"The lion’s share of the private/for-profit scans are from the Corvey Collection which the publisher Gale appears to control. ""Based on the sample, we may guess that about 58%—somewhere between 47% and 68%—of the 2,903 novels have publicly accessible scans.1 For any given novel, however, the chance of finding a scan seems to depend on two things: (1) the novel’s year of publication and (2) the novel having subsequent editions or printings (see Figure 2).""Two results stand out. First, the 19th century British novel is a phenomenally well-preserved part of cultural history. Copies of nearly ever novel published during the period survive. Second, the proportion of novels scanned between 1800 and 1820 is low—likely around 33% based on this sample. This raises concerns about any claim of representativeness made on behalf of existing corpora covering those years. As libraries and private collections continue to be digitized and, I hope, be made publicly accessible, such concerns should diminish."

via http://twitter.com/ranti/status/151680086322581504

"Unlike the other two, the NZETC version has accents, bold and italics in the right place. It' the only one with a workable and useful table of contents. It is also edition which has been extensively revised and expanded."

""

"The point of this post is not to go into great depth about what the pairing of these objects tells us about the role of materiality in the Late Roman/Byzantine Egypt. Instead, I want to stress that the opportunity to think about that issue with such relative ease arises from acts of independent self-digitization that exist within wider contexts of topically related efforts also engaging in self-digitization. That leads to an environment in which intellectual risk taking is rewarded."

""

"“Pars Inter­na­tional,” the out­fit that han­dles per­mis­sion for the NYT, wants to charge me $460 to use this image in my book. They call this an “image prepa­ra­tion fee.” Of course, if I found a copy of the NYT from 1910, I could do what­ever I wanted with it, includ­ing reprint it, because it’s out of copyright."

via http://twitter.com/#!/jenelfarrell/status/52360893828300800

""

""

via http://dltj.org/article/thursday-threads-2010w52/

""

"Consider the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), for example. It’s one of the most prominent journals in the world, valued both for its reports on groundbreaking new research, and for its documentation, in its back issues, of nearly 200 years of American medical history. Many other journals with lesser value still cannot be read without paying for a subscription, or visiting a research library that has paid for a subscription. But you can find and read most of NEJM’s content freely online, both past and present. Several groups of people made this possible. Here are some of them.

The journal’s publisher has for a number of years provided open access to all research articles more than 6 months old, from 1993 onward. (Articles less than 6 months old are also freely available to readers in certain developing countries, and in some cases for readers elsewhere as well.) A registration requirement was dropped in 2007.

Funders of medical research, such as the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, have encouraged publishers in the medical field to maintain or adopt such open access policies, by requiring their grantees (who publish many of the articles in journals like the NEJM) to make their articles openly accessible within months of publication. Some of these funders also maintain their own repositories of scholarly articles that have appeared in NEJM and similar journals.

Google Books has digitized most of the back run of the NEJM and its predecessor publications as part of its Google Books database. Many of these volumes are freely accessible to the public. This is not the only digital archive of this material; there’s also one on NEJM’s own website, but access there requires either a subscription or a $15 payment per article. Google’s scans, unlike the ones on the NEJM website, include the advertisements that appeared along with the articles. These ads document important aspects of medical history that are not as easily seen in the articles, on subjects ranging from the evolving requirements and curricula of 19th-century medical schools to the early 20th-century marketing of heroin for patients as young as 3 years old.

