I was quite pleased to be asked to write a technical report for JISC. The paper provides background on the state of ebook publishing today, and concludes with a set of recommended projects that aim to improve digital scholarly publishing in the UK. The report is available online as Digital Monograph Technical Landscape: Exemplars [...]
For skilled cataloging, work that takes intelligence and the best education attainable, the demand is always above the supply. In the library of the future, the free library, the greatest missionary force of the age, there is going to be a great opening for women’s work, too.
I don’t mean by the ideal free library [...]
There’s a great deal of valuable information in this recently-released white paper by The American Council of Learned Societies: ACLS Humanities E-Book XML Conversion Experiment: Report on Workflow, Costs, and User Preferences. Although the study was based on scholarly books, their findings would apply to many other digitization projects.
The Humanities E-Book (HEB) project took [...]
I spent Tuesday in the company of some very interesting developers and librarians as part of necode4lib, the regional chapter of code4lib.
The event was hosted by the Boston Public Library. We were given a fascinating tour of the Open Library scanning facility: ten “scribe” workstations, manned by full-time staffers. I didn’t have my [...]
My attention was caught by this quote from Clay Shirky on the excellent ReadWriteWeb blog:
Back in 1974, when the Internet was a fraction of what it is now, the acorn to an oak, there were really only two applications,” said Shirky, “Telnet, and FTP.”
Surely he’s wrong, I thought. Those protocols aren’t that old.
But I was [...]
I was pleased to be able to assist with the Corpus Toneelkritiek Interbellum project, which allows reading, browsing and searching of early 20th-century Dutch theater reviews. I can’t read Dutch, but Google’s automated translation tells me that the review of Hamlet mentions a “long modern clown,” which sounds disturbing enough that I’ll leave the [...]
I had a great time meeting people and attending talks at this year’s ALA conference in Anaheim. Although I’ve so far focused on software development for publishers, there’s a lot of need for innovation in library software as well, and is something I’m interested in exploring.
User-generated content
Tim Spalding from LibraryThing convincingly demonstrated that ordinary [...]