Celia's

...The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University is pleased to announce the launch of #OccupyArchive (occupyarchive.org), an effort to collect, preserve, and share the stories and born-digital materials of Occupy Wall Street and the associated Occupy movements around the world. Visit the “Share”occupyarchive.org/share page to offer your reflections on the occupations, or contribute a document, an image, a video, or an audio recording.

Currently, the archive includes a growing set of collections of webpage screenshots, movement documents, and digital images. These collections were built with a combination of individual contributions and automated feed importing. Now, with the launch of the OccupyArchive.org website, individuals can contribute and geolocate their stories and files from the movement. Together, these materials will provide an historical record of the 2011 Occupy protests.

The #OccupyArchive is a result of the efforts of volunteers from CHNM and the George Mason University History and Art History Department. It builds upon the experiences and techniques developed in CHNM’s previous digital archive projects, such as the September 11th Digital Archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, the Bracero History Archive, and the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800. #OccupyArchive is proudly powered with Omeka.

See Also: Occupy Wall Street Collection via Internet Archive (October 22, 2011)

From INFOdocket

Title: “Practical Limits to the Scope of Digital Preservation” (16 pages; PDF)
Author: Mike Kastellec
Libraries Fellow, North Carolina State University Libraries [preprint from Information Technology and Libraries.]

From the Abstract:

This paper examines factors that limit the ability of institutions to digitally preserve the cultural heritage of the modern era. The author takes a wide-ranging approach to shed light on limitations to the scope of digital preservation. The author finds that technological limitations to digital preservation have been addressed but still exist, and that non-technical aspects— access, selection, law, and finances— move into the foreground as technological limitations recede. The author proposes a nested model of constraints to the scope of digital preservation and concludes that costs are digital preservation’s most pervasive limitation.

Direct to Full Text Preprint (16 pages; PDF)

... A close look at one archive shows why the mass digitization of orphan works is creating such trouble.

The UCLA library is building a Web repository for the Arhoolie Foundation's Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings, an archive of rare 78- and 45-rpm records that date as far back as 1905. When many of the recordings became accessible to the public on the collection's Web site, in 2009, UCLA bragged that it was largest online archive of its kind. And the digitizing is only about halfway done. The archive is important to students and scholars who want to learn about the musical heritage of North America and the cultural development of one of the largest minority groups in the United States.

...

But the university is sharing only a fraction of that music with the world because it believes most of the collection is made up of orphans, still covered by copyright. Full access is restricted to computers connected to the campus network. Off-campus users can hear only 50-second snippets. UCLA chose that policy based on its reading of fair-use exceptions to copyright law, which may permit reproductions for teaching and research. Going further would introduce "a level of risk that, given the current status of copyright law, was really challenging," says Sharon E. Farb, associate university librarian for collection management and scholarly communication...

... the bibliographic orphanage run by the HathiTrust Digital Library. The 8.7-million-volume library pools digital copies of texts that Google scanned from universities. John P. Wilkin, its executive director, estimates that HathiTrust may contain 2.5 million orphan works. HathiTrust publishes the full text of works in the public domain, but not of those that are orphaned...

Bottom line: Lots of works that don't have any marking on them are very likely under copyright, but we can't say for sure, since there's nowhere to go to look...

[Full article]

From: Chronicle of Higher Education

A new report, Inspiring Research, Inspiring Scholarship, (link to pdf file) has just been released. Written by Simon Tanner of King’s College London, it looks at four broad areas in which the creation of digital resources has has significant impact.

Inspiring Research, Inspiring Scholarship : The value and benefits of digitised resources for learning, teaching, research and enjoyment.

An introduction to our [JISC] digital collections and archives : For academics, students, researchers and librarians

Since 2003 JISC and JISC Collections have been investing in digitised content across all subject areas. This website provides an introduction to these digital collections to help academics, students, researchers and librarians understand the wealth of resources available to them. Many of the collections provide access to archive materials which are too fragile in their original format to be used so widely, or they bring together materials which are scattered throughout the world.

How to get started...

• Quickly find a collection using our subject, index and keyword search.
• Explore the interactive theme map to discover collections related to your area of interest.
• See how the collections can support your work by exploring inspiring moments in time.

By Manfred Dworschak, Spiegel Online International

The German Digital Library wants to make millions of books, films, images and audio recordings accessible online. More than 30,000 libraries, museums and archives are expected to contribute their digitized cultural artifacts. The idea, in part, is to compete with Google Books. But will it work?

On a good day this reader gets through as many as 1,216 pages per hour. Hissing quietly, devouring book after book. Now and then it says, "Pffft."

This is a state-of-the-art robot at work. It automatically scans every book placed open in front of it. A slender wedge drops down to the fold, sucks in a page from left and right and lifts the goods. It's photographed and with a gentle puff of air -- pffft -- the robot flips the page...[More]

New Zealand history: New Zealand Electronic Text Centre

The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre is a special project of the Victoria University of Wellington Library. It seeks to provide free open access to significant New Zealand and Pacific Island texts and materials. This section of the website covers New Zealand history. It offers access to 100s of full text historic and out of copyrights works covering New Zealand, political economic and social history from earliest times. It includes materials relating to Maori history and the colonisation of New Zealand. Copyright and technical information is displayed on the website. From Intute.ac.uk

http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/subject-000001.html

http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/webwise/090226/

Three hundred museum and library professionals from across the United States gathered together in February 2009 to discuss the development of digital resources and how this development affects librarians and information specialists at cultural institutions. This straightforward website includes webcasts of the sessions and is the next best thing to attending the conference as visitors to their site can listen to digital recordings of every session from the 2009 WebWise Conference. Some of the sessions held, in addition to the opening remarks and the wrap-up, include the complicated topics of "Rights and Responsibilities"--that of museum and library collections and users; "Identity and Collaboration"--when collaboration between institutions is impeded and when collaboration threatens to adversely change the "brand" of an institution; and "Chasing the Edge and Maintaining the Core"--the balance between acquiring cutting edge technology while still keeping the core services well maintained. [KMG]