It’s one thing to scan journal volumes, though; it’s another to make them easy to find and use– which is why NEJM’s for-pay archive got a fair bit of publicity when it was released this summer, while Google’s scans went largely unnoticed. As I’ve noted before, it can be extremely difficult to find all of the volumes of a multi-volume work in Google Books; and it’s even more difficult in the case of NEJM, since issues prior to 1928 were published under different journal titles. Fortunately, many of the libraries that supplied volumes for Google’s scanners have also organized links to the scanned volumes, making it easier to track down specific volumes. The Harvard Libraries, for instance, have a chronologically ordered list of links to most of the volumes of the journal from 1828 to 1922, a period when it was known as the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal."

via http://twitter.com/nniiicc/status/27142034549

"The fact that at least one author was asked for permission suggests that the Archive is being very careful about what it chooses to make available through the lending program. A look at the 187 items in the lending library supports this view. There are
Works by well-known copyright reform advocates such as Brand and Lawrence Lessig.
Obsolete computer books. Example: Microsoft Windows 98 at a glance
Older books likely to be orphan works: example- Alice James: her brothers~her journal, the posthumously published diary of Alice James.
An in-copyright version of an out-of-copyright work: Brace Lineage, a genealogical work apparently based on an older version.
Other genealogic works which might be considered to be data compilations. Example: Twelve generations in America
Spanish language works published in Guatemala. Example: Regimenes agrarios
A collection of stories by anonymous pregnant teens: You look too young to be a mom: teen moms speak out on love, learning, and success
In short, if you wanted to take legal action to stop the digital lending library, each of the books included in the lending library would pose some sort of problem for you.
"

"Most of my library time, though, went to wandering the long, narrow corridors of the stacks, Despite being surrounded by tens of thousands of books, I don't remember feeling the anxiety that's symptomatic of what we today call "information overload." There was something calming in the reticence of all those books, their willingness to wait years, decades even, for the right reader to come along and pull them from their appointed slots. Take your time the books whispered to me in their dusty voices. We're not going anywhere. [The Shallows, p.12]
It seems they lied ;-) While many of the books will remain on the shelves for some years to come, it is clear that the exodus has begun. The books are leaving the library."

"Afterwards, I was reminded of Walter Benjamin's celebrated - if exasperating - essay on The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction in which he tried to figure out what happens to authenticity in an age of perfect copying. "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art," he wrote, "is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." This "aura" that emanates from original works - which is, Benjamin argued, stripped away by reproduction - is hard to pin down (and Benjamin doesn't really nail it, in my opinion) but, believe me, you know it when you feel it. And not even Google can digitise it. [For a moment, I was in the presence of Newton's genius]"

""

"Ted pointed me to in my own account, the page that listed every high­light and every note that I had taken on my Kin­dle ver­sion of John Seely Brown’s new book Pull, I could only think two words:

Game. Changer.

All of a sud­den, by read­ing the book elec­tron­i­cally as opposed to in print, I now have:

* all of the most rel­e­vant, thought-provoking pas­sages from the book listed on one web page, as in my own con­densed ver­sion of just the best pieces
* all of my notes and reflec­tions attached to those indi­vid­ual notes
* the abil­ity to copy and paste all of those notes and high­lights into Ever­note which makes them search­able, editable, orga­ni­z­able, con­nectable and remixable
* the abil­ity to access my book notes and high­lights from any­where I have an Inter­net connection.""One of Lanier’s con­cerns is how deci­sions made in the design of our dig­i­tal tools lock us in to behav­iors that reduce — and even remove — our human­ity. For the ebook con­text, an alter­na­tive title for his book could have been “You Are Not an App.”"

""

""

"Digital representations may improve (or even make possible) the reading of difficult texts, such as the Vindolanda tablets or the Archimedes Palimpsest, so for purposes of interpretation, they may be superior to the physical reality. They can combine data, metadata, and other contextual information in ways that help a reader to work with documents. But they cannot satisfactorily replicate the physicality of the document, and it may be a bit dishonest to try." See also http://www.nesc.ac.uk/action/esi/contribution.cfm?Title=1014 http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/1014/ and http://giacometti.tumblr.com/post/213059488/object-artefact-script

"What is too often forgotten is that the book itself is a remarkable technology, easily one of the most socially significant in human history. Amazingly, books are still among our most reliable tools for preserving information. They never give you an error message or fail to open because of incompatibility with newer technologies. If you want your descendants to read your memoirs, you're smarter to leave them a book than a disk. Both the euphoric embrace of digital technologies and the haze of nostalgia for the book have obscured its technological nature, propagating the notion that the meeting between the book and the computer pits the pretechnological against the technological. Any triumph for one is viewed as a loss for the other. Without denying that digitization poses serious new challenges for the book, one can argue that that perspective is deeply flawed."

