Found History

During a discussion of e-book readers on a recent episode of Digital Campus, I made a comparison between Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPod which I think more or less holds up. Just as Apple revolutionized a fragmented, immature digital music player market in the early 2000s with an elegant, intuitive new device (the iPod) and [...]

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DSpace Reaches 700 Instances Worldwide — The DuraSpace blog is reporting that there are now more than 700 instances of DSpace. DuraSpace was founded earlier this year to support DSpace and Fedora, two leading open source digital repository packages. Brewster Kahle Calls on Google to Abandon Private Settlement, Support Orphan Works Legislation — The Internet [...]

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The Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia is working on a new plugin for Omeka that would connect an Omeka frontend to a Fedora repository backend. An early version of the code can be downloaded from the Omeka SVN repository. Any questions or comments on the plugin should be directed to the Omeka Dev [...]

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Setback for GPO Digitization Program — Via DigitalKoans, the United States Government Printing Office (GPO) has announced on its listserv that it has been unable to make an award for its 2008 RFP to digitize “all retrospective Federal publications back to the earliest days of the Federal Government.” The announcement does not explain why the [...]

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Deadline Set for Google Books Settlement — Judge Chin has set a deadline of November 9, 2009 for a revised settlement agreement between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. The New York Times has the Authors Guild saying, “the core agreement is going to stay the same.” Denver for WebWise [...]

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This one made the rounds of Twitter earlier today thanks to Jo Guldi. This month Wired Magazine tells a cautionary tale for those following the progress of Google Books. Entitled “Google’s Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles,” the article reminds readers of Google’s 2001 acquisition of a Usenet archive of more than 700 million articles [...]

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Gmail Helps Spam Be More Annoying? — Yesterday Google began rolling out a new “feature” called “enhanced email” to some Gmail users. As reported by ReadWriteWeb, the “enhancement” is the ability for messages to update themselves in real time, for example by pulling a company’s latest deals into a marketing email sitting in your inbox. [...]

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The Future of Libraries — Broadcasting from my very own neighborhood, local Washington DC NPR personality, Kojo Nmandi, hosted a special program on “The Future of Libraries” last week. Full .mp3 audio of the show is available via the Kojo Nmandi Show Podcast. Open Source Media Production Pipeline — This month in the Open Source [...]

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For the past few years, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has undertaken a series of public-private digitization partnerships, especially with a company called Footnote.com. These partnerships provide NARA with free digitization services, and visitors to NARA’s reading rooms with access to the products, but allow Footnote.com and NARA’s other private partners to charge [...]

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Originally published in the journal Archival Science, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries has just released under open access terms a report of the Institution’s experience with Flickr Commons. Written by Martin Kalfatovic, Effie Kapsalis, Katherine Spiess, Anne Van Camp, and Mike Edson, the report recounts what the authors deem a mostly successful experiment with Web 2.0, [...]

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