EDUCAUSE | Contributed by Organizations or Campuses; Articles, Papers, and Reports; and Digital Imaging

University Libraries in Google Project to Offer Backup Digital Library

ckeller — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:55:00 -0500

A group of major universities has been quietly working for the past two years to build one of the largest online collections of books ever assembled, by pooling the millions of volumes that Google has scanned in its partnership with university libraries.

At Libraries, Taking the (Really) Long View

ckeller — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:46:16 -0500

Storing digital data is becoming more essential to the work of librarians, who are trying to think in terms of the next 100 years — a virtual eternity in computer time.

"Born Medieval": MSS. in the Digital Scriptorium

elilly — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:13:37 -0600

Stephen G. Nichols tells of creating a digital library of manuscripts of the <i>Romance of the Rose</i>, the most popular vernacular French romance of the Middle Ages. The scholarly rationale for the digital library project proved the easy part. Nichols also shares the complex, technical steps of digitizing the manuscripts.

Technology Review 10 Emerging Technologies 2007

drupal — Mon, 21 May 2007 09:48:55 -0500

This special issue of "Technology Review" provides detailed articles on 10 technologies that may change many aspects of our lives.

Managing Digitization Activities: Executive Summary

drupal — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:21:10 -0500

The executive summary of this ARL Spec Kit discusses various components of library digitizing projects. These areas include; staffing, budgets, and material selection.

Mass Digitization of Books

drupal — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 17:02:12 -0600

Mass digitization of the bound volumes that we generally call "books" has begun, and, thanks to the interest in Google and all that it does, it is getting widespread media attention. The Open Content Alliance (OCA), a library initiative formed after Google announced its library book digitization project, has brought library digitization projects into the public eye, even though libraries were experimenting with digitization for at least a decade. What is different today from some earlier digitization of books is not just the scale of these new initiatives, but the quality of "mass."

Acquiring Copyright Permission to Digitize and Provide Open Access to Books

drupal — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 14:14:59 -0600

What are the stumbling blocks to digitization? Is copyright law a major barrier? Is it easier to negotiate with some types of publishers than with others? To what extent does the age of the material influence permission decisions? This report, by Denise Troll Covey, principal librarian for special projects at Carnegie Mellon University, responds to many of these questions. It begins with a brief, cogent overview of U.S. copyright laws, licensing practices, and technological developments in publishing that serve as the backdrop for the current environment. It then recounts in detail three efforts undertaken at Carnegie-Mellon University to secure copyright permission to digitize and provide open access to books with scholarly content.

University-Press Group Raises Questions About Google's Library-Scanning Project

drupal — Tue, 24 May 2005 09:26:26 -0500

The Association of American University Presses has become the latest group to voice objections to Google Print for Libraries, a project in which the search engine is scanning some or all of the books in five university and public libraries in the United States and Britain. In a letter to Google, the organization questions the notion that copyright law allows Google to scan copyrighted works into its database, even if only small portions of those texts are available online. Peter Givler, the group's executive director, said that copyright law fundamentally applies to making copies, regardless of what is done with them. The Publishers Association, which represents publishers in England, has also objected to the project, raising many of the same objections as the Association of American University Presses. For its part, Google said it is working with publishers to address their concerns and to make the project beneficial to them as well. Hugh P. Jones, copyright counsel of the Publishers Association, said he has been in contact with Google but that so far the two groups have failed to agree.

DIRECT: A Decentralized Image Retrieval System for the National STEM Digital Library

drupal — Fri, 13 May 2005 12:17:27 -0500

This paper describes the Decentralized Image Retrieval for Education (DIRECT) service for the National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Digital Library (NSDL). DIRECT augments NSDL by providing content-based image-retrieval (CBIR) functionality. CBIR allows the user to designate a query image so that the service can search the library for images of similar content. DIRECT matches images not by text metadata but by the color or texture of the image objects; the matching process does not depend on a match between the cataloger description and the user description. DIRECT is a peer-to-peer service built for decentralized digital libraries. The content-based image-retrieval service is available to all collections in NSDL without imposing new standards or protocols. With DIRECT, NSDL can support images that have yet to be cataloged or have incomplete metadata without adding overhead (expenditure of additional resources) to the collections.

Imaging Pittsburgh: Creating a Shared Gateway to Digital Image Collections of the Pittsburgh Region

drupal — Thu, 13 May 2004 10:40:08 -0500

The University of Pittsburgh's Digital Research Library received a two-year grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to provide online access to multiple photographic collections held by the University's Archives Service Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania. When the project ends in October 2004, the project team will have mounted over 7,000 visual images depicting the people, places and events of the greater Pittsburgh region during the mid–nineteenth and mid–twentieth centuries. Although the beta version of the Web site was released in February 2004, the project team will continue to develop the site and offer creative avenues for exploring the collections. This paper summarizes remarks made at Web–Wise 2004 Conference in Chicago.