Here's an excerpt:

In a public-private partnership with Google, the Austrian National Library is digitising its historical book holdings. Some 600,000 volumes from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries will be digitised and made available free of charge. The project demonstrates that public-private partnerships can be successful in enabling our heritage institutions to provide large-scale access to their holdings, provided that such partnerships are not exclusive and free access is ensured. The article outlines the preparatory phase and work flows established in the project.

| Google Books Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

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 |

Here's an excerpt:

The existence of a ubiquitous and cheap worldwide communication’s network that increasingly makes documents easily and freely available will require a transformation of academic library collecting practice. It will be driven by a number of specific developments including: the digitization of content; the development of print repositories; the development of e-readers and print-on-demand publishing; the growth of open access; challenges to establish academic publishing organizations; and the growth of new forms of scholarship based on openness and social productivity. If academic libraries are to be successful, they will need to: deconstruct legacy print collections; move from item-by-item book selection to purchase-on-demand and subscriptions; manage the transition to open access journals; focus on curating unique items; and develop new mechanisms for funding national infrastructure.

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

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Changes in technology and the increased visibility of special collections have resulted in a deluge of requests for digital copies of special collections materials. A steady stream of digitization requests for one item here, two pages there can be labor-intensive, and policies for user requests vary widely across institutions.

To address these issues, OCLC Research and the OCLC Research Library Partnership's Working Group on Streamlining Photography and Scanning sought methods for reducing cumbersome digitization-on-demand workflows and policy obstacles. The result—a flexible, tiered approach to delivering digitized materials that acknowledges differences in user needs, collections, institutions, and resources—is detailed in the report, Scan and Deliver: Managing User-initiated Digitization in Special Collections and Archives.

In this webinar, members of the working group shared their creative experiments aimed at scanning and delivering user-requested digital copies of special collections materials. San Diego State University offers self-serve scanning in their reading room. At the University of Chicago, special collections and interlibrary loan (ILL) colleagues are working together to use existing infrastructure and expertise. The Getty Research Institute developed a tiered approach to capture and post digital files created by fulfilling user requests. The presenters discussed workflows-in-progress, lessons learned, and how they learned to stop worrying and love digital copy requests.

| New: Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In particular, the Recommendation invites Member States to:

• put in place solid plans for their investments in digitisation and foster public-private partnerships to share the gigantic cost of digitisation (recently estimated at 100 billion EUR). The Recommendation spells out key principles to ensure that such partnerships are fair and balanced.
• make available through Europeana 30 million objects by 2015, including all Europe's masterpieces which are no longer protected by copyright, and all material digitised with public funding.
• get more in-copyright material online, by, for example, creating the legal framework conditions enabling large-scale digitisation and cross-border accessibility of out-of-commerce works.
• reinforce their strategies and adapt their legislation to ensure long-term preservation of digital material, by, for example, ensuring the material deposited is not protected by technical measures that impede librarians from preserving it.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

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 |

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 |

Here's an excerpt:

Guidelines for the digital conversion of transmissive content (negatives and positive slides) in the cultural heritage community have lagged behind those for print content. The primary reasons for this are twofold. Unlike print material, transmissive content is generally an intermediate format (as with negatives) or requires a viewing mechanism (such as a projector). In either case, there is no standard for the viewing of the object. The second challenge for digitization of transmissive content is, in large part, a result of the ambiguity of the visual output for slides or negatives.

| Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt from:

There are many different library text digitization projects, serving a variety of purposes. With this in mind, these Best Practices are meant to be as inclusive as possible by specifying five encoding levels. These levels are meant to allow for a range of practice, from wholly automated text creation and encoding, to encoding that requires expert content knowledge, analysis, and editing. The encoding levels are not strictly cumulative: while higher levels tend to build upon lower levels by including more elements, higher levels are not supersets because some elements used at lower levels are not used at higher levels—often because more specific elements replace generic elements.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

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 |

Here's an excerpt:

This report is an effort to begin to synthesize the evidence available under the JISC digitisation and eContent programmes to better understand the patterns of usage of digitised collections in research and teaching, in the UK and beyond. JISC has invested heavily in eContent and digitisation, funding dozens of projects of varying size since 2004. However, until recently, the value of these efforts has been mostly either taken as given, or asserted via anecdote. By drawing on evidence of the various impacts of twelve digitised resources, we can begin to build a base of evidence that moves beyond anecdotal evidence to a more empirically-based understanding on a variety of impacts that have been measured by qualitative and quantitative methods.

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

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The goal of the new policy is to make high quality digital images of Yale's vast cultural heritage collections in the public domain openly and freely available.

As works in these collections become digitized, the museums and libraries will make those images that are in the public domain freely accessible. In a departure from established convention, no license will be required for the transmission of the images and no limitations will be imposed on their use. The result is that scholars, artists, students, and citizens the world over will be able to use these collections for study, publication, teaching and inspiration.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

While digitising for preservation purposes has been permitted since 2004 under strict conditions in accordance with Art. 16n of the Dutch Copyright Act, for the reutilisation of digitized material (e.g. on websites or by means of retransmission by radio or television) permission must be sought and obtained from large numbers of rights holders. For large digitisation projects, such as Beelden voor de Toekomst (Images for the Future), this means a rights clearance operation of dizzying proportions. In addition, digitisation projects face great uncertainty with regard to the level of the copyright license fees due. Given this background the Images for the Future consortium has commissioned the Institute for Information Law (hereinafter IViR) to investigate models for licenses and fees for mass digitisation projects.

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

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This report provides examples of how to simplify and streamline digital capture of non-book collections.

Nine case studies illustrate processes and procedures institutions have adopted to speed up digitization of special collections. The intent in sharing these vignettes is to enable others to consider whether or not any of the approaches could be applied to their own initiatives to increase the scale of their digitization efforts.

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

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program supports projects that provide an essential foundation for scholarship, education, and public programming in the humanities. Thousands of libraries, archives, museums, and historical organizations across the country maintain important collections of books and manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings and moving images, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, art and material culture, and digital objects. Funding from this program strengthens efforts to extend the life of such materials and make their intellectual content widely accessible, often through the use of digital technology. Awards are also made to create various reference resources that facilitate use of cultural materials, from works that provide basic information quickly to tools that synthesize and codify knowledge of a subject for in-depth investigation.

Applications may be submitted for projects that address one or more of the following activities:

• arranging and describing archival and manuscript collections;
• cataloging collections of printed works, photographs, recorded sound, moving images, art, and material culture;
• providing conservation treatment (including deacidification) for collections, leading to enhanced access;
• digitizing collections;
• preserving and improving access to born-digital sources;
• developing databases, virtual collections, or other electronic resources to codify information on a subject or to provide integrated access to selected humanities materials;
• creating encyclopedias;
• preparing linguistic tools, such as historical and etymological dictionaries, corpora, and reference grammars (separate funding is available for endangered language projects in partnership with the National Science Foundation);
• developing tools for spatial analysis and representation of humanities data, such as atlases and geographic information systems (GIS); and
• designing digital tools to facilitate use of humanities resources.

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