Libology Blog

About 2 million images from the LIFE Photo Archive have been digitized and are available via Google Image Search.  What is even better is that, over the next few months, the remaining 8 million images from the collection will be added.  Many of these have never been published, so there ought to be some historically interesting and significant gems in this collection.

You can search the collection by using the above link, or add “source:life” (without the quotes) to your image search query.

via the Official Google Blog

Go to WorldCat and type in a search.  The results contain books, video, audio, you name it.  One of the more recent additions is the Digital Images Collections, which can be wonderful to view.  How to find them, though?

Type in your search terms, then add cntnt (”Content” without the vowels) as an additional term (which acts as a limit).  Viola!

Try chicago cubs cntnt

Try airplanes cntnt

Try carnegie libraries cntnt

You get the idea…

found via the WorldCat blog

Wired.com has a great set of photographs detailing the process that goes into scanning books for the Internet Archive’s text  project.

The process isn’t what I envisioned… I expected something that would look like it came from the radiology department of your local hospital rather than that relatively normal Canon EOS SLR digital cameras.  Of course, to gain a bit of perspective, one needs to see just how upscale these cameras are

• Canon EOS 1D
• Canon EOS 5D

found via HangingTogether.org

The Public Domain Archive and Reprints Service is something that I have thought would make an interesting business model:  take public domain materials and publish them using a print-on-demand service.

With the various scanning projects, there are more and more public domain works available electronically each day, and the benefits are many.  Whether out-of-print, rare, fragile or some combination of all three, many books won’t work in a circulating collection.  This can put many books back into library circulation.

This could also be a potential model for rare book and archival collections : scan everything and make the newly published version available for your public users — without risking the originals.

from LISNews

Kind of an interesting application of the Zotero add-on for Firefox : the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University (no relation ) and the Internet Archive are working to create a storage for scholarly annotation of online documents.

The annotation would work through added functionality (in the form of a new button) on the Zotero workspace, and could create an entirely new means to access scholarly critique and commentary. Simply put, this will make one of the most interesting and promising add-ons even better by allowing the user to collaborate with other researchers.

Research 2.0 anyone?

from Open Access News

Additional:  note that this will also create an option to save an archival copy of an electronic document on the Internet Archive servers.  This centralized storage will also provide benefits beyond the initial commons concept.

additional info found on Dan Cohen’s blog

The Diary of Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraqi National Library and Archive is available via the British Library website.  In the diary, Dr. Eskander details the day-to-day challenges faced by the library staff as they attempt to do their work, and live their lives, in what has to be one of the most challenging environments for librarianship.

found on MetaFilter

This article from Linux.com is a great overview of what it takes to run a digitization project with fragile material and across great distance, as the Library of Congress and Archive.org work together on a project to preserve some of the rare materials in the library’s collection that are at risk of decaying.

from NewsForge

As an update to this post, it seems that the situation with the EPA library is getting worse.

Presumably in response to a congressional request to halt the closure of its libraries, the EPA is removing thousands of documents from its web servers, and has sold $40,000 worth of library furniture in their Chicago library for a total of $350. The woman who bought the furniture is estimating that she will re-sell it for $80,000 (perhaps when the EPA changes course again and buys its own furniture back).

(Darn! I could use a few good bookshelves right about now at a bargain price!)

from ResourceShelf

According to a press release, the Internet Archive has been granted an exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), allowing it to continue archiving web sites, software and such.

Hopefully this is the movement towards more reasonable copyright applications when it comes to libraries and archival organizations!

from Open Access News

All right then, begin the list:

1) An article spotted in this morning’s paper that offers a great summary for those not familiar with the archive: Content of Dead Sites Lives in Archive .

2) They earned a 2006 Education Award Laureate from the Tech Museum Awards (also contains additional information about what they do). (from Open Access News)

3) And they started a blog earlier this month which showcases interesting content and their activities: What’s New at the Internet Archive. (from ResourceShelf)

Cornell University has a collection of historical literature on witchcraft, including confessions of accused witches, debates about scripture and witchcraft, and instructions for those investigating possible witchcraft.

from ResourceShelf (end of post)

A new report is out from the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme that is best described by its full title:

Risks Associated with the Use of Recordable CDs and DVDs as Reliable Storage Media in Archival Collections - Strategies and Alternatives (pdf)

The report contains good information for any library that is storing, or considering storing, digital information on CDs or DVDs for any length of time.

from ResourceShelf