Category: Digital Libraries

Mark Phillips Named as One of Library Journal’s 2012 Movers & Shakers

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 |

"Notes from the DPLA Audience & Participation Workshop"

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 |

Librarian, Digital Special Collections at University of Waterloo Library

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 |

Digital Public Library of America and Europeana to Collaborate

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 |

Digital Public Library of America Receives $5 Million in Funding

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 |

Revenue, Recession, Reliance: Revisiting the SCA/Ithaka S+R Case Studies in Sustainability

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 |

Digital Public Library of America Names Beta Sprint Review Panel Members

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 |

Content Clustering and Sustaining Digital Resources

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 |

Funding for Sustainability: How Funders’ Practices Influence the Future of Digital Resources

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 |

NEH Awards $300,000 to the Shelley-Godwin Archive

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a grant of $300,000 to the Shelley-Godwin Archive.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a grant of $300,000 to the Shelley-Godwin Archive, a digital resource comprising works of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Humanities scholars, curators, and information scientists from The New York Public Library (NYPL), the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford, the Houghton Library of Harvard University, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, and the British Library will collaborate on the archive's creation. They will be led by Elizabeth C. Denlinger, Curator of the Pforzheimer Collection of the NYPL. Neil Fraistat, director of MITH, a renowned scholar in both the digital humanities and Shelley studies, will act as co-Principal Investigator.

The Shelley-Godwin Archive will draw primarily from the two foremost collections of these materials, those of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at NYPL, which together hold an estimated 90 percent of all known relevant manuscripts worldwide. With the Archive’s creation, manuscripts and early editions of these writers will be made freely available to the public through an innovative framework constituting a new model of best practice for research libraries. First among these is the manuscript of Mary Shelley's iconic novel of 1818, Frankenstein; and second will be the working notebooks of P.B. Shelley, which are scattered amongst the five partner institutions from California to England. MITH will create the project’s infrastructure with the assistance of the New York Public Library’s digital humanities group, NYPL Labs.

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

Splashes and Ripples: Synthesizing the Evidence on the Impacts of Digital Resources

JISC has released Splashes and Ripples: Synthesizing the Evidence on the Impacts of Digital Resources.

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 |

CLIR/DLF Awarded Grant for Digital Public Library of America Prototype

The Council on Library and Information Resources and the Digital Library Federation have been awarded a Mellon grant to develop a Digital Public Library of America Prototype.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded CLIR/DLF a $46,000 planning grant to develop a prototype for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The prototype will be submitted to the DPLA “beta sprint,” which seeks “ideas, models, prototypes, technical tools, [or] user interfaces . . . that demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wide range of broadly distributed content.”

Rachel Frick, director of the DLF program, will manage the project and serve as co-principal investigator with Carole Palmer, professor and director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

Palmer will lead UIUC staff in developing the prototype, which will demonstrate how the IMLS Digital Collections and Content Registry (DCC) and its research and development activities can serve the DPLA as a critical mass of base content, as well as an aggregation model. A functional prototype will be produced in combination with a set of static wireframes and demonstrations, showing how DCC’s advances in content, metadata, user experience, and infrastructure can be leveraged for the DPLA.

Palmer and Frick will work closely with Geneva Henry, executive director of the Center for Digital Scholarship at Rice University, who will produce a report that reviews current literature pertaining to the technical aspects of large-scale collection aggregations and federations. The report will review and compare the system architectures, content types, and scale of content of the DCC, Europeana, the National Science Digital Library, and other aggregations to shed light on how and why large-scale aggregation projects succeed or fail. The report will also identify potential content providers for the DPLA, and will estimate the time, effort, and other costs required to ingest these resources into the prototype.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

Library of Congress and Sony Music Entertainment Launch National Jukebox

The Library of Congress and Sony Music Entertainment have launched the National Jukebox.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Library of Congress and Sony Music Entertainment today unveiled a new website of over 10,000 rare historic sound recordings available to the public for the first time digitally. The site is called the "National Jukebox" (www.loc.gov/jukebox/).

Developed by the Library of Congress, with assets provided by Sony Music Entertainment, the National Jukebox offers free online access to a vast selection of music and spoken-word recordings produced in the U.S. between the years 1901 and 1925. . . .

The agreement for the National Jukebox grants the Library of Congress usage rights to Sony Music’s entire pre-1925 catalog—comprising thousands of recordings produced by Columbia Records, OKeh, and Victor Talking Machine Co. among others – and represents the largest collection of such historical recordings ever made publicly available for study and appreciation online. . . .

Visitors to the National Jukebox will be able to listen to available recordings on a streaming-only basis, as well as view thousands of label images, record-catalog illustrations, and artist and performer bios. In addition, users can further explore the catalog by accessing special interactive features, listening to playlists curated by Library staff, and creating and sharing their own playlists. . . .

