Category: Digital Libraries

Better World Books and the Internet Archive: "Saving 4 Million Books From Landfill"


The service that BWB provides is an important one for libraries. BWB collects used books from libraries, booksellers, colleges, and universities in six countries, which are then either resold online, donated or recycled. To date, Better World Books has donated over 35 million books worldwide, has raised close to $34 million for libraries and literacy, and has saved more than 450 million books from landfills. Through the partnership with the Internet Archive, BWB has donated more than one million books each year for preservation and digitization, totaling 4 million books to date.

https://cutt.ly/X8CaoCv

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Brewster Kahle: "I Set Out to Build the Next Library of Alexandria. Now I Wonder: Will There Be Libraries in 25 Years? "

https://cutt.ly/GRUknP6

Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography, Version 2 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Thinking Digital Libraries for Preservation as Digital Cultural Heritage: By R to R4 Facet of FAIR Principles"

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-020-00291-7

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

ARL:Proceedings of the 2018 Library Assessment Conference

ARL has released "Proceedings of the 2018 Library Assessment Conference."

Here's an excerpt:

These proceedings, arranged by themed sessions, comprise 80 papers representing the diversity of assessment efforts, including value and impact, space, methods and tools, digital libraries, and non-traditional users.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Understanding Connections: Examining Digital Library and Institutional Repository Use Overlap"

Mark E. Phillips, Pamela Andrews, and Ana Krahmer have published "Understanding Connections: Examining Digital Library and Institutional Repository Use Overlap" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

The University of North Texas Libraries; Digital Collections are situated as a unified whole within their preservation infrastructure, with three separate user interfaces serving the content to different audiences. These separate interfaces are: The UNT Digital Library (DL), The Portal to Texas History, and The Gateway to Oklahoma History. Situated within each interface are collections, and hosted within these collections are digital objects. One collection, the UNT Scholarly Works Repository, specifically serves UNT's research and creative contributions and functions as the Institutional repository (IR) for the University of North Texas. Because UNT Scholarly works is seated as a collection amongst other collections, users can access faculty research, not just out of an interest in research from specific faculty members, but also as it ties into the user's broader understanding of a given topic. With flexible infrastructure and metadata schema that connect collections beneath the umbrella of the wider preservation infrastructure, the UNT DL employs full-text searching and interlinked metadata to strengthen and make visible the connections between objects in different collections. This paper examined how users navigated between other collections within the UNT IR, as well as within the UNT DL. Through this examination, we observed patterns between how users navigated between objects, understood which collections may have related to one another, examined why some unique items were used more than others, and viewed the average number of items used within a session.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Tiny Data: Building a Community of Practice around Humanities Datasets"

Veronica Ikeshoji-Orlati et al. have published "Tiny Data: Building a Community of Practice around Humanities Datasets" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

Quantitative data, the foundation of scientific research, have been in the foreground of discussions about data creation, curation, and publication pipelines. However, data for humanistic and social scientific inquiries take many forms, including physical and ephemeral primary resources (books, objects, performances, interactions); qualitative, free-form observations; as well as quantitative, structured data and metadata. At the Vanderbilt University Jean and Alexander Heard Library, we started the Tiny Data Working Group (TDWG) in 2016 to tackle some of the humanistic research data creation and curation issues in a constructive, collaborative, and interdisciplinary format. The present paper considers what it means to be FAIR with humanities data, as well as how to build a community of data-literate humanists, based on our experiences with the TDWG.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 9 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Digital Public Library of America to Pilot eBook Lending in Fall"

DPLA has released "Digital Public Library of America to Pilot eBook Lending in Fall."

Here's an excerpt:

Planned for this fall, DPLA will be lending ebooks in what it hopes is a streamlined, non-proprietary and vendorless platform.

While ebook lending has grown fast among US public libraries, the process is not always seamless. Book discovery, borrowing, and consumption must happen within the provide'’s app or website. DPLA wants to create a process that isn’t as specific, and one that works with a broader range of content producers for better access to ebooks.

Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"The Digital Public Library of America and the National Digital Platform"

Emily Gore et al. have published "The Digital Public Library of America and the National Digital Platform" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America's libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. In order to do this, DPLA has had to build elements of the national digital platform to connect to those institutions and to serve their digitized materials to audiences. In this article, we detail the construction of two critical elements of our work: the decentralized national network of "hubs," which operate in states across the country; and a version of the Hydra repository software that is tailored to the needs of our community. This technology and the organizations that make use of it serve as the foundation of the future of DPLA and other projects that seek to take advantage of the national digital platform.

Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Assessing Safe Spaces for Digital Scholarship in the Library"

Rachel Wexelbaum has published "Assessing Safe Spaces for Digital Scholarship in the Library " in LIBRES.

Here's an excerpt:

Academic libraries, and the students and faculty that they serve, have different definitions of safe space. The attempts of both parties to construct a safe space for digital scholarship in the library can clash based on these divergent perspectives. While the number of academic libraries providing some form of digital scholarship support is increasing, the library definition of safe space, as well as the working culture of the library, has the potential to render libraries unsafe spaces for innovation and digital scholarship.

Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"DPLA and Library of Congress Announce New Collaboration"

The Digital Public Library of America has released "DPLA and Library of Congress Announce New Collaboration."

Here's an excerpt:

The Library of Congress today signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Digital Public Library of America to become a Content Hub and will ultimately share a significant portion of its rich digital resources with DPLA's database of digital content records.

The first batch of records will include 5,000 items from three major Library of Congress map collections—the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and panoramic maps.

Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Library Leadership for the Digital Age"

Ithaka S+R has released "Library Leadership for the Digital Age."

Here's an excerpt:

Users think libraries are—or at least should be—digital. And yet, we in academic libraries are still counting how many of everything we have in our local collections. We brag about how big we are or how specialized we are. We advertise our job openings with language suggesting that our size is an indicator of greatness. But as libraries become digital, the language about size or subject strength seems slightly ridiculous.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Developing Best Practices in Digital Library Assessment: Year One Update"

Joyce Chapman, Jody DeRidder and Santi Thompson have published "Developing Best Practices in Digital Library Assessment: Year One Update" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

In the face of limited resources and increasing demand for online access to digital library content, we need to strategically focus our efforts and better understand users, impact, and associated costs. However, methods for assessment of digital libraries are not standardized. In an effort to address this crucial gap, the Digital Library Federation Assessment Interest Group has engaged the community over the past year in the development of best practices and guidelines. With this article, the authors provide an update on progress to date and solicit participation in an evolving effort to develop viable solutions.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"What Technology Skills Do Developers Need? A Text Analysis of Job Listings in Library and Information Science (LIS) from Jobs.code4lib.org"

Monica Maceli has published "What Technology Skills Do Developers Need? A Text Analysis of Job Listings in Library and Information Science (LIS) from Jobs.code4lib.org " in Information Technology and Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

Technology plays an indisputably vital role in library and information science (LIS) work; this rapidly moving landscape can create challenges for practitioners and educators seeking to keep pace with such change. In pursuit of building our understanding of currently sought technology competencies in developer-oriented positions within LIS, this paper reports the results of a text analysis of a large collection of job listings culled from the Code4lib jobs website. Beginning over a decade ago as a popular mailing list covering the intersection of technology and library work, the Code4lib organization's current offerings include a website that collects and organizes LIS-related technology job listings. The results of the text analysis of this dataset suggest the currently vital technology skills and concepts that existing and aspiring practitioners may target in their continuing education as developers.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

CDL Executive Director Laine Farley to Retire

Laine Farley, CDL Executive Director, will retire on 9/30/15.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

During her tenure, the scope and extent of CDL's digital library programs have undergone significant expansion, ensuring the national prominence of the digital library services that CDL manages on behalf of the University of California campuses. Among her many accomplishments as Executive Director have been fostering initiatives in library publishing and data management, developing policies and tools for UC's open access initiatives, overseeing the largescale digitization of UC library holdings in partnership with Google and the Internet Archive, and establishing UC libraries as founding members of the HathiTrust.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

IMLS Releases Four National Digital Platform Grant Proposals

IMLS has released four national digital platform grant proposals for projects it awarded grants to.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

  • Fostering a New National Library Network through a Community-­Based, Connected Repository System (LG-70-15-0006): The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Stanford University, and DuraSpace will foster a greatly expanded network of open-access, content-hosting "hubs" that will enable discovery and interoperability, as well as the reuse of digital resources by people from this country and around the world. The three partners will engage in a major development of the community-driven open source Hydra project to provide these hubs with a new all-in-one solution, which will also allow countless other institutions to easily join the national digital platform.
  • Museum Hub for Open Content (LG-70-15-0002): ARTstor, in collaboration with the El Paso Museum of Art, the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Staten Island Museum, and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) will create and implement software to enable museums to contribute digital image collections for open public access. The project will lower barriers to museum contributions to the DPLA by producing enhanced metadata tools, intellectual property rights decision support tools, and a direct-to-DPLA publishing capacity.
  • Combining Social Media Storytelling with Web Archives (LG-71-15-0077): Old Dominion University and the Internet Archive will collaborate to develop tools and techniques for integrating "storytelling" social media and web archiving. The partners will use information retrieval techniques to (semi-)automatically generate stories summarizing a collection and mine existing public stories as a basis for librarians, archivists, and curators to create collections about breaking events.
  • Repository Services for Accessible Course Content (LG-72-15-0009): This planning project, led by Tufts University, will bring together experts from disability services, including librarians, IT professionals, advocates, and legal counsel, to develop work plans for shared infrastructure, within which universities can support their students with disabilities. The intention is to create specifications and a business model that will complement existing platforms and services.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

DLPA Strategic Plan 2015 through 2017

The Digital Public Library of America has released DLPA Strategic Plan 2015 through 2017.

Here's an excerpt:

We must, first and foremost, complete our hub network so that all collections and item types in America have an on-ramp to DPLA; fully build out our technology platform to ensure we have a solid foundation for many years to come and that anticipates further growth and diversification; and pursue an outreach plan that gets DPLA resources more widely into the hands of the global public, into education at all levels from kindergarten through graduate schools (with a special focus on underresourced organizations), and onto the screens of eager amateur and family historians and the developers who are creating the latest apps and websites.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"On Being a Hub: Some Details behind Providing Metadata for the Digital Public Library of America"

Lisa Gregory and Stephanie Williams have published "On Being a Hub: Some Details behind Providing Metadata for the Digital Public Library of America" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

After years of planning, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) launched in 2013. Institutions from around the United States contribute to the DPLA through regional "service hubs," entities that aggregate digital collections metadata for harvest by the DPLA. The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center has been one of these service hubs since the end of 2013. This article describes the technological side of being a service hub for the DPLA, from choosing metadata requirements and reviewing software, to the workflow used each month when providing hundreds of metadata feeds for DPLA harvest. The authors hope it will be of interest to those pursuing metadata aggregation, whether for the DPLA or for other purposes.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"