic: electronic or paper? Still "there is much to be said on both parties". Here is a debate about if libraries are going to be all digital? Some interesting comments "declared" that not only "All libraries will be closed", but also "All schools and universities will be closed within 30 years" !

Rare Chinese book to be digitized

Harvard College Library and the National Library of China have agreed to digitize one of the largest collections of rare Chinese books - 51,000 volumes rare Chinese books at Harvard Yenching Library. It was a “multimillion-dollar’’ project and that the Chinese government is paying most expenses. Harvard staff will be responsible for capturing images of the fragile books, scrolls, and artifacts, one of the largest collections outside Asia, using high-tech cameras in its state-of-the-art lab at Widener Library. Once completed, these images dating as far back as the Song dynasty in 960 AD, will be publicly available for free on the Web to scholars in China and elsewhere. Read the Story from Boston Globe

Mass Digitization: The IMPACT Project from Europe

“To significantly improve access to Europe's cultural heritage, the British Library and the University of Salford have teamed up with a group of 15 institutions from across the continent as part of the four-year IMPACT project." "Led by the National Library of the Netherlands, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the IMPACT project aims to share expertise from across Europe and establish international best practice guidelines with a view to speeding up, standardising and enhancing the quality of mass digitisation through establishing a Centre of Competence for text based digitization.”

Growing interest in E-Textbooks

"The average college student spent $702 on books in 2006-07, according to the National Association of College Stores — a figure that has continued to grow and is speeding the transition to electronic textbooks and other digital class materials." see what students, faculty and publishers think about the transition. And also read Northwest Missouri State University's campus wide e-textbook initiative-studying the feasibility of transitioning from the rental of traditional textbooks to the rental of e-textbooks.

Photo Archive: the Museum of Rockies

"The Museum of the Rockies Photo Archive is a preservation and research collection of historical photography from the Northern Rockies Region of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. The Archive collects and preserves photographs from the late 1860's to the 1980's." The Photo Archive collection contains over 80,000 photographs, including the complete archives of several local and regional photographers such as Elsa Spear Byron documenting the Crow tribe, and online databases with images of Indian peoples of the northern Great Plains and railroads.

Digital textbooks?

Read New York Times article: In digital future, textbooks are history. Actually California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is taking action now, which he believes will help reduce the more than $350 million state annual spending on educational materials.

Springer Announces New Image-Searching Program

Springer plans to introduce SpringerImages, a subscription service that will combine graphs, charts, drawings, and photos from books and journals published by the company and available on SpringerLink and Images.Md.
The new product will be able to search any text in the image, as well as its caption. Users will be able to edit the key words or tags corresponding to the image, and those with subscriptions to Springer’s online material will also find a link to the article. The new technology will make all images available for download in high resolution, and they can be sent to either a PowerPoint presentation or PDF document.

250+ killer digital libraries and archives

Here is a website called 250 plus Killer Digital Libraries and Archives from OEDB (Online Education Database). The list contains over 250 libraries and archives that focus mainly on localized, regional, and U.S. history. The contents of digital collections selected are mainly open access, which means general public can access it. The links were made to the root source of digital collections. for instance, if you're looking for the American Memory Project, which was created and housed at the Library of Congress, then you'll find the link for the Library of Congress rather than the link for American Memory although the American Memory Project link was included in the description of the Library of Congress listing.

This list was probably not most updated, but it's nice to have a place to look.

Flickr Commons

Digitization is expensive, it's not what you what that nobody knows and nobody accesses your digital collections after you consumed so much resources to build them. It becomes common now that Libraries and Museum use social networking tools to publicize their digital collections. Flickr Commons is one of the initiatives that help promote institutions' digital collections. By putting digital collection into Flickr, more people discover and access the collections and help describe the photos by leaving comments and adding tags. And it is also a learning process and enjoyment. Readers learn and build up knowledge and enjoy by reading comments. The current members of Flickr Commons include the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, New York Public Library and The Field Museum Library and others.

CIC Historic Campus Architecture Project (HCAP)

Look at CIC (Council of Independent Colleges) Historic Campus Architecture Project (HCAP)here It's magnificent! It's the first national architecture and landscape database of independent college and university campuses. This project presents information about significant buildings, landscapes, campus plans, and heritage sites of American higher education and identifies sources for further research. Supported by grants from the Getty Foundation, the CIC HCAP website documents nearly 2,100 places of historical significance on private college and university campuses and includes nearly 5,000 images relating to these sites. To date, nearly 400 institutions have participated.
I am working on UMM Digital Image Database now, one collection called Historic Campus, which was based on a project founded by Getty Foundation too, including many significant historic campus photos. So I am quite interested in the project.
Here is a link to the story of the project and Barbara S. Christen, an architectural historian who has been overseen the project.