The website will showcase special interactive features as well, including a digital facsimile of the 1919 edition of the famous opera guide "Victrola Book of the Opera," which describes more than 110 operas, including illustrations, plot synopses and lists of recordings offered in that year. Features include the book’s original text, a comparison of the different interpretations of the most popular arias of the period, and streamed recordings of nearly every opera referenced in the book.

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

Presentations from the CNI Spring 2011 Membership Meeting

Presentations and handouts from the CNI Spring 2011 Membership Meeting are now available.

Here's a brief selection of presentations:

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

Open Source Digital Library Software: Alpha Release of VuDL

Villanova University's Falvey Memorial Library has released the alpha version of VuDL, which is under a GPL open source license.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The simple-to-use Digital Library Administration application is powered by all open source technologies, and provides a METS metadata editor, service image generation tools, XML database repository, and a built-in OAI server.

The core of VuDL's application is powered by Orbeon Forms, a powerful XML/XForms processor. eXist (a native XML database) and the server's file system combine to support the data and image repository.

VuDL's public interface is powered by VuFind (http://vufind.org), an Open Source discovery layer developed and managed by Villanova University. VuFind is currently in use in academic and research libraries in 12 countries, including the National Library of Australia and the London School of Economics.

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

Managing Digital Collections: A Collaborative Initiative on the South African Framework

The National Research Foundation has released Managing Digital Collections: A Collaborative Initiative on the South African Framework.

Here's an excerpt:

The objective of this Framework is to provide high-level principles for planning and managing the full digital collection life cycle. It aims to

  • provide an overview of some of the major components and activities involved in creating good digital collections
  • provide a sense of the landscape of digital collections management
  • identify existing resources that support the development of sound local practices
  • encourage community participation in the ongoing development of best practices for digital collection building
  • contribute to the benefits of sound data management practices, as well as the goals of data sharing and long term access
  • introduce data management and curation issues
  • assist cultural heritage organisations to create and manage complex digital collections
  • assist funding organisations who wish to encourage and support the development of good digital collections
  • advocate the use of internationally-created appropriate open community standards to ensure quality and to increase global interoperability for better exchange and re-use of data and digital content.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |

Europeana Libraries Project Will Add 5 Million Digital Objects to Europeana

Europeana has launched the Europeana Libraries Project.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Work begins this week to add over 5 million digital objects, ranging from Spanish civil war photographs and handwritten letters from philosopher Immanuel Kant, to Europeana from 19 of Europe's leading research and university libraries.

The project is called Europeana Libraries and it will put many of these treasures online for the first time. It will also add extensive collections from Google Books, theses, dissertations and open-access journal articles to the 15 million items amassed in Europeana to date. Providers include some of Europe's most prestigious universities and research institutes, including the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library, Trinity College Dublin and Lund University.

The assembled objects span centuries of European history. Manuscripts from Serbia date back as far as 1206 and relate to the Ottoman Empire's European territories. Written in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and Persian, they are being digitised by the University Library of Belgrade. There will also be significant film additions. Footage of talks from 10 Nobel prize winners will be contributed by the University of Vienna and the Wellcome Trust Library in London will add 900 clips from medical science films produced over the past 100 years.

Europeana Libraries is notable not only for the content it will make available online but also because this project brings together national, research and university libraries under one umbrella, to make their materials available via Europeana.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |

Prototype WorldCat Local User interface for HathiTrust Digital Library

OCLC and the HathiTrust have created a prototype WorldCat Local user interface for HathiTrust Digital Library.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The WorldCat Local prototype (http://hathitrust.worldcat.org) for the HathiTrust Digital Library was designed and implemented by both organizations in close cooperation as a means to further develop a shared digital library infrastructure. The WorldCat Local interface for the HathiTrust Digital Library is based on the WorldCat database, and will run along with the current HathiTrust catalog during the prototype testing period.

As a digital repository for the nation's great research libraries, the HathiTrust Digital Library brings together the massive digitized collections of partner institutions. HathiTrust offers libraries a means to archive and provide access to their digital content, whether scanned volumes, special collections, or born-digital materials. The representation of these resources in digital form offers expanded opportunities for innovative use in research, teaching and learning.

OCLC and HathiTrust have been working together to increase online visibility and accessibility of the digital collections by creating WorldCat records describing the content and linking to the collections via WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local. The creation of the unique public interface through WorldCat Local is the next step to offer enhanced access to this vital collection.

"HathiTrust benefits greatly from this partnership in that the collaborative development has enabled the creation of a new means of discovering HathiTrust holdings while simultaneously integrating these holdings into the larger world of library holdings made discoverable by OCLC," said John Wilkin, Executive Director of the HathiTrust.

