As with many online collection projects, the idea is marvelous. The actual collection you can create, however, is currently limited. For example, searching for books that would fit the collection I created (Godey's Lady's Book Contributors) proved to be disappointing in the paucity of its results. However, that can only improve as more books are digitized and added to their collection.

Conclusion? Definitely one to keep an eye on, both for its content, its method and its overall "value added" sensibilities.

MBooks Public Collection:
https://sdr.lib.umich.edu/cgi/mb?a=listcs;colltype=pub

"O'Reilly is about to offer a bunch of its bestsellers for sale on the Amazon Kindle. . . Early next month, the company will also start selling electronic versions of certain books with no copy protection. For a single price (cheaper than the printed-book price), the package will include the book in three formats: PDF, Mobipub (compatible with the Amazon Kindle), and Epub (soon to be compatible with the Sony Reader)."

As an experiment, Pogue will be offering his popular "Windows Vista: The Missing Manual" on the buy-the-electronic-versions program.

Here are a few bits--the rest is available at: http://sclater.com/blog/?p=95

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Michael L Chasen, Blackboard’s CEO, described the three principles of Project NG (Next Generation) which is bringing WebCT and Blackboard together into one platform: Student achievement, Openness and Web 2.0. So what does that actually mean?

There is an excellent instructor dashboard. . . It informs tutors about what’s new, what needs attention, which students have handed in work late, which haven’t logged in for a week etc.

The authoring facilities are also getting increasingly sophisticated. A course management block allows you to drag and drop blocks of content around the page, building new items and adding assessments, communication tools etc from drop-down menus. One of these menus is for mashups allowing you to integrate Google Earth maps, Flickr, YouTube and other resources easily into courses.

“Communities” can be set up by students to create their own social learning spaces if the institution wants to make this possible.

The student profile has been redesigned and looks good – something you could imagine would give a greater sense of ownership to the student.
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We'll see...

• Letters and Diaries


• Illustrated Newspapers and Magazines


• Photographs


• War Research Database

Wonder of wonders, there is even a reference to Alice B. Haven in a letter from Jeannette Hulme Platt to James Canfield, July 29, 1867 where she says "Last week I was charmed with "Memoir of Cousin Alice." She was a woman above women;..." Hurrah!

Enjoy it soon.

"Instead of being limited to keywords, Powerset allows you to enter keywords, phrases, or questions. Instead of just showing you a list of blue links, Powerset gives you more accurate search results, often answering questions directly, and aggregates information from across multiple articles. Finally, instead of leaving you at the search page, Powerset's technology follows you into enhanced Wikipedia articles, giving you a better way to digest and navigate content quickly. This post serves as a jumping-off point for all of the key information about the launch."

So, if you often search Wikipedia. or if you often use Google to search but end up at Wikipedia, you might want to try Powerset instead. Rumors are that Google will be trying to catch up soon...

http://www.powerset.com/

Academic Computing here at UVM will soon be experimenting with a similar lending program...stay tuned for more news on that.

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

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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.

Google Docs

"In addition to filling out an application, participants will be required to provide a URL for their project and/or make a two minute video of their proposal, upload it to YouTube and tag the YouTube video with "HASTAC2008."

Gross oversimplification:
NEA: reading is in decline because people are buying/reading fewer books, or in the idealized image: people, especially younger people, are not curling up with an absorbing book. One of the major problems is that they are going online.
Response: there are and have been many forms of reading. "Going online" can mean anything, including reading absorbingly or immersively. The report is flawed because it 1) does not differentiate between the media (book/screen) and 2) does not define reading as anything more than a single experience: linear absorption reading versus scanning, searching, skimming, rereading, etc.

Update: good discussion on the topic at if:book (A Project for the Institute of the Future of the Book).

1) The Right to Read, by Richard Stallman
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
"For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college—when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do."

2) The Future of Reading: A play in Six Acts
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/11/19/the-future-of-reading

3) Unboxing Amazon's Kindle, By Peter Glaskowsky
http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9822443-2.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Webware

4) Google on "nea reading 2007" for links to and about the NEA study on reading rates. For example, a NY Times article by Motoko Rich, Nov. 19, 2007, starts:
"...Americans — particularly young Americans — appear to be reading less for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining. At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines like math and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited, and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills."

As people are introducing themselves, I thought I'd capture some of the URLs being posted...they may provide some interesting leads.

(In no particular order)

1) http://www.exegenix.com - a company that converts legacy (proprietary) content to XML

2) Three projects from Concordia Theological Seminary
http://www.projectwittenberg.org/ - electronic Luther and Lutheriana
http://www.ctsfw.edu/library/probono.php - Walther Library: pro bono ecclesiae: Theological Resources, and
http://replica.palni.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=%2Fcopcampus - Saarinem's Village: Images of the Concordia Campus (hosted by PALNI - Private Academic Library Network of Indiana's ContentDM server)

3) http://www.sclqld.org.au/schp/digitisation.php - Supreme Court of Queensland Library digitization project (digitizing letterpress books from 1874)

4) http://www.ecmi.de/emap - European Centre for Minority Issues Ethnopolitical Map

5) http://www.datastandards.co.uk/index.htm - a company that provides document conversion, typesetting and print on demand services.

6) http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/index.php?page_id=Home - University of Virginia Press ROTUNDA "publication of original digital scholarship along with newly digitized critical and documentary editions in the humanities and social sciences. " David Sewell's group which, of course, uses the TEI!

7) http://spenserarchive.org/ - The Spencer Archive

So, so far, only one self-identified TEI using site, and several commercial service sites. No doubt there willbe more to come...