"No one in this cycle—not the researchers in the fiefdom, not the institution, not the grant agency, no one—takes responsibility for the post-grant existence of anything the fiefdom produces."

"For classes commonly taught through high school, it’s difficult to imagine how good a learning experience could be after millions of hours spent refining to create the perfect approach. Imagine repeating a lecture over-and-over, testing the resulting student understanding a {day, week, month, year, decade} later to such an extent that every slide, every sentence, and every exercise is optimized for excellent learning. We could even imagine adapting the lecture to the learning style of each student.

The process of converting to the second approach has been slow, but it seems to be picking up."

"Current scholarship is not spontaneously generated from the brain or lab of the writer. Useful scholarship must understand and interpret past work, to be effective in the present. In many fields, and not just the classical humanities, the relevant past work may stretch back hundreds or even thousands of years. Current scholarship and study will be more effective if its source material is also made openly accessible, and if proper attention is drawn to the most useful sources. And now is an especially opportune time for scholars of all sorts, professional and amateur, to get involved in the process.""Google’s PageRank algorithm may take advantage of implicit curation of web pages (through the choices of authors’ page links), but Google and other aggregators have had a much harder time drawing attention to the most useful books, scholarly articles, or other works created without built-in hyperlinks."

"In A History of Online Information Sources, 1963-1974, Charles P. Bourne and Trudi Bellardo Hahn assert, “The serious application of computers to document reference retrieval began in the late 1950s, with slow serial searches of small files of bibliographic records on magnetic tapes. A precursor of effective, large-scale online information retrieval (IR) systems was an experiment in searching bibliographic records on an IBM disk memory system called RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control). …The genesis of online retrieval systems can be traced to the first half of the 1960s.” What we see as nearly comprehensive coverage of journals online is a product of over forty years of experimentation, from metadata to full-text delivery."""Anarchy is not necessarily chaotic and dangerous. It is organization through disorganization—anarchist tactics generally involve uncoordinated actions toward a coordinated goal.""books ...transcends...$"

"I recognize however, that there are lawyers willing to argue that any index is inherently a derivative work and that rights holders should be able even to control the indexing of their work. It's clear from looking at cases such as The Harry Potter Lexicon case and Seinfeld Aptitude Test case that judges use a variety of tests to determine if a work is indeed a collection of facts. In the latter case, infringement was established because the "facts" were fictional. Because judges look at a variety of factors, we can't remove copyright law from the picture just because there's no copying. Still, the judge in the Harry Potter Lexicon case was pretty clear that an index per se is a transformative and thus allowed use of the work""

"Google created some seriously nifty infrared camera technology that detects the three-dimensional shape and angle of book pages when the book is placed in the scanner. This information is transmitted to the OCR software, which adjusts for the distortions and allows the OCR software to read text more accurately."

"Or make them publicly available. I said “can,” not “may” or “should.” But the existence of the device has the potential to raise lots of the same kinds of questions those other duplicating technologies raised. It empowers individuals, and enough empowered individuals could produce a Wikipedian digital library, collectively assembled, imperfect and incomplete, but growing and expanding."

"dan reetz & his diy book scanner

It’s pure 21st-century ingenuity. Reetz designed his first book scanner because, as a grad student at North Dakota State, he was appalled by textbook prices. Then he built it, in two days, from old digital cameras, cardboard, and scrap parts; a friend wrote the page-processing software.""I think the Reetz-Clancy continuum augurs good things for the future of books. On one end, the recognition that books have to live online now, and that publishing has to operate at internet scale. On the other, the passion for (obsession with?) independence and the cottage-industry craftiness that’s been the best part of book publishing for so long already."

