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The eMOP project led by Texas A&M will use page images from ProQuest’s Early English Books Online and Early European Books, Gale Cengage’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and other sources to create a database of early typefaces used in English books and documents, and then train optical character recognition (OCR) software to read these documents.
Two School Library Journal articles took gold and silver prizes at the 2012 annual Eddie Awards, sponsored by FOLIO: magazine and recognizing editorial excellence in magazines and websites.
The Global Education Conference, held around the clock November 12–16, offered a wide range of sessions by and for educators. In particular, “Appls Galore” emphasized a variety of ways to use this technology with young students.
Mary Lee Schneider becomes president and chief executive officer of Follett Corporation. Schneider’s appointment has important implications for the elementary and high schools that rely on Follett for their print and digital learning materials.
Web applications that make it easy to create records in appealing formats for sharing, selected by Richard Byrne, School Library Journal’s Cool Tools columnist.
From Media Decoder (NY Times): The Penguin Group plans to announce on Monday that it is expanding its e-book lending program to libraries in Los Angeles and Cleveland and surrounding areas though a new distribution partner. In a pilot program that will begin this year, Penguin has worked with Baker & Taylor, a distributor of […]
Recently a Google engineer unveiled a do-it-yourself (DIY) robotic book scanner. As reported by The Verge, Dany Qumsiyeh and a team of colleagues constructed it out of sheet metal, scanner parts, and an ordinary vacuum cleaner to build a page-turning scanner that only requires human intervention to put a book on the device. Scans are automatically […]
Golden Gate Capital, a $12 billion San Francisco-based private equity firm with a significant software and technology portfolio, has entered into an agreement to acquire library automation solutions provider Ex Libris Group from current owner Leeds Equity Partners, the companies announced this morning. The deal is expected to be completed in December. Under new ownership, Ex Libris will remain an independent business based in Jerusalem and run by the current management team, the company explained in the announcement. Additional terms of the sale were not disclosed.
Mobile app shop Boopsie has announced the Boopsie Star Program, which will help library vendors increase the visibility of their own mobile apps by making them available through library-branded Boopsie mobile portals. Boopsie apps already offer one-click access to vendors including Overdrive, Mango Languages, Tutor.com, Credo Reference, EBSCO, Gale/Cengage Learning, Recorded Books, and Library H3lp.
A report issued by The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop concluded that though children under 13 are involved in social media, there isn’t enough data on their social networking habits.