From The Scout Report

Digital library of the Caribbean
The Digital library of the Caribbean is a cooperative venture which seeks to provide free access to online resources about the history, culture and society of the Caribbean and its constituent nations. The site is maintained by Florida International University (FIU) in partnership with the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI) and the University of Florida (UF). It provides free access to a growing collection of online resources including digitised editions of historic and contemporary Caribbean newspapers (The Nassau Tribune, Abaconian; Awe Mainta and Justice) the Leonard Carpenter Panama Canal Collection ( a collection of historic photographs of the canal region and construction most are dated from 1914 to 1929) large collections on maya and Aztec civilisations; online government gazettes, maps, photographs and historic books. A wide range of subject areas relevant to social scientists are covered : including political, economic and social history, elections and government, constitutional history and the history of slavery and emancipation, British Empire and decolonisation. Countries covered include: nations of the West Indies; Mexico; Bahamas; Barbados; Dominica; Puerto Rica; Haiti; Jamaica; Trinidad and Tobago. From Intute.ac.uk
http://www.dloc.com/

Fathom Archive
Fathom was an international consortium of universities headed by the University of Chicago and including the London School, of Economics (LSE). From 2000-2003 it created a collection of free online educational resources covering subject areas from the sciences and social sciences. Since 2003 (when the project closed) new materials have not been added. However, the archive site enables users to read the archive of online academic papers, interviews and lectures. It includes audio and video files. Topics covered include global international political and economic relations, civil rights, technology and society. The site can be browsed. Technical and copyright information is displayed. From: Intute.ac.uk
http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/

Europeana: European culture
Europeana is a European Commission funded portal which was launched in 2008 and is currently working to build a virtual European library offering free access to Europe's cultural resources. It includes millions of texts (manuscripts, papers, ebooks), images (photographs, maps), films (moving images, videos, film clips, television broadcasts) and sounds from Europe's main research libraries, archives and galleries. Organisations currently include the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the British Library in London and the Louvre in Paris. It is possible to search the site by subject keyword, or browse by date, language and theme. A wide range of topics relevant to the social sciences are covered including elections (historic coverage), anthropology, social history, cultural events. Copyright and technical information is displayed on the website. Intute.ac.uk
http://www.europeana.eu/

From the web site:

Perhaps because he is a historian rather than librarian by training, Robert Darnton regards the vast ocean of digital information that civilization has begun accumulating with relish rather than anxiety. Darnton delves into European archives to find raw material, boxes of cast-off “ephemera,” for his stories of how people lived hundreds of years ago. No wonder he believes “it’s important to preserve as much as you can because you don’t know what will turn out to be significant.”

In conversation with David Thorburn and audience members, Darnton lays out why he finds more promise than peril in rapidly expanding digital collections. He first owns up to the tactile pleasures of archival history: the sensation of opening a box full of manuscripts, dirty hands, the smell of old paper, and literally coming “into contact with vanished humanity.” He cherishes the drama of such research, as well as the finished, weighty products of this kind of work: the book. While the “tactile quality of books” is very important — and Darnton describes holding up leaves of 18th century books to see bits of ground-down petticoat thread — there are also positive dimensions to digital versions. For instance, when the British Library digitized Beowulf, it discovered several new words. But “one medium of communication doesn’t displace another,” he reassures. “They coexist.” Darnton himself is hard at work on a large-scale electronic book about books in the 18th century, comprised of layers a user can navigate, from essays on various subjects, to selections of documents in English, to the original documents in French. There might even be songs performed as they were sung in the streets of Paris 250 years ago. “We are in an era of creating new kinds of books, new kinds of reading and authorship.”

Direct to Video Stream

This presentation was recorded on October 16, 2008 at MIT in Cambridge, MA. It runs 1:54 minutes.

From: The Resourceshelf

DART-Europe E-theses Portal
The DART-Europe E-theses Portal is a pilot project is formed by a partnership of major European research universities and libraries who are working together to improve global access to European research theses. Partners include : BICfB (Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de la Communauté française de Belgique), Belgium CBUC (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitàries de Catalunya), Spain Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Germany;DiVA (Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet), Sweden and Norway;Dublin City University, Ireland; Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland; Helsinki University of Technology, Finland Lund University, Sweden; Oxford University, UK; Tartu University, Estonia Trinity College Dublin, Ireland; UCL (University College London); University of Debrecen University and National Library, Hungary, University of Nottingham. The portal aims to provide free access to a searchable database of doctoral dissertation and theses records from its memebers. These cover all areas of the humanities, sciences and social sciences. Many theses are available in full text and can be downloaded subject to copyright. The database may be searched by author, title, keyword or browsed by institution.
http://www.dart-europe.eu/basic-search.php

Hongkiat has compiled a list of 20 of the best Web destinations which offer free e-books which includes 15 additional briefly suggested sites, and reader-contributed recommendations in the comments. If you haven’t had enough with these, you could check out the 22 e-book websites listed in 80 Online Resources for Book Lovers, or if you’re on the fence about the value of e-books, head over to read the 30 Benefits of Ebooks.

iLibrarian blog

Electronic Resources & Libraries 2009 Conference - 9-12 February, 2009 - Los Angeles, CA, USA
Peter Scott’s Library blog