Group items tagged

You are at the Home Page of a web-based collection of ebooks designed for use in libraries. There are many thousands of ebooks in the dawsonera catalogue, produced by academic publishers around the world. Your institution may purchase a selection of these to create a tailored collection of ebooks for you to read. If ebooks have been purchased, you can find and read them by using the Reader Portal.

"A veteran of a former turning of the e-book wheel looks at the past, present, and future of reading books on things that are not books."

The article is interesting, but I truly question the claim that Amazon will sell $1 Billion dollars worth of Kindle hardware and software by 2010. What is relevant to our study is the reader comments. It's not a scientific random sample, but they are easily accessible opinions of the Kindle.

Rich presentations on ebooks and library collections. User studies, preservation, rights, future role of library, etc.

Springer's digital STM collection: "* More than 3,500 New eBooks and eReference Works Every Year * Ownership Business Model * Unlimited Simultaneous Use * Over 27,000 eBooks Available " Claims to provide full integration into catalog and usage stats

Abstract "Commercial publishing interests are presenting the future of the book in the digital world through the promotion of e-book reading appliances and software. Implicit in this is a very complex and problematic agenda that re-establishes the book as a digital cultural artifact within a context of intellectual property rights management enforced by hardware and software systems. With the convergence of different types of content into a common digital bit-stream, developments in industries such as music are establishing precedents that may define our view of digital books. At the same time we find scholars exploring the ways in which the digital medium can enhance the traditional communication functions of the printed work, moving far beyond literal translations of the pages of printed books into the digital world. This paper examines competing visions for the future of the book in the digital environment, with particular attention to questions about the social implications of controls over intellectual property, such as continuity of cultural memory."

This is just a news announcement with speculation as to the new features.

"The World Collections Programme (WCP) aims to establish two-way partnerships with institutions in Asia and Africa, and increase their access to the UK collections and expertise."

This article discusses how digitized text should be coded to enable easier searching and retrieval.

Robert Chavez, Gregory Crane, Anne Sauer, Alison Babeu, Adrian Packel and Gabriel Weaver Abstract This paper provides an overview of the collaboration between the Perseus Project and the Digital Collection and Archives (DCA) at Tufts University in moving the collections of the Perseus Project into the DCA's Fedora based repository as well as a listing of potential services necessary to support a successful institutional repository.

This article examines what it will take to make digital respositories successful in the future. The authors of this article predict that value-added services such as linking documents to related or source documents will popularize digital repositories. The authors imagine partnerships between different libraries and collections will also strengthen the future of digital repositories.

"Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research." From the Home>Software and Services page.

Quoted directly from the introductory paragraphs of the article, "This article offers some perspectives on GPLP in light of what is known about library print book collections in general, and those of the Google 5 in particular, from information in OCLC's WorldCat bibliographic database and holdings file. Questions addressed include: * Coverage: What proportion of the system-wide print book collection will GPLP potentially cover? What is the degree of holdings overlap across the print book collections of the five participating libraries? * Language: What is the distribution of languages associated with the print books held by the GPLP libraries? Which languages are predominant? * Copyright: What proportion of the GPLP libraries' print book holdings are out of copyright? * Works: How many distinct works are represented in the holdings of the GPLP libraries? How does a focus on works impact coverage and holdings overlap? * Convergence: What are the effects on coverage of using a different set of five libraries? What are the effects of adding the holdings of additional libraries to those of the GPLP libraries, and how do these effects vary by library type?"

"Libraries have warned that the rise of digital publishing may make it harder or even impossible to access items in their collections in the future."

critique of Google Books

I think this can be deleted, but tagged it just in case. It seems to me to mostly be a critique against Google's digitization project, pointing out better ways to digitize books.

"MyiLibrary™ is Ingram Digital Group's online eBook and eContent resource for academic, medical, professional and corporate libraries the world over. Our unique aggregation platform offers organizations the ability to acquire and access digital content on an individual title, publisher-specific or subject collection basis, based on their unique requirements and resources. With nearly 160,000 titles currently available, covering all major academic disciplines, and an additional 1,000 titles being added weekly, MyiLibrary has the most comprehensive online eContent resource available on the market today. We work with the world's leading commercial publishers including McGraw Hill, John Wiley, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Springer and Elsevier, as well as exclusive access to intergovernmental publications from groups such as The International Atomic Energy Agency, the International Labour Organization and the World Health Organization."

Center for the Digital Future, Annenberg School for Communication, USC Annual Internet Survey by the Center for the Digital Future Finds Shifting Trends Among Adults About the Benefits and Consequences of Children Going Online Seventh Annual Study Finds Significant Concerns About Online Predators and Children's Participation in Online Communities

BROWSING VIRTUALLY

"Organizing the OCA: Learning faceted subjects from a library of digital books. David Mimno and Andrew McCallum. Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2007, Vancouver, BC, Canada. PDF The Open Content Alliance is one of several large-scale digitization projects currently producing huge numbers of digital books. Statistical topic models are a natural choice for organizing and describing such large text corpora, but scalability becomes a problem when we are dealing with multi-billion word corpora. This paper presents a new method for topic modeling, DCM-LDA. In this model, we train an independent topic model for every book, using pages as "documents". We then gather the topics discovered, cluster them, and then fit a Dirichlet prior for each topic cluster. Finally, we retrain the individual book topic models using these new shared topics. " via Dan Cohen working on virtual shelves project, using information within texts (OCA) as organizing principle instead of LCSH; former Perseus programmer