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Entries Tagged as 'digitization projects'

Elsevier to launch the Elzevier Archive

July 6th, 2011 · digitization projects

No, that z in the name is not a spelling error.

Today marked the launch of the Elsevier Heritage Collection. This is an online archive of over 2,000 rare books that were published between 1580 and 1712. Around a thousand titles were published by the original Elzevier publishing house. The current Elsevier  was named for that publishing house, which had published groundbreaking work from contemporary scholars including Descartes, Galileo, and Huygens.

BTW, if you’re interested in work from that period you might want to also look at  the list maintained by The Elzevier Collection at the University of London.

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Wikipedia hard cover editions now available

November 11th, 2010 · digitization projects

Do you recall my post from some time back about how you can select and print a collection of Wikipedia articles?Well, Pediapress have announced:

The most demanded features for our Wikipedia books were color inside and hardcover outside. It’s now a reality. As of a few days ago, you can now order books in hardcover and with color content. We’re very excited about these new features, because it allows you to make books that are not only customized, but also even more beautiful and resistant. They simply look good in your bookshelf.

If you want to make one of these books, there’s a link on every Wikipedia page. [Read more →]

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iPads coming to a private school in Scotland

August 18th, 2010 · digitization projects

The computer teacher for a private school in Scotland has been blogging about his experience  in getting iPads into the classroom. Since this is an ongoing series of posts I think it’s worth adding to an RSS Reader.

He’s faced some interesting problems. Logistics, for example. Each Ipad has to be authorized to an iTunes account before it can be used. They have over 100 iPads so you can imagine the hassle. And then there’s app licenses.  He discovered the need for a volume license the day before Apple announced (interesting coincidence, that).

It’s really an interesting read.

Fraser Speirs

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Librivox turns 5

August 10th, 2010 · digitization projects

From the Librivox blog:

On August 10, 2005 I put up a website, called it LibriVox, and posted the following:

LibriVox is a hope, an experiment, and a question: can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting?

LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain. It works like this: a book is chosen, then *you*, the volunteers, read and record one or more chapters. We liberate the audio files through this webblog/podcast every week (?).

Five years later, it seems as if the answer is: yes.

Our latest catalog statistics are the following:

* Number of completed projects: 3,656
* Number of completed non-English projects: 533
* Total number of languages: 31
* Number of languages with a completed work: 29
* Number of completed solo projects: 1676
* Number of readers: 3889

For the last six months, we’ve averaged 87 books a month, or just under 3 books per day.

Total recorded time: 76119522 seconds, or 2 years, 150 days, 12 hours, 41 minutes, and 10 seconds. Total of 76226 sections.

We’ve achieved all this in large part thanks to wonderful resources of our partners: Project Gutenberg, who still provide the bulk of our texts; Distributed Proofreaders, who help proofread Gutenberg texts; the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who help point us in the right direction on the rare occasions when we have legal questions; and of course the Internet Archive, who host all of our terabytes of audio files (for free).

Thank you also to those who donated in our first-ever fund-raiser, to help keep LibriVox servers (the non-audio ones) paid-for for the foreseeable future.

And finally: thank you to all the volunteers: the proof-listeners, and the readers, and the BCs and MCs and CD-cover makers, the coders and sysadmins, and all of you who help keep LibriVox going.

I’m looking forward to the next five years.

Perhaps you’d like to help us record more public domain books?

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Winston Churchill archive goes digital

July 29th, 2010 · digitization projects

From the NYTimes:

CAMBRIDGE, England — You’re a high school or college student, or a journalist, psychologist or historian, and you have a paper to write on Winston Churchill’s “finest hour” speech on June 18, 1940, arguably his most stirring moment in World War II. But you want to go beyond the famous lyric of defiance he delivered in the House of Commons, and learn how he progressed in his own mind to that moment, and what private doubts he had – as he did — about Britain’s ability to withstand Hitler.

By the summer of 2012 the challenge will become a great deal easier, thanks to a project that will be announced on Thursday by the Churchill Archives Center in Cambridge and Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of the London-based Bloomsbury publishing house. No longer will the serious student have to journey to Cambridge from places near and far, paying for travel and a hotel, when the same end can be achieved with a few keystrokes and a fraction of the cost.

