digitizationblog

Simon Tanner of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London is leading a team which is to digitise the Dead Sea Scrolls. Further information is available at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/phpnews/wmview.php?ArtID=2164.

This Cornell press release describes the partnership between the university, Microsoft, and Kirtas Technologies to digitize and make accessible through Microsoft's Live Book Search selected public domain materials in agriculture, American history, English literature, astronomy, food and wine, general engineering, the history of science, home economics, hospitality and travel, human sexuality, labor relations, Native American materials, ornithology, veterinary medicine, and women's studies.

This press release, dated March 2, announced that the "European Commission steps up efforts to put Europe’s memory on the Web via a 'European Digital Library'." The first public version of the Library, which will contain at least six million documents, is now available.

On the Google blog today there is an annoucement that Google will be implementing a pilot project to digitize US National Archives' video footage, to be included in Google Video.

PictureAustralia is the NLA's virtual collection of images from a number of libraries, archives, and museums in that country. NLA has partnered with Flickr (more info here) to provide the opportunity for individuals to contribute to the national collection the fun and easy way.

(Scraped from Lorcan Dempsey's weblog)

The image is of Washington Senators baseball player Herman A. "Germany" Schaefer using a camera during a visit to play the New York Highlanders in April 1911.

Google Inc. has agreed to donate $3 million toward the Library of Congress' World Digital Library initiative. Details are available in this press release and this article by James H. Billington in the Washington Post.

This article from the Nov. 9 WSJ introduces readers of that publication to the Open Content Alliance, and also provides some photos of the custom book scanners being used at the U of T and some details of their scanning operation.

Ha ha. While using the Million Book Project's page at the Internet Archive today, I noticed that the "Most Downloaded Items" sidebar supplies the following numbers:

1. Ethics Of Sex Acts: 9,177 downloads
2. Advanced English Grammar: 2,680 downloads
3. Brief History Of Mathematics: 2,355 downloads
4. Early Jazz: 2,157 downloads
5. The handbook of soap manufacture: 2,045 downloads

A book on sex is 300% more popular than Advanced English Grammar and Brief History Of Mathematics? Who'd have predicted that?

As mentioned in today's Scout Report, An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life presents over 5000 photos taken by Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Photos are arranged in fourteen categories (including People and Historical Figures, Misery, Religious Architecture, and Workers and Industry) and are accompanied by brief descriptions.