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With eBooks having taken off in the past few years I was curious about the current status of Project Gutenberg, the original resource of online books. Starting in 1971 with the Declaration of Independence Gutenberg initially relied on manually typing in royalty free books into a text format. The project is still continuing, but the founder died last year and as of July 8th the archive is only 40,000 books, an almost miniscule number compared to the digitization efforts of Google.

Stephen Duncombe, a professor at New York University, has created a free, online version of Thomas More's Utopia that anyone can browse and annotate. The project is called Open Utopia (http://theopenutopia.org/).

The Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC) is a project that aims to bring together online resources and archival materials on historical person, to basically allow a researcher to know where all the records are to understand a person. What I found in the prototype is that it resembled a catalog of sophisticated authority records. This could be useful for someone needing quick information or seeing how a historical figure fits in context, but I question if in the end it doesn't repeat information found almost as readily in other resources such as Wikipedia.

Interesting project in Austria. They placed 70 QR codes around the city each leading to a particular ebook or mp3 that can be downloaded for free.  The blog states, "This project is in effect giving digital content a finite location, thus removing one of the key aspects that separates paper books from ebooks". 

I wonder if the posts are in places with literary or historical significance-- e.g., a QR code near the former home of a famous author, leading to excerpts or readings from his or her books. I can see a huge potential for museums here, actually. For example, at the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, a QR code can be posted to information or collections on the Dred Scott Decision. Or here in Columbia, QR codes posted in the Red Campus can pull up copies of historical documents on the 1892 fire.

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Neat!

This is an awesome tool I saw at the Evergreen conference. I used it on the Merlin git repo which was cool to see but since everything is in a flat directory structure and it's mostly Jessica (and a little bit me) committing it's not nearly as cool as some of the videos from other projects.

Really neat ideas from Harvard Libraries!

An article that covers some open access and peer reviewed projects such as the Public Library of Science (www.plos.org) and ultimately makes the conclusion that research should be free because no part of the process should cost very much, and some of the hold up is academia not considering open access journals "prestigious" enough to merit tenure. I would agree in principle, especially if commercial publishers are removed from the equation. However, a lot of applied science and research relies on funding that may involve copyrighted or trademarked material, so some research will always be restricted.

A video about the EDUCE project to scan and read the scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. Herculaneum was the second and lesser known city that was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. The scrolls were in what is probably the only library from antiquity to survive "intact," but the volcanic ash carbonized the scrolls so they are essentially charcoal. Some have been "read" by unwrapping the scroll in segments and scanning in ultraviolet light detect the ink, this is the first time the scanning has been done non-invasively to read the scroll without destroying it.

"What words and images do we use internally to articulate why our library exists? What moods, feelings, and energy do we want to project outward?"

Very interesting article!

There is quite a bit of alarming data in what the project has gathered, and one of those pieces of information is that more than 148,000 of the sites surveyed are vulnerable to the BEAST attack, which was developed by researchers Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong and disclosed last year. Their attack uses what's known as a chosen-plaintext attack against the AES implementation in the TLS 1.0 protocol and enables them to use a custom tool they wrote to steal and decrypt supposedly secure HTTPS cookies. The attacker can then hijack the victim's secure SSL session with a site such as an e-commerce site or online banking site.

"A new report from the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project finds that 12% of readers of ebooks borrowed an ebook from their libraries in the past year, and a majority of respondents (62%) don't know if their local library provides ebooks. "

"Starting this fall, the 220-member library cooperative Califa Library Group will begin rolling out a $325,000 project with the goal of buying from the smaller publishing companies thousands of e-books that the libraries will own forever."

I wonder if any MOBIUS members will be interested in participating in this pilot project.

The Project Gutenberg Text Encoding Initiative is intended to create a machine readable (not intended for human eyes) file that encodes markup and formatting data. When processed by a conversion script it outputs usable formats including PDF and UTF-8, keeping the same formatting across all. While an interesting idea I've heard little about it, and there doesn't seem to be a converted effort to make PGTEI a standard for eBooks.

This is both bad and good news. Good in that rather than stretching out for years or decades with multiple lawsuits and decisions, that instead there will ultimately be a definite answer about Google's book scanning project. It's bad that as a class action some serious money and power will come into play, and the stakes will be that much higher.

This project is moving along...

This was another session which showed that with community spaces if you build it they will come. I interviewed at this library in 1996 right after graduate school and it was and still is a large warehouse type building in 70's style. One of the substantial changes to Chattanooga since then is it is known as the "Gig City" for large deployment of gigabit Internet which has brought may Internet developers to the area. The development of the attic into a community space stressed the importance of community outreach and feedback as a sort of ecosystem to keep a project viable.

An interesting project that intends to combine Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine (STEM) with Art to make STEAM and thus make these programs accessible to more students. While it has practical use at the pre-school and elementary level I can't see much use it would be for higher levels of education.