Mats Dahlström, Joacim Hansson, and Ulrika Kjellman have published "'As We May Digitize'—Institutions and Documents Reconfigured" in the latest issue of LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of European Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

This article frames digitization as a knowledge organization practice in libraries and museums. The primarily discriminatory practices of museums are compared with the non-discriminatory practices of libraries when managing their respective cultural heritage collections. . . . Two poles along a digitization strategy scale, mass digitization and critical digitization, are distinguished in the article. As memory institutions are redefined in their development of digitized document collections, e.g., by increasingly emphasizing a common trans-national rather than national cultural heritage, mass digitization and critical digitization represent alternative avenues. . . . The article re-contextualizes current digitization discourse: a) historically, by suggesting that digitization brings ancient practices back to life rather than invents entirely new ones from scratch; b) conceptually, by presenting a new label (critical digitization) for a digitization strategy that has hitherto been downplayed in digitization discourse; and c) theoretically, by exploring the relations between the values of different digitization strategies, the reconfiguration of collections as they are digitized, and the redefinition of MLA institutions through those processes.

| Digital Scholarship's Digital/Print Books | Digital Scholarship |

The Open Knowlege Foundation Blog has published "Building the Ecology of Libraries—An Interview with Brewster Kahle."

Here's an excerpt:

What are the challenges faced by the Internet Archive regarding the digitization of books?

There are two big problems: there is going and building a digital collection, either by digitizing materials or buying electronic books. And the other is: how do you make this available, especially the in-copyright works? For digitizing books, it costs about 10 cents a page to do a beautiful rendition of a book. So, for approximately 30 dollars a book for 300 pages you can do a gorgeous job. Google does it much more quickly and it costs only about 5 dollars for each book. So it really is much less expensive in less quality, but they are able to do things at scale. We digitize about 1000 books every day in 23 scanning centers in six countries. We will set up scanning centers anywhere, or, if there are people that would like to staff the scanners themselves, we provide the scanners and all of the backend processing for free, until we run out of scanners and we've got a bunch of them. So we're looking either for people that want to scan their own collections by providing there own labour or they can employ us to do it and all told it is 10 cent a page to complete.

| Digital Scholarship's Digital Bibliographies | Digital Scholarship |

A video of John Palfrey's Digital Public Library of America presentation at WebWise 2012 is now available.

All other presentations from the conference are also available.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

Mark Phillips, Assistant Dean for Digital Libraries at the University of North Texas Libraries, has been named as one of Library Journal's 2012 Movers & Shakers.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

An accomplished systems architect, Phillips redesigned and rebuilt the university's digital library (digital.library.unt.edu). It's now a vast repository of collections from various UNT libraries, schools, and departments, and the sprawling Portal to Texas History (texashistory.unt.edu) is also based on this system. In 2011, Phillips worked on upgrades and explored avenues for discovery and use of the materials now housed online.

| Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

The Digital Public Library of America has released "Notes from the DPLA Audience & Participation Workshop."

Here's an excerpt:

As of January 2012, approximately 80 volunteers—Steering Committee members, workstream co-chairs, and workstream conveners—have committed to working on the project over the next two years, and $5 million has already been raised. Plenary meetings, the first of which was held in October 2011 in Washington, DC, will be held at six-month intervals in order to present and showcase the project's collected progress.

| Digital Scholarship's Digital/Print Books | Digital Scholarship |

The University of Waterloo Library is recruiting a Librarian, Digital Special Collections.

Here's an excerpt from the ad (job ID: 1561):

The University of Waterloo Library is seeking an innovative and dynamic professional librarian to fill a position in the Special Collections department. The successful candidate will, in collaboration with others, develop and implement the Library's digital preservation program, including policies, workflows and processes for the appraisal, acquisition, description, storage, preservation and discovery of University and Library academic and administrative digital assets, collections and archives.

| Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

The Digital Public Library of America and Europeana have agreed to collaborate to make their systems interoperable, to share source code, and to engage in cooperative collection building.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Robert Darnton, a DPLA Steering Committee member and University Librarian at Harvard, said, "The association between the DPLA and Europeana means that users everywhere will eventually have access to the combined riches of the two systems at a single click. The aggregated databases will include many millions of books, pamphlets, newspapers, manuscripts, images, recordings, videos, and other materials in many formats."

Jill Cousins, Executive Director of Europeana, welcomed the agreement, saying that "Europeana was designed to be open and interoperable, and to be able to collaborate with the DPLA is a validation of that aim. By this combined effort on two continents, Europeana and the DPLA hope to promote the creation of a global network with partners from around the world."