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Century-old Brazilian newspaper to drop print edition

July 15th, 2010 · digitization projects

The Knight Center for Journalism are reporting:

The Rio de Janeiro-based Jornal do Brasil will stop circulating its 119-year-old print edition and appear only online, O Globo reports. The paper’s owner, Nelson Tanure, says he will set the date for the changeover this week.

Before deciding to end the print edition, Tanure tried, unsuccessfully, to sell the newspaper as it is mired in debt and circulation has fallen to 17,000 during the week and 22,000 on Sundays. According to Globo, the attitude among Jornal’s 180 employees – including 60 journalists – is one of sadness and anxiety.

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Google to scan the Koninklijke Bibliotheek

July 14th, 2010 · digitization projects

From the Google Books blog:

In recent months, I’ve got to know a group of people in the Hague who are working on an ambitious project to make the rich fabric of Dutch cultural and political history as widely accessible as possible – via the Internet.

That team is from the National Library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), and as of today, we’ll be working in partnership to add to the library’s own extensive digitisation efforts. We’ll be scanning more than 160,000 of its public domain books, and making this collection available globally via Google Books. The library will receive copies of the scans so that they can also be viewed via the library’s website. And significantly for Europe, the library also plans to make the digitised works available via Europeana, Europe’s cultural portal.

The books we’ll be scanning constitute nearly the library’s entire collection of out-of-copyright books, written during the 18th and 19th centuries. The collection covers a tumultuous period of Dutch history, which saw the establishment of the country’s constitution and its parliamentary democracy. Anyone interested in Dutch history will be able to access and view a fascinating range of works by prominent Dutch thinkers, statesmen, poets and academics and gain new insights into the development of the Netherlands as a nation state.

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Indus ScanRobot (video)

June 30th, 2010 · conferences & trade shows, digitization projects

This is the first of 2 automated scanners I found at the ALA conference. This one is made by Indus. You might want to check out their product page; they make a number of specialized scanners for various media. They had several other scanners on display, but I was distracted by TEH SHINY robotic scanner.

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These are not your mother’s scanners

June 30th, 2010 · conferences & trade shows, digitization projects

One thing I was hoping to see at the ALA was the scanners, and I was not disappointed. I found 4 booths with quite a few devices; all were fascinating.

You can split the scanners I saw at the con into 2 general types. One is intended for digital conversion, and the other is a high end replacement for photocopiers. I’m not being snide; these scanners really are designed so the average user could just walk up and use them. It probably won’t surprise you that  all the models had features in common: a USB port and support for standard formats (PDF, JPEG, TIFF, etc).

Image Access are  a maker of both types of scanners, and had both types on display. They had the biggest booth, and some impressive hardware. Unfortunately, they were also uncomfortable about me taking pictures. I didn’t even try to shoot a video.

The image above is the KIC, one of their mid-range models. I watched a demo, and it’s designed for a moderately tech savvy user. It doesn’t just scan and convert; you can crop, cut & paste, and dedit the scanned image in other ways too.

This is the Bookeye, one of their more basic units. I fiddled around with it, and it seemed to have a number of settings that weren’t set right.  It’s probably more important to note that it had a lot of settings, though.

The next image is one of their Opus scanners. I’d call it a mid-range model, but only because of how sophisticated the high end models are. As you can see, this one is intended for digital conversion. To get the most out of it you’ll need to pair it with 1 or more computers.

This last image shows 2 of their best scanners. I was almost afraid to ask how much the cost, but I do know that they offer a scanner lab as a package deal for $125K.

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book flip scanner

June 22nd, 2010 · digitization projects, hardware news

This is a few months old, but I just came across it and it is so very very cool.

Some researchers at the University of Tokyo are working on a truly high speed book scanner. The scanner works by letting you rapidly flip the  pages of a book in front of a high-speed camera. When this video was made, they could scan a 200-page book in one minute. (It’s probably faster by now.)

Spectrum via O’Reilly Radar

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