"Reetz is a tinkerer and a liberator of information. He spent some time in Russia and became accustomed to the conveniences of digital books in a society that doesn't pay much attention to copyright laws...went dumpster diving for materials, then posted instructions for how to make the scanner online.""let's assume that an effective book digitizer can be built and deployed for $500...Then the cost of putting a book scanner in 20,000 libraries would be $10,000,000. If these libraries digitized an average of even one book per day, they could digitize 10,000,000 books in two years. Since 10 books per day should be well within the capabilities of an inexpensive digitizer, the libraries should have no technical difficulties with digitizing 4 million books per month.

If libraries acquired the capability of digitizing millions of books per month, then Google's erstwhile monopoly on digitized out-of-print books could evaporate quickly in an appropriate legal environment."

"The fear was always that Google would try to grab hold of the “orphan works” in large research libraries once they were digitized and sell those back to research institutions on an exclusive basis, to become the king vendor atop the mountain of digital databases. Well, once the settlement took on concrete shape, that turned out to be exactly where the company was heading.

I was initially welcoming to Google’s initiative because I believe that digitization is crucial for the improved dissemination of knowledge. ...Brin disingenuously suggests that out-of-print work is available now only to those who can afford to hop on a plane and fly to a library which holds such work. There’s a very small class of materials about which this is true: rare books, archival holdings and the like. Which are not the materials being digitized at the moment. Otherwise, ...inter-library loan or in more regional equivalents. The books may have to fly on a plane, but not the researchers.

"Turns out that the entire point of the article was to show two color graphics on the second page. Well this journal is widely held, but we weren't sure who could actually do a color scan. You see, AGU scanned these articles from that time period in black and white."
" * black and white when the original is color
* missing articles or pages out of articles or even issues
* fuzzy or illegible scans
* omitted front matter, ads, editorials, etc.

Some of this is planning and reflects the evolution of the whole process. Older scans were just of the research articles. Most publishers have doubled back and now go from cover to cover. I always find it amazing that publishers don't have complete runs of their publications. They seriously don't....On the other hand, one of the aggregators does everything in really crappy color so even articles originally in black and white aren't very readable."

"Several European nations, including France and Germany, have expressed concern that the proposed settlement gives Google a monopoly in content. Since the settlement was the result of a class action against Google, it applies only to Google. Other companies would not be free to digitise books under the same terms. "

"Most of the misdatings are pretty obviously the result of an effort to automate the extraction of pub dates from the OCR'd text.""The BISAC scheme is well suited to organizing the shelves of a modern 35,000 foot chain bookstore or a small public library where ordinary consumers or patrons are browsing for books on the shelves. But it's not particularly helpful you're flying blind in a library with several million titles, including scholarly works, foreign works, and vast quantities of books from earlier periods."

"Papers Past contains more than one million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. The collection covers the years 1839 to 1932 and includes 52 publications from all regions of New Zealand. "

"NASA is taking the rare step of reaching out to the public for help. The space agency is looking for the best way to analyze and electronically catalog a precious collection of notes that chronicle the early history of the human space flight program."

"If I could buy a Kindle and it would come with free/low-cost (.$25-$1.00) electronic copies off all of the books I've bought off Amazon in the past 6 months/1 year/since Kindle go-live, I would definitely reconsider. Then you are getting about as close as you can get to an eBook iPod, short of including CDs inside every cover."

A digitization success story. "www.bovary.fr and the more scholarly flaubert.univ-rouen.fr/are fascinating for the insights they offer into the craft of fiction. Flaubert was a compulsive but felicitous rewriter, sometimes producing 20 versions of the same page. He condensed, cut transitions, removed metaphors ...hunted down word repetition, and was weary of direct speech because he found it overly theatrical. He went on changing things until the final typesetter’s proof. He wrote 52 versions of one of the novel’s most famous episodes, the passage in which Emma is heady with the excitement of her new love affair with country aristocrat Rodolphe.""Transcribed by professionals as well as amateurs, safeguards were set up to minimise the risk of error. Texts were read through several times by experts like Sibires, and corrections are still being introduced to this day. Gerard jots down things she spots, and goes on line later to fix them. “At this stage, it’s mostly comas and accents,”"