Another outcome of this collaboration will be a virtual exhibition about the migration of Europeans to America. The DPLA and Europeana will demonstrate the potential of their combined collections by digitizing and making freely available material about the journey from the Old World to the New. This pilot project will include text and images about the experience of the uprooted as they abandoned their homes to seek a new life thousands of miles across a treacherous ocean. Letters, photographs, and official records open up unfamiliar views into the harsh world inhabited by Europeans from the shtetl communities of Russia to the peasant villages of Ireland. And equally vivid testimonies illustrate the culture shock and hard lot of the immigrants after their arrival. Everyone in the United States, including Amerindians, descends from immigrants, and nearly everyone in Europe has some connection with migration, either within Europe itself or across the ocean. All will be invited to stroll digitally through this rich exhibition.

| New: E-science and Academic Libraries Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

The Digital Public Library of America has received $5 Million in funding.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Sloan Foundation and Arcadia Fund today announced a major contribution for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) in the form of combined $5 million in funding. The DPLA Steering Committee is leading the first concrete steps toward the realization of a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all.

Doron Weber, Vice President, Programs at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Peter Baldwin, Chair of the Donor Board at the Arcadia Fund, made the announcement at the DPLA plenary meeting today in Washington, DC. The funding—split equally between Sloan and Arcadia—will support an intense two-year grassroots process to build a realistic and detailed workplan for a national digital library, the development of a functional technical prototype, and targeted content digitization efforts. Sloan has previously committed one million dollars towards the establishment of a DPLA Secretariat at the Berkman Center and to support the legal workstream of the DPLA initiative by developing solutions to copyright law obstacles facing public digital library initiatives.

| New: E-science and Academic Libraries Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

The Strategic Content Alliance has released Revenue, Recession, Reliance: Revisiting the SCA/Ithaka S+R Case Studies in Sustainability.

Here's an excerpt:

In 2009, the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance commissioned Ithaka S+R to investigate the sustainability strategies of twelve digital content projects in the higher education and cultural heritage sectors, located in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Egypt, to see how their leaders were developing cost-management and revenue strategies to foster longterm growth for ongoing digital projects

Two years and one economic crisis later, Ithaka S+R, with the generous support of the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance, conducted a new round of research and interviews with the leaders of the twelve projects that were the focus of our original case studies. Our goal was to see how their sustainability models had held up, where weaknesses might be starting to show, and what new strategies project leaders were adopting in response. How had budget cuts and other factors affected the projects? What had project leaders learned about making their resources valuable to users? Where did the resources—financial or non-financial—come from to make continued growth and innovation possible? And how could these lessons be useful to others?

The research is documented in updates to the original twelve case studies. The final report, Revenue, Recession, Reliance: Revisiting the SCA / Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability, provides a summary and analysis of findings across all twelve projects profiled.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

The Digital Public Library of America Steering Committee has named the members of the Beta Sprint Review Panel.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

After a careful selection process, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Steering Committee is thrilled to announce the eight members of the Beta Sprint Review Panel. The panel will convene in early September to review the Beta Sprint submissions. The creators of the most promising betas will be invited to present at the October 21, 2011 public plenary meeting in Washington, DC.

The panel is composed of public and research librarians and experts in the fields of library science and information management from around the country:

• Patsy Baudoin, MIT Libraries
• Maeve Clark, Iowa City Public Library
• Laura DeBonis, former Director for Library Partnerships for Google Book Search
• Eli Neiburger, Ann Arbor District Library
• David Rumsey, David Rumsey Map Collection
• Michael Santangelo, Brooklyn Public Library
• John Weise, HathiTrust
• Jessamyn West, library technologist

Read more about it at "Digital Public Library of America Steering Committee Announces 'Beta Sprint.'"

| Digital Scholarship |

JISC has released Content Clustering and Sustaining Digital Resources.

Here's an excerpt:

This eBook presents case studies from 11 digital projects managing digital resources for Higher Education. One strand of case studies look at the skills required to build and sustain digital collections, with a focus on how universities embed digitisation as a strategic activity within their core work. The second strand draws on case studies examining how digital silos can be broken down, as users demand increasingly sophisticated resources that cluster or aggregate related content from different areas of the Internet. The projects were funded under the JISC eContent Programme for 2009-11.

| Digital Scholarship |

Ithaka S+R has released Funding for Sustainability: How Funders' Practices Influence the Future of Digital Resources.

Here's an excerpt:

With support from the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance, Ithaka S+R conducted a study to examine the ways that both public and private funding bodies in academic and cultural heritage sectors are defining sustainability and encouraging the digital resources they help to create to endure and continue to provide value well beyond the term of the grant. The project explored the funding practices of over 25 funders that support various forms of digital resources, and included over 100 interviews with more than 80 programme officers, foundation directors, project leaders and other experts. Our goal was to gain an understanding of how funders think about the long-term viability of the digital resources they support, and the policies and practices they have put in place to encourage successful outcomes.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |