The World As Library

And now here is the World Digital Library

2009-04-21T13:23:00.002-04:00

Just opened and online now:
"The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world."

The principal objectives of the WDL are to:

Promote international and intercultural understanding;
Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.

Browse by place, time (yes, very cool!), topic, type of item, or by institution.

Curator's videos introduce a number of the collections -- a nice feature.

http://www.wdl.org/

Deep River Blues

2009-03-24T15:03:00.001-04:00

Messing with a video camera in my music room at home. Doc Watson owns this song, but I always enjoy playing it.

Digital Libraries as Services Mash-ups: Conceptualizing Libraries within a Service-Oriented Architecture

2009-03-24T11:51:00.002-04:00

Along with collections, services have a significant role in defining libraries. We can conceptualize services as transactions between a library entity and its users. We can also conceptualize services as transactions between a library entity and other library or information service entities; also as transactions between subsystems of a library entity. In a networked environment populated by humans and by computers, we can envision services as interchanges among a variety of nodes of either human or computer types.

We can envision a transformation of our resources and tools by reconceptualizing them into data, services, and workflow. We can create methods to expose this data by developing interfaces that provide services between resources and/or agents on the network. Popular examples of this concept are appearing as mash-ups around the Internet. They are constructed around the use of Web services and provide relatively simple illustrations of a more comprehensive approach known as service-oriented architecture (SOA).

This article probes the feasibility of viewing libraries and their services as components that may be inter-connected to build dynamic and flexible systems. The investigation begins by establishing some similarities among approaches that model and implement systems that deal with things and their relationships. This will provide the context for decomposing large-scale operations into smaller, discrete units and will demonstrate how these units can interact. Subsequent discussion will review some intellectual work that models libraries as collections of services; will review some example cases where this concept is implemented; and will provide some introduction to Web services, SOA, and related enabling technologies.

Read the full article...

Will Fair Use now get a Fair Hearing?

2007-08-31T07:18:00.000-04:00

The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) says that professional sports leagues, Hollywood, and book publishers are misrepresenting copyright law when they use over-restrictive language about their copyrights. CCIA has filed a complaint with the FTC. Google, Microsoft, and other heavyweights are behind this, in part, because they often get sued over these issues. I like the alternative language they're offering!

Link to story at arstechnica.com

RSS in Plain English

2007-08-03T11:52:00.000-04:00

Lee Lefevre's cool intro and how-to make RSS and feeds work for you.

A Self-Publishing Tool Kit

2007-07-24T09:01:00.000-04:00

Over on the Read/Write Web blog, Josh Catone has written a piece on tools that a writer might use to get the work done and get it in print and in distribution. His tongue is partly in his cheek, but he manages to articulate some useful hints and tools. Note especially, Lulu, for on-demand printing and distribution.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/self_publishing_tool_kit.php

David Weinberger says, "Everything is Miscellaneous"

2007-07-24T08:32:00.000-04:00

YouTube on your own tube

2007-07-20T10:12:00.000-04:00

YouTube now offers you the ability to design your own custom player/s that you load up with video from YouTube and can embed on your Website or blog.

Here are the simple instructions:
"Name and design your player, then fill it with videos from your videos or playlists. Once you've generated the embed code and saved the player, you can copy and paste the code to your website or blog."

http://www.youtube.com/custom_player

"One interface, not two." The coming of the Web OS

2007-07-20T09:46:00.001-04:00

"One interface, not two." So says Blake Ross, co-founder of the Mozilla Firefox project, as he speaks of "a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do." He's been working on a project called Parakey that will make it really easy to store stuff and share it around the world.

How far off? Don't know, but Parakey has just been purchased by... Facebook.

IEEE Spectrum article on Parakey

Wired story on Parakey acquisition by Facebook

Vinyl-ly! I've been waiting for something like this!

2007-07-19T10:55:00.000-04:00

Numark's TTUSB is a turntable with a USB connection that provides an easy way to reformat 331/3 and 45 RPM recordings into digital files on a PC or Mac. Besides the USB, other output options include stereo RCA and stereo mini.

Hey, I'm old enough to know what this is and why I need one.

http://www.numark.com/ttusb

The Open Library is taking shape

2007-07-19T10:23:00.002-04:00

A demo site is up that explains the project goals, the technology architecture, the developing metadata schema, and more.

From the site:
"It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on."
...
"We hooked it up to the Internet Archive's book scanning project, so that you can read the full text of all the out-of-copyright books they've made available. And we hope to add a print-on-demand feature, so that you can get nice paper copies of these scanned books, as well as a scan-on-demand feature, so you can fund the scanning of that out-of-copyright book you've always loved."

http://demo.openlibrary.org/

Exbiblio says they can scan six words of text and connect you...

2007-07-19T10:23:00.001-04:00

to a digital version of the same document located somewhere on the Web.

Using a small, hand-held wireless device (about the size of a thumb drive) you can scan a small portion of a printed document and Exbiblio will use the scanned image like a fingerprint to match up with the digital version. The company says they'll have a working version out this fall.

http://www.exbiblio.com/

Catch up on your reading: DailyLit helps readers' digestion by serving up books in small portions

2007-07-19T10:20:00.000-04:00

Sign up to read classics and books that are out of copyright. (More modern titles may be on the way.) They'll be delivered to you daily via email or RSS.

http://www.dailylit.com/index