HathiTrust Digital Library records are discoverable through the separate WorldCat Local interface, as well as through WorldCat.org.

"OCLC and the HathiTrust have been working together closely in this shared development project to facilitate access to these valuable digital materials," said Chip Nilges, OCLC Vice President, Business Development. "This collaboration leverages OCLC's extensive work in the area of resource discovery with the HathiTrust's considerable expertise and infrastructure with respect to the preservation of scholarly resources."

| Digital Scholarship |

Digital Libraries: Europeana Strategic Plan 2011-2015

The Europeana project has released the Europeana Strategic Plan 2011-2015.

Here's an excerpt:

Launched as a proof of concept in 2008, with 2 million objects from 27 EU countries, Europeana spent 2009 and 2010 creating an operational service and ingesting a critical mass of data from some 1500 providers across Europe. Together with content partners and aided by Europe’s leading research universities, we now have a strong and vibrant network of museums, archives and libraries.

We are achieving our objective as an aggregator, and aim to give access to all of Europe’s digitised cultural heritage by 2025. However, to remain successful in the future we need now to move from a centralised role to a more distributed model. Europeana will take its place in a wider European information space, collaborating with other aggregators of content. From the users’ perspective, Europeana’s content will be readily accessible in the places they frequent online—social networks, educational sites and cultural spaces. Our ambition is to provide new forms of access to culture, to inspire creativity and stimulate social and economic growth. To achieve this, Europeana and its stakeholders grapple with major challenges. Primary among these are the intellectual property barriers to digitisation. Europeana will become outmoded if it is not renewed through access to 20th and 21st century material. To ensure such access, more concerted efforts are needed at a European level to deal with orphan works and rights harmonisation. Secondly, it is vital that the digitisation of Europe’s cultural and intellectual record is accelerated. Thirdly, long-term funding needs to be secured for both Europeana and the ecosystem of content providers and aggregators that supplies its lifeblood.

In this strategic plan we outline our approach to these challenges and to creating value for the stakeholders and users. Over the next five years, Europeana will focus on four strategic tracks:

  • aggregate content to build the open trusted source of European heritage
  • facilitate knowledge transfer, innovation and advocacy in the cultural heritage sector
  • distribute their heritage to users wherever they are, whenever they want it
  • engage users in new ways of participating in their cultural heritage

| Digital Scholarship |

The New Renaissance

The European Commission's Comité des Sages has released The New Renaissance.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The report, called "The New Renaissance," key conclusions and recommendations are:

  • The Europeana portal should become the central reference point for Europe's online cultural heritage. Member States must ensure that all material digitised with public funding is available on the site, and bring all their public domain masterpieces into Europeana by 2016. Cultural
  • Works that are covered by copyright, but are no longer distributed commercially, need to be brought online. It is primarily the role of rights-holders to digitise these works and exploit them. But, if rights holders do not do so, cultural institutions must have a window of opportunity to digitise material and make it available to the public, for which right holders should be remunerated.
  • EU rules for orphan works (whose rights holders cannot be identified) need to be adopted as soon as possible. The Report defines eight fundamental conditions for any solution.
  • Member States need to considerably increase their funding for digitisation in order to generate jobs and growth in the future. The funds needed to build 100 km of roads would pay for the digitisation of 16% of all available books in EU libraries, or the digitisation of every piece of audio content in EU Member States' cultural institutions.
  • Public-private partnerships for digitisation must be encouraged. They must be transparent, non-exclusive and equitable for all partners, and must result in cross-border access to the digitised material for all. Preferential use of the digitised material granted to the private partner should not exceed seven years.
  • To guarantee the preservation of collections in their digital format, a second copy of this cultural material should be archived at Europeana. In addition, a system should be developed so that any cultural material that currently needs to be deposited in several countries would only be deposited once.

| Digital Scholarship |

Presentations from the 2010 Digital Library Federation Fall Forum

Presentations from the 2010 Digital Library Federation Fall Forum are now available.

Here's the major presentations:

| Digital Scholarship |

JISC e-Content Programme Grants Announced

The JISC has announced the availability of up to £840,000 in 2011 e-Content Programme grant funds.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Funding of up to £840,000 is available within two strands:

Strand A–Enriching via Collaboration
Using collaboration to cluster, repackage and re-present existing digital content.
Total funding available £400,000. Up to 5 projects will be funded. Maximum funding for any one project is £100,000

Strand B–Developing Community Content
To develop new content and communities for educational and social purposes.
Total funding available £440,000. Up to 6 projects will be funded. Maximum funding for any one project is £100,000,

The deadline for receipt of proposals in response to this call is 12:00 noon UK time on Friday 10 December 2010. Projects should start by 1 March 2011 and may run for up to 7 months. All projects must be complete by 30 September 2011.

