Amazon is apparently in talks to launch a digital-books library run on the same premise as Netflix. For an annual fee, readers can read themselves silly on e-books of their choosing. There are no details available as to how advanced this process has moved, but it does make us wonder about the impact on brick and mortar libraries.
In a blog post last week, I discussed Robert Darnton’s recently published article in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “The Chronicle Review”, where Mr. Darnton identified and debunked, “5 Myths About the Information Age.” The first myth he debunked was the notion that the book is dead. Not only is the book not dead, it is thriving. I commented on the relationship between the printed page and how it can be supported by digital content and vice versa. One can drive greater usage of the other, if the digital content is effectively designed.
"Resource Sharing in the Digital Age" is the theme for the upcoming Interlending & Document Supply Conference, sponsored by IFLA and ALA. The event will take place September 19-21, 2011 in Chicago.
It seems simple, even obvious. But in Southern Illinois, it had not been done yet. Shurtleff College, one of the predecessors to SIUE, has leapt into the digital age with nearly four decades' worth of yearbooks now are online.
Two university libraries join together to start a new open access, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to library-led scholarly communication initiatives, online publishing and digital projects.
ICANN is again broadening opportunities to create new gTLDs to include sTLDs. The policy liberalizes the process for creation of new gTLDs. This brings about support and concern for an unlimited number of gTLDs and potential URLs.
Microtask, a Finnish company, attempted a new approach in the digitization effort of the National Library of Finland. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, the method through which scanned documents are converted from image to searchable text, can be prone to errors which can affect accuracy and indexing. Unfortunately, these mistakes can only be corrected by human hands and that is a time consuming task.
Google Books recently announced a deal with the British Library to open its national library collection to Google Books. This makes them the fifth European nation to do so in the past few years.