"Decapod provides the facilities to tackle material such as small journals, original source materials in the humanities and social sciences, non-journal periodicals, and more." See also http://www.decapodproject.org

"there is general agreement that Google gets a monopoly... at least on out-of-print books, which is the vast majority of books in libraries. (Not on public domain books, which is what the OCA digitizes, but anyone can digitize public domain books.) So although the libraries and their contents will still be there, and can be used in hard copy as they are today, no one but Google can digitize the in-copyright works without incurring liability. So "monopoly on online version of their contents" is a factual statement, if you understand that public domain is public domain."

"Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable -- blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical technicians.""By taking high-resolution digital images in 14 different light wavelengths, ranging from infrared to ultraviolet, Oxford scholars are reading bits of papyrus that were discovered in 1898 in an ancient garbage dump in central Egypt.""While conservationists are quick to stress that pixels and bytes can never replace priceless physical artifacts, many see digitization as a vital tool for increasing public access to rare items, while at the same time creating a disaster-proof record and perhaps unearthing new information.""... decode ancient manuscripts with multispectral imaging will begin at the UMichigan, Berkeley,Columbia...400 papyrus pieces."

"This is a 15th century parchment Book of Hours manuscript produced in France in the style of the workshop/scriptorium of the Master of the Duke of Bedford. The manuscript (Huntington HM 1100) can be viewed in two webpages of thumbnails, hosted by the Digital Scriptorium. "" ¶There's an interesting politico-cultural thread for exegesis in comparing the relatively free and open digitisation attitude in the States -vs- the seemingly grudging, less-is-best and user pays mentality of UK institutions (yes, a great big generalisation, I know). You would think, on first blush, given their respective capitalism -vs- socialism tendencies (and that's another one), that it would be the other way around."

" I COLLECT LOST LUGGAGE, PHOTOGRAPH IT, AND THEN TRY TO FIND THE OWNERS. IT’S A LITTLE ODD BUT NOT AS ODD AS STAMP COLLECTING, JUST A LITTLE HARDER TO FIND STORAGE SPACE. "

"How much does it cost to sponsor digitization and broad availability of a technical report? $60.00 – approximately the same cost as ordering a hard copy. This is payable by check or Visa, MasterCard, Discover, Bravo or Private Issue credit cards."

"Libraries have long been characterized as the heart of the research university, the center for scholarship. No one disputes that the aggregated sum of information and material available online, even primary material, has shifted the library's identity. Scholars no longer only visit archives in person; they access library material with immediacy (and increased mediation) online.""The design of new environments for performing scholarly work cannot be left to the technical staff and to library professionals.

"over the last decade and more, public policy has been consistently worse than useless in helping to make most of the works of the 20th century searchable and usable in digital form. This is the alternative against which we should evaluate Google Book Search and Google’s settlement with publishers and authors."

"Like Peter Hirtle, I didn’t hear many people saying directly that the settlement should not go forward (though I did hear that from a few people who were there but not on the stage). I did hear repeated concerns over how the deal came about, and how it made substantial changes to the contours of copyright through class action litigation rather than legislation; and I also heard substantial concerns over the monopolies given to Google and the Book Rights Registry, and how those monopolies might stifle innovation and competition, drive up prices for online access to books, and infringe on rights of readers. (Despite its name, the Book Rights Registry is not simply a passive store of information; it also actively negotiates terms and prices of online book uses on behalf of rightsholders, and manages the distribution of revenues from these uses.)"

"In 2004, Google began a partnership with Oxford University Library to scan mostly 19th century public domain books from its Bodleian library. Five years on, we're delighted to announce the end of this phase of our scanning with Oxford, our first European partner."

"One interesting question that I get asked from time to time is how to manually encode DX information on film cansisters."