Read more about it at "Grant Funding 11/10: JISC e-Content Programme."

Department Head, Digital, Access, and Technology Services at Western Carolina University

The Western Carolina University's Hunter Library is recruiting a Department Head, Digital, Access, and Technology Services.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Western Carolina University's Hunter Library seeks an enthusiastic and highly qualified librarian to develop and lead its new Digital, Access, and Technology Services department. The Department of Digital, Access, and Technology Services is comprised of Access Services (circulation, curriculum materials center, and interlibrary loan) with a staff of 13, Systems, with a staff of 3, and a current grant-supported digital projects staff of 3. This new department will have responsibility for leading the design, development, and ongoing implementation of library digital, access, and technology service operations. As part of the library-wide learning mission, the department will facilitate the discovery, delivery, and use of intellectual content. Specific program responsibilities include: managing access services, library technology infrastructure and systems (hardware and software), digital library development (e.g., Craft Revival Project), digital repository services, library web design and architecture, digital media technology, technology services related to a notion of library as information/learning commons; and facilitating digital scholarship and publishing as it may relate to university-produced research.

Wellcome Trust Approves £3.9 Million Budget for Creation of Wellcome Digital Library

The Wellcome Trust has approved a £3.9 million budget for the creation of the Wellcome Digital Library.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Wellcome Library today announces the launch of an ambitious digitisation project, to provide free, online access to its collections, including archives and papers from Nobel prize-winning scientists Francis Crick, Fred Sanger and Peter Medawar. . . .

The Wellcome Trust has approved a budget of £3.9 million to begin a two-year pilot project on the theme of Modern Genetics and its Foundations. Drawing on the Wellcome Library's internationally renowned collections, content will include 1400 books on genetics and heredity published between 1850 and 1990, along with important archives including the papers of Francis Crick and his original drawings of the proposed structure of DNA. . . .

In addition to content from the Wellcome Library, up to £1 million of the fund will be used to support digitisation of relevant material from partner institutions in the UK and overseas.

Users will be able to access the repository following completion of the pilot phase of digitisation, slated for completion in September 2012.

Institutions from Sub-Saharan Africa and Former Soviet Republics Join World Digital Library

New institutions from Sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Republics have joined the World Digital Library.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Under a $2 million grant awarded by Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Library of Congress has completed the first stages of a three-year effort to enable cultural institutions in sub-Saharan Africa and the countries of the former Soviet Union to join the World Digital Library (WDL), an award-winning project initiated by the Library in cooperation with the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) to provide free, multilingual access to important cultural and historical documents from all 193 UNESCO member states.

The WDL now has 85 partners from 55 countries. More than 10 million users from every nation in the world have visited the WDL – www.wdl.org – since its launch in April 2009.

In connection with the first official meeting of the WDL partners, to take place in Washington, DC on June 22-23, Carnegie Corporation of New York today will support a conference of directors and technical staff from libraries, archives, and museums in 11 countries of the former Soviet Union – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan — to identify important documents and collections from these countries that should be added to the WDL. The conference will identify the personnel and infrastructural needs these nations must fulfill to participate in national and international digital library projects. It will also seek to map out a strategy to ensure that the cultural richness of the Central Asian and Caucasus countries as well as Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus are reflected in the WDL. Representatives of Russian libraries already participating in the WDL will take part in the conference as observers.

Under the same Carnegie Corporation of New York grant, which was awarded in July 2009, the Library of Congress worked with the National Library of Uganda (NLU) to establish a Digital Conversion Center at the NLU in Kampala. This center, the first of its kind in Uganda and one of very few in sub-Saharan Africa, is enabling the national library to digitize documents relating to the history and culture of Uganda for inclusion on its own website and on the WDL. The items digitized are from the NLU and other cooperating institutions in Uganda. They include such documents as those that led to the first constitution of Uganda and several related to the movement for independence; early accounts of missions to Uganda; and the original of the 1898 treaty between Great Britain and the Kingdom of Buganda.

The Library of Congress and Carnegie Corporation of New York provided digitization equipment and software to Uganda’s NLU and helped the institution in Kampala recruit a dedicated digital conversion staff. That staff was trained by a five-person team from the Library of Congress in content selection, preservation, digitization and metadata creation. Gertrude Kayaga Mulindwa, Director of the National Library of Uganda, will address the WDL partner meeting on her institution’s experience in establishing the digital conversion center and the experience gained and lessons learned for capacity-building in other developing country libraries. Future activities planned under the grant include efforts to build capacity at libraries in South Africa so they, too can contribute collections to the WDL.