The New York Public Library and Kirtas Technologies are making a half-million public domain books available for sale as digitized or printed copies.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Readers and researchers looking for hard-to-find books now have the opportunity to dip into the collections of one of the world's most comprehensive libraries to purchase digitized copies of public domain titles. Through their Digitize-on-Demand program, Kirtas Technologies has partnered with The New York Public Library to make 500,000 public domain works from the Library's collections available (to anyone in the world).

"New technology has allowed the Library to greatly expand access to its collections," said Paul LeClerc, President of The New York Public Library. "Now, for the first time, library users are able to order copies of specific items from our vast public domain collections that are useful to them. Additionally the program creates a digital legacy for future users of the same item and a revenue stream to support our operations. We are very pleased to participate in a program that is so beneficial to everyone involved."

Using existing information from NYPL's catalog records, Kirtas will make the library's public domain books available for sale through its retail site before they are ever digitized. Customers can search for a desired title on www.kirtasbooks.com and place an order for that book. When the order is placed, only then is it pulled from the shelf, digitized and made available as a high-quality reprint or digital file.

What makes this approach to digitization unique is that NYPL incurs no up-front printing, production or storage costs. It also provides the library with a self-funding, commercial model helping it to sustain its digitization programs in the future. Unlike other free or low-cost digitization programs, the library retains the rights and ownership to their own digitized content.

Ithaka has released What to Withdraw: Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Based on the expected continuing needs for print materials, this report considers the minimum time period for which access to the original will be required and assesses the number of print copies necessary to ensure that these goals are met. While complex, this methodology provides for a variety of risk profiles based on key characteristics, with preservation recommendations that similarly vary. For example, many materials that are adequately digitized and preserved in digital form, contain few images, and are held in certain quantities in system-wide print repositories may be safely withdrawn from local print holdings without impacting either preservation or access.

At the same time, the report warns that other print materials may not yet be ready for broad withdrawal without threatening both access and preservation goals. For these materials, a number of strategies are recommended to increase the flexibility available to libraries in the future.

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission has awarded digitization grants to six TexShare member libraries.

Here's an excerpt from the press release :

The exciting projects that have been funded are:

• "Houston Oral History Project" ($25,000) – The Houston Public Library is partnering with Houston Mayor Bill White to preserve and make the video-recordings of significant Houstonians available on the web. This grant will convert an additional 288 hours of audiotapes from cassette or reel-to-reel to digital format along with transcripts for the collection.
• "The Bexar Archives" ($19,930) – The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin will create a research tool, called Bexar Archives Online, which joins digital images of the original Spanish documents with the corresponding English-language translations.
• "Marion Butts Photography Negatives Project" ($17,571) – The Dallas Public Library will use the photographic records produced by Marion Butts, an African-American photographer and editor of the Dallas Express, as well as other primary source materials such as maps, Negro city directories and oral histories to develop a series of online Texas-focused, TEKS-based lesson plans targeting seventh grade students. The records chronicle Dallas and Texas history during the segregation and civil rights eras.
• "Lady Bird Johnson Photo Collection Project" ($16,610) – The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at the University of Texas at Austin will digitize and provide access to a unique collection of photographs of Claudia Taylor "Lady Bird" Johnson. She is the wife of former President Lyndon B. Johnson, and was born in Karnack, Texas. As the First Lady of the United States from 1963-69, she was an advocate for nature, beautification and conservation of natural resources. Most of the photographs in this collection date after her return to Texas.
• "Itinerant Photographer Collection" ($14,389) – The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin will preserve and digitize a collection of glass plate negatives depicting local businesses owners and employees in Corpus Christi, which were taken by an unidentified photographer in February 1934 during the Depression. The center will provide an online finding aid, an online catalog record and an online exhibit of the fragile items now in danger of emulsion loss.
• "Tejano Voices Project" ($6,500) – The University of Texas at Arlington Library will digitize and describe 13 oral history interviews from notable Tejanos and Tejanas from across Texas conducted in 1992-2003 by Dr. Jose Angel Gutierrez, associate professor of political science at UT Arlington. Many of the interviews emphasize the personal struggles, from individuals of Mexican decent, who are the first in their communities elected or appointed to government offices. The interviews also reflect the history of the Tejano community as it pressed for an end to racial segregation in the state and access to political power in the post-WWII period.

Below are two presentations from the ALA 2009 "Digital Library Hardware Showcase" session.

