From the Smithsonian: The Top 10 Books Lost to Time
The Top 10 Books Lost to Time – Great written works from authors such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen that you’ll never have a chance to read, by Megan Gambino, Smithsonian.com, September 20, 2011
Category «Libraries»
New Report: Taking Stock and Making Hay: Archival Collections Assessment
Taking Stock and Making Hay: Archival Collections Assessment, by Martha O’Hara Conway, University of Michigan, and Merrilee Proffitt, OCLC Research “This report identifies projects and methodologies to make it easier for institutions of all types to undertake collections assessment and to encourage a community of practice. An accurate census of archival collections enables an institution …
Kindle Books Now Available at over 11,000 Local Libraries
News release: “Amazon.com today that Kindle and Kindle app customers can now borrow Kindle books from more than 11,000 local libraries in the United States. When a customer borrows a Kindle library book, they’ll have all of the unique features they love about Kindle books, including Whispersync, which automatically synchronizes their margin notes, highlights and …
UNC LifeTime Library – Now Offering Library Science Students Perpetual Online Access
Alex Campbell: “Incoming students at the University of North Carolinas School of Information and Library Science this year are getting a new kind of welcome-to-campus perk: Free data storage, for keeps. The service, called LifeTime Library, works on students personal computers, allowing them to automatically archive files and folders. The data are preserved on the …
UK Guardian – The death of books has been greatly exaggerated
Radical change is certainly producing some alarming symptoms: “According to Nielsen BookScan, the publishing industry standard for book sales data, book sales are pretty healthy, with one significant proviso which I’ll come to. Ten years ago in 2001, 162m books were sold in Britain. Ten years later a decade in which the internet bloomed, …
HathiTrust Statement on Authors Guild, Inc. et al. v. HathiTrust et al.
Press release: “On September 12, 2011 the Authors’ Guild and a number of other entities filed suit against HathiTrust and a number of its university partners. The issues in the suit are the orphan works project as well as the digitization effort that we have been engaged in for almost two decades. Digitization is a …
BookStats Publishing Formats Highlights
The Association of American Publishers – BookStats Publishing Formats Highlights: “e-books and other non-physical formats – “The consistent, growing popularity of e-books and apps are a major success story in content formats, even in advance of data for 2011, which is currently tracking high e-format sales. Highlights: e-books have grown from 0.6% of the total …
Bloomberg Agrees to Buy Bureau of National Affairs for About $990 Million
via Bloomberg: “Bloomberg LP, the closely held news and financial information provider, agreed to buy The Bureau of National Affairs Inc. for about $990 million to add legal, tax and regulatory research and analysis. BNA shareholders, who are current and former employees, will get $39.50 a share in cash in a transaction that is projected …
Inside Higher Ed Reports on What Students Don't Know About Using the Web and Research
Inside Higher Ed: “The ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) project — a series of studies conducted at Illinois Wesleyan, DePaul University, and Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Illinoiss Chicago and Springfield campuses — was a meta-exercise for the librarians in practicing the sort of deep research they champion. Instead of relying …
Paper – Extracting, Transforming and Archiving Scientific Data
Extracting, Transforming and Archiving Scientific Data – Daniel Lemire1 and Andre Vellino, National Research Council of Canada, August 23, 2011. Fourth Workshop on Very Large Digital Libraries, 2011 “It is becoming common to archive research datasets that are not only large but also numerous. In addition, their corresponding metadata and the software required to analyse …
Commentary: Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of rare is changing in the age of information abundance
Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of rare is changing in the age of information abundance by Maria Popova. “Over the past few years, the fledgling field of the digital humanities has made significant strides with a number of ambitious digitization projects bringing online rare cultural artifacts manuscripts, canvases, celluloid, marginalia that used …
Half of Young Children in the U.S. are Read to at Least Once a Day
News release: “Many young children are getting a head start on acquiring the skills needed to read, as family members take time out of their day on a regular basis to read aloud with them, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today. In 2009, half of children age 1 to 5 were read to seven or …
