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April 24, 2008
NCSU Library Loans Kindles
Next week the Learning Commons at the North Carolina State University Library will begin lending Kindle ebook readers. Students will tell reference librarians which books they would like to have downloaded onto the devices, which they will check out for one week. Once a book has been downloaded on to the device it will be left on it, so the collection of books on the devices will grow according to popular demand.The collection will initially focus on popular reading materials, and the library has also subscribed to major newspapers, available wirelessly on the Kindles.
Academic Computing here at UVM will soon be experimenting with a similar lending program...stay tuned for more news on that.
Posted by hag at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)
April 15, 2008
Harvard Tail Wags Dog
Students at Harvard have decided not to wait for an 'official' open repository for undergraduate theses. A group of students calling themselves the Harvard College Free Culture have set up a repository for undergraduate honors and senior theses. The site let's student upload their own work, and search or browse the collection.
Welcome to the Harvard College Thesis Repository - Harvard College Thesis Repository
Tech info: This site is running EPrints 3.0 (Beetroot) [Born on 2007-01-23].EPrints is free software developed at the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, England.
Posted by hag at 1:00 PM | Comments (0)
April 14, 2008
LOC Flickr Pilot
Library of Congress is experimenting with Flickr Collections. There are currently 2 collections: 1910s in the News and 1930-40s in Color. Over 3,000 photos to date. Check it out at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/
Posted by hag at 3:44 PM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2008
Large Digital Library Collection
The Internet Archive has been building a library since 1996. Many know it as the home of the "wayback machine" a tool that lets you search for older versions of web pages, including those that may no longer exist. For example, if you search on http;//www.uvm.edu you can find samples of UVM's home page going back to 1996.
More recently I revisited the site to look at their text collections. These have grown extensively. They now include text from American Libraries, Canadian Libraries, the Gutenberg Collection, the Biodiversity Library, and a Children's Library, along with many others, some 383,875 texts and growing.
The texts themselves come in a variety of formats, all searchable. You can view them as PDFs, HTML, plain TXT, and even as flip books, i.e. versions that show you an image of the books pages. When you click it "turns" the page so you can proceed as you would in a paper-based book. The site also includes video and audio collections, as well as educational materials.
Check it out the text collections at:
http://www.archive.org/details/texts
Posted by hag at 2:59 PM | Comments (0)
April 2, 2008
Google Books Disappoints
Google had promised to release its Viewability API to give access to Google Books. The buzz around digital humanists was that this wold be a wonderful tool allowing access to the content of the books. Think of the fun! Instead, here's the scoop from their site. Looks like Google is defining "universally accessible and useful" in terms of books as objects, not books as textual content. How boring, how sad, what a lost opportunity.
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http://code.google.com/apis/books/
What are the Google Book Search APIs?
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. To help make the information we've organized in Google Book Search more useful, we provide several different ways to learn about Google's books and link to them.
Viewability API - Dynamic Links
The Google Book Search Book Viewability API enables developers to:
* Link to Books in Google Book Search using ISBNs, LCCNs, and OCLC numbers
* Know whether Google Book Search has a specific title and what the viewability of that title is
* Generate links to a thumbnail of the cover of a book
* Generate links to an informational page about a book
* Generate links to a preview of a book
Static Links to Google Book Search
Google Book Search provides a standard linking format that allows developers to link to books using ISBNs, LCCNs, and OCLC numbers.
Posted by hag at 6:59 PM | Comments (0)