• "Better, Cheaper, Faster" or "Down and Dirty"? Evaluating Consumer-Grade Digitization Equipment, Danielle Cunniff Plumer, Coordinator, Texas Heritage Digitization Initiative
• Equipment and Considerations for your Digital Collections, Emily Gore, Head of Digital Initiatives & IT and Mandy Mastrovita, Digital Production Librarian, Clemson University Libraries

Presentations from the JISC Digital Content Conference 2009 are now available.

Here's an excerpt from the conference page:

In the context of the completion of Phase 2 of the JISC Digitisation Programme the JISC Digital Content Conference aims to discuss and decide the next steps that need to be taken to ensure the sustained integration of digitised content into research and education and is one of the most important events of 2009. It will consider the issues facing the UK's universities as they deal with creating, delivering, sustaining and using a whole range of digital content as well as looking into future opportunities and challenges. The following thematic strands will run throughout the conference: Managing Content; Content Development Strategies; Content In Education; User Engagement; Looking Into The Future.

Fifteen institutions from Europe and the UK have launched the IMPACT project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Feeding into the EU's i2010 vision to significantly improve access to Europe's cultural heritage, the British Library and the University of Salford have teamed up with a group of 15 institutions from across the continent as part of the four-year IMPACT project—IMProving Access to Text—to remove the barriers that stand in the way of the mass digitisation of the European cultural heritage.

Led by the National Library of the Netherlands, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the IMPACT project aims to share expertise from across Europe and establish international best practice guidelines with a view to speeding up, standardising and enhancing the quality of mass digitisation through establishing a Centre of Competence for text based digitisation. As one of the main participants, the British Library has taken the lead on one of IMPACT's four sub-projects, establishing the operational context of the work carried out by contributors to the project.

Mass digitisation has become one of the most prominent issues in the library world over the last 5 years, with a number of experienced libraries in Europe already scanning millions of pages each year. To help establish some standardisation over the course of the project, the British Library's team will lead work on a set of 'Decision Support Tools' in an effort to focus on practical implementation support, providing guidance on digitisation workflow, the capturing of material and the organisation of metadata based on the real world experiences of project partners. These measures, announced at the first IMPACT conference in April will help ensure new material can be digitised successfully and feed into existing workflows. . . .

With extensive experience working with the digitisation of historic material, the British Library has also been working closely with technical experts at the internationally distinguished Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (PRImA) research group, University of Salford, exploring methods of improving Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for use in the digitisation of less standardised material. OCR technology was absolutely vital for the delivery of the Library's recent newspaper digitisation project of 19th Century UK newspapers (http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs), allowing the text to be fully searchable, but the current technology has it limitations. . . .

Through collaboration IMPACT has already established methods for overcoming issues with geometric correction, border removal and binarisation, and is looking at examples of best practice from around the world, such as the Australian Newspaper Digitisation project's cutting edge application of collaborative user generated corrections, to increase resource discovery success for historic mass digitisation.

In "Mass Digitization Mini-Symposium: A Reverse Travelogue," Eric Lease Morgan reports on a mass digitization mini-symposium at the Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame. His post includes links to the summarized presentations.

John Weaver et al. have made their "Planning and Managing the Digitization of Library and Archive Materials: A Multi-Model Approach" presentation available on SlideShare.

Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

This workshop will enable you to:

• Identify different models and methods for digitizing library and archival materials
• Identify the relative advantages and disadvantages of these models
• Define and evaluate a potential digitization project at your library
• Identify key considerations in planning and funding a digitization project
• Identify and develop management and production processes for different types of digitization projects
• Discover additional, relevant resources for planning and managing digitization projects

eIFL.net has released eIFL Case Studies on Low Cost Digitisation Projects: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

This report summarizes the experiences with digitisation by some eIFL countries. Although there are probably many more examples of digitisation in eIFL countries, this report includes only those where the country responded to the survey.

The main objective of this study was to raise awareness about best practice digitisation projects that are: (1) affordable, (2) easily managed at the technical and organisation level, (3) sustainable, and (4) enable eIFL countries to preserve and promote their local content online.

Libraries in eIFL countries with digitisation projects were asked to complete a survey that asked them about the intent of their projects. Surveys were completed and returned by libraries with additional relevant information, such as pictures illustrating the digitisation (scanning). Subsequently, the respondents were interviewed briefly by phone or Skype about their survey answers.

The Nevada Statewide Digital Advisory Committee and the Nevada State Library and Archives have released the Nevada Statewide Digital Planning 2008-2009: Final Report (Thanks to Virtual Library Notes).

