Librarian Way

The The Book & The Computer Web site says their focus is “exploring the future of the printed word in the digital age.” (Via Library Link of the Day) The latest article is a conversation with University Librarian Michael Keller at Stanford University, in which he discusses the digitization project and their custom-built 4digitalbooks robotic scanner.

The interview includes a discussion of intellectual property issues as it relates to this project. They are first concentrating on scanning books published by Stanford University Press during the last 80 years. Keller states, “We can take books that have been long out of print and put them back on the market, benefiting authors who might not have seen a dime since their first sale long ago.” The scanner can go through 1,000 to 1,200 pages per hour, but they need more of these and they need more organizations using these so that older materials can be made globally available at a faster rate. There must also be coordination of what is being scanned so as to reduce duplication of effort.

Many university libraries and OCLC have digitization projects: OCLC, Digital and Preservation Services Outreach and Colorado Digitization Program have a nice set of resource links. Mary Minnow wrote a six-part overview of copyright law at
LLRX.com - Library Digitization Projects and Copyright. First Monday published a transcript of Clifford Lynch’s 2002 keynote address at the Web-Wise conference
titled Digital Collections, Digital Libraries and the Digitization of Cultural Heritage Information and they have many more presentations from the 2000 Web-Wise conference: First Monday June 2000.

Digitization is something SLIS students need to learn about, as there will be more of it as the cost of digitizing drops.

According to the Bibliotheca Universalis Web site, their mission is “to put major works of worldwide cultural and scientific heritage comprising text, images and sound, at the disposal of the general public using communication and information technology.”

This is the beginning of one-stop portal access to select material from 13 international digital libraries. It started as a G7 project of the Global Information Society.

English language partners include offerings from The Library of Congress in the United States, the National Library of Canada [French and English sections], and The British Library in the United Kingdom. In the search options, under the "collections" link, it appears that only the browse by institution selection works. In their Technical Section they provide links to Web sites that provide background resources on some of the issues they have encountered in this project, such as incompatibility in digitization standards and mixed interoperability and metadata standards.

They have an impressive mission, but it has so far to go. The depth and richness of resources depends on the authoritativeness, quality, and usability of the content the partners make available. A particularly rich resource is Global Gateway: World Culture & Resources (Library of Congress).

Version 52 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography Web site, published by Charles W. Bailey, Jr., was released today. It contains roughly 2050 citations relating to “selected English-language articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.”

This is of interest to future librarians because it has references to issues of interest to—or should be of interest—the Information Age librarian. Citations cover intellectual property rights, cataloging identifiers and metadata, e-prints, information integrity, and much more.

If the cited article has public accessible Internet access, such as an HTML page, the citation contains a link to it. Bailey has a Table of Contents to each category of citations and has a last updated notation. This is a must bookmark Web site for anyone interested in future directions in libraries and publishing.