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Frank Menchaca, executive vice president of publishing for Gale Cengage Learning, discusses digitization projects and the company’s new college courses for public libraries as part of a series of Q&As leading up to “The Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond,” LJ’s third annual ebook summit on Wednesday, October 17.
This month, the New York Public Library (NYPL) is celebrating the centennial of Cage’s birthday with a live event on September 27 and the publication of John Cage’s Prepared Piano, a new edition of their Point iBook periodical series. The evening event also offered NYPL an opportunity to highlight the ongoing development of John Cage Unbound: A Living Archive, a new website that showcases the John Cage manuscript collection housed at NYPL’s Library for the Performing Arts, as well as videos in which professional musicians, students, and others explain how they prepare and perform works by Cage.
Recently I came across some open source software for serving really large images on the web, and as the proprietor of a photography web site, I was immediately intrigued. What if, I thought, I could put up the full versions of my photos (multi-megapixel) for viewing and discovery, but not for download? This is because […]
The home base for the New York Public Library (NYPL) Labs is a strange mix of old and new. A bunch of modern cubicles hover incongruously amid the stately marble walls of what used to be a courtyard in the venerable Schwarzman Building, before the need for more space convinced the library to press it into service. It’s not a bad metaphor for what the labs do: turn the library’s substantial historical holdings into something new, useful, and a little bit quirky.
The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will allow Google to appeal the class action status of the seven-year old Google Inc. v. Authors Guild case, the court announced in an order this morning. Decertifying the case would force Author’s Guild members who dispute the digitization of their works to sue Google individually. Google has argued that many authors have benefited economically from its Google Books project, and whether a scan violated copyright or was protected under fair use doctrine should be determined on a case-by-case basis.
Arguing that authors have suffered no economic harm from the scanning of more than 15 million books, Google on Friday filed a motion seeking the dismissal of the long-running Authors Guild v. Google case. The motion states that the digitized books, and the Google Books service that they enable, are “not a substitute for the [physical] books themselves—readers still must buy a book from a store or borrow it from a library to read it. Rather, Google Books is an important advance on the card-catalogue method of finding books,” that allows full-text searching.
The long-awaited Grateful Dead Archive is now live at http://www.gdao.org/. Built on top of the open source content management system Omeka, one of the best features of the site is the ability for anyone to contribute their own Grateful Dead memorabilia or stories. I probably shouldn’t say this, but the site is probably best experienced as […]
The new EPUB 3 distribution and interchange format standard for digital publications will include a wealth of features that can be used to enhance ebook accessibility. But, publishers need to begin incorporating those features into production workflows during the digital publication process, rather than expecting other organizations to retrofit accessibility features, Matt Garrish, chief editor of the EPUB 3 specification and author of Accessible EPUB 3, said during the “Ebooks for Everyone: LIA Project, Accessible Publishing Guidelines, EpubCheck and More” session at BookExpo America held this week in New York City.
The New York Public Library (NYPL) has launched Frankenstein: The Afterlife of Shelley’s Circle, the second edition of its free “Biblion: The Boundless Library” app for iPads. The app was developed in an effort to give more people access to the library’s research collections, and encourage them to explore those collections in unique ways. The first edition, released in May 2011 focused on NYPL’s extensive collection of materials from the 1939-40 World’s Fair, and won Apple’s Education App of the Year award.
The collections from Oregon State University and the Delaware Public Archives go beyond agriculture.