Here's an excerpt:

The Statewide Digital Plan (April, 2009) was developed under the leadership of the Nevada State Library and Archives (NSLA) and the Statewide Digital Advisory Committee (SDAC) (Appendix A). Through a series of activities that involved a wide range of Nevadans, including the cultural heritage community, K-12 community, and community arts organization, four goals and objectives were developed and activities prioritized.

Over the next five years the library and cultural heritage community will focus on these goals:

Goal I: Provide online access to digital collections held by Nevada cultural heritage organizations and allied information providers that are distributed throughout Nevada.

Goal II: Develop & implement standards/best practices that will support access to Nevada’s digital collections.

Goal III: Develop a leadership/governance structure that will support the growth and sustainability of a standards-compliant digital initiative created by Nevada’s cultural heritage organizations and allied information providers.

Goal IV: Establish a collaborative digitization model where the full range of types and sizes of Nevada cultural heritage organizations and allied information providers can participate.

JISC has released Welsh Journals Online: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

Welsh Journals Online is the most challenging digitisation project ever undertaken by the National Library of Wales. It aimed to create a website giving free searchable and browsable access to the contents of back-numbers of the major journals relating to Wales or the Welsh language. These journals form the core of the Library’s collection of printed books and are its most-used resource.

The journals were chosen to represent the diversity of material available, and cover English- and Welsh-language titles including scholarly articles on topics from archaeology to zoology, poetry, fiction, reviews and obituaries. The project publishes 400,000 pages of text, from 52 titles; the 180,000 pages of Welsh content represents the single largest corpus of text in the language available on the web. Some of the titles are well-known and widely used as sources (eg Archaeologia Cambrensis), while others have been overlooked or are difficult to access (Yr Arloeswr). . . .

The website is fully exposed to Google and it is likely that many new users will find the resource through general searching of the web. For those who are unfamiliar with the journal literature of Wales some contextual help is provided in the form of factsheets; lesson plans based upon these have also been created to assists teachers wishing to use the Welsh Journals Online website to discuss the questions of copyright, searching, or referencing.

The majority of the material is covered by copyright, and licensing and rights management formed a significant part of the project. The need to control display at page level (so that where necessary a single article or photograph could be blanked) required detailed metadata to record permission, gathered in cooperation with the publishers. Of the titles included, the proportion of blanked pages is very low (less than 0.1%), but rights issues led to the exclusion of some titles completely. The Library did not offer any payment for permission and works by Dylan Thomas, Robert Graves, and R S Thomas are therefore not shown. Given that the cost-per-page of web publication is approximately £2, the payment of even minimal fees would transform the economics of mass-digitisation.

The Cornell University Library has eliminated use restrictions on reproductions of public domain works, including over 70,000 e-books.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

In a dramatic change of practice, Cornell University Library has announced it will no longer require its users to seek permission to publish public domain items duplicated from its collections. Instead, users may now use reproductions of public domain works made for them by the Library or available via Web sites, without seeking any further permission.

The Library, as the producer of digital reproductions made from its collections, has in the past licensed the use of those reproductions. Individuals and corporations that failed to secure permission to repurpose these reproductions violated their agreement with the Library. "The threat of legal action, however," noted Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, "does little to stop bad actors while at the same time limits the good uses that can be made of digital surrogates. We decided it was more important to encourage the use of the public domain materials in our holdings than to impose roadblocks."

The immediate impetus for the new policy is Cornell’s donation of more than 70,000 digitized public domain books to the Internet Archive (details at www.archive.org/details/cornell).

"Imposing legally binding restrictions on these digital files would have been very difficult and in a way contrary to our broad support of open access principles," said Oya Y. Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. "It seemed better just to acknowledge their public domain status and make them freely usable for any purpose. And since it doesn't make sense to have different rules for material that is reproduced at the request of patrons, we have removed permission obligations from public domain works."

Institutional restrictions on the use of public domain work, sometimes labeled "copyfraud," have been the subject of much scholarly criticism. The Cornell initiative goes further than many other recent attempts to open access to public domain material by removing restrictions on both commercial and non-commercial use. Users of the public domain works are still expected to determine on their own that works are in the public domain where they live. They also must respect non-copyright rights, such as the rights of privacy, publicity, and trademark. The Library will continue to charge service fees associated with the reproduction of analog material or the provision of versions of files different than what is freely available on the Web. All library Web sites will be updated to reflect this new policy during 2009.

The new Cornell policy can be found at cdl.library.cornell.edu/guidelines.html.