Britain’s Victoria and Albert Museum will make digital images free of charge

This was old news but the idea still new: Britain’s Victoria and Albert Museum will make digital images of objects in its collections freely available to scholars beginning in early 2007, a move "could transform art publishing". The new policy will allow visitors to the Collections Online Web site to download high-resolution files free of charge, according to a museum news release. The Web site already contains more than 25,000 images from the museum, with more being added. The museum is one of the largest repositories of works in design and the decorative arts from cultures around the world.

Library of Congress Will Scan Fragile Books

The Library of Congress will digitize thousands of public-domain works, with a special emphasis on "brittle books" and important titles on American history, through a $2-million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. By this project, the Library of Congress intends to create a best-practices report that details how fragile items should be handled and scanned. Story from the Chronicle of Higher Education and see also from theLibrary of Congress

Seven Institutional Repository Syatems Comparison

Comparison of seven institutional repository systems-Digital Commons, DigiTool, DSpace, EPrints, Equella, Fez, VITAL, by Neil Godfreyin his "Informal comparison of seven institutional repository systems". original post from DigitalKoans

Harvard Says No to Google's book settlement with publishers and authors

News from Chronicle of higher education blog: Harvard Says No Thanks to Google Deal for Scanning In-Copyright Works. After examined Google’s recent legal settlement with publishers and authors, Harvard University announced that the university "would not allow its in-copyright holdings to be scanned by Google Book Search" because of concerns over access to the scanned texts and the prices charged. Waiting to see how Google will respond.

The First Upper Midwest CONTENT dm User Group Meeting

The first Upper Midwest CONTENT dm User Group Meeting was held at Macalester College in St. Paul Minnesota on Oct. 16-17, 2008. It was a success! I was a member of the planning committee and worked with Sara Ring (She was the meeting organizer) and other 6 fellows from the area on meeting planning for two months, and I felt rewarded since the meeting went very well. The topic for pre-conference was working with text collections in CONTENT dm, presented by Sara Ring, Coordinator of Bibliographic and Technical Services from MINITEX Library Information Network. The hands-on practice on building documents, postcards and monographs using CONTENT dm 4.3 was a good introduction especially for new users. There were a couple of good presentations during the conference such as: Editing web templates in CONTENT dm (Carroll University, St. Cathrine); Working with Audio( Marquette University) And Advanced data wrangling: tips and software for creating perfect tab-delimited metadata files for batch loading into CONTENT dm by Wayne Toborg from St. John's University, which was impressive. He introduced a couple of locally designed tools for working with legacy data and tricks using excel to manipulate data to create tab-delimited files for batch loading into CONTENT dm. Other sessions I missed (had to because there were two sessions at the same time) sounded pretty good too. The presentations will be posted online later after get permissions from the presenters. I did an informal talk on our CONTENT dm user experience on the afternoon's session on Thursday, to exchange with peoples from other institutions. Most of attendees from academic libraries, a few from museums (none from public libraries, maybe next time should invite public libraries too? ) The last session was the CONTENT dm version 5 update from OCLC by Ron Gardner. the improvements focus on search, other languages, and EADs. For search improvements, include Unicode searching, faceted searching, relevancy ranking, and spelling checking. For Acquisition Station, add scheduled approval, scheduled indexing, and approve and index one click, index history etc. Other enhancements mentioned include: reports enhancements, upload manager-no more FTP, metadata fields increase from 100 to 125; designate required metadata fields-you can mark whatever metadata fields as required for students to fill in.
The weather was beautiful, and the Fall scene was absolutely gorgeous. Macalester College did a good job on site organization and provided good food too. The attendees were mainly from Minnesota, Wisconsin, North and South Dakota, and Iowa, a few from Illinois and even Las Vegas! It was fun!

First Upper Midwest CONTENT dm User Group Meeting

The Upper Midwest CONTENTdm User Group Meeting will be held at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, on October 16-27, 2008. The meeting is sponsored by MINITEX and WiLS (Wisconsin Library Services) The meeting will provide an opportunity for CONTENT dm users in this region to share their experience, best practices, tips and tricks of using CONTENT dm building digital collections, and also an update on CONTENTdm version 5 new features and enhancements.
The conference (include pre-conference) covers wide range of topics that are for both advanced and beginning users, such as : working with text collections with CONTENT dm; working with audio, web customization, batch loading tab-delimited text files into CONTENT dm, and best practices of all aspects of CONTENT dm etc.
So far as of Friday Oct. 3, 2008, pre-conference registration is full, 57 people registered for the conference. Pround to be one of the planning committee members. :-)
For Conference Announcement and Registration, click here