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German science, technology and medical publisher Springer Science+Business Media, will digitize its entire catalog of books back to 1840 by the end of the coming year, including works by Einstein, Niels Bohr and Sir John Eccles and Rudolf Diesel. (Yes, that Rudolf Diesel.)

The books, 70% of which are in English and nearly 30% in German, will total 65,000 titles when the project is finished.

Although we often invoke "Hollywood" when we talk about the movie industry, many of the world's greatest films and much of the world's film history comes from outside that Los Angeles district. A nod here goes to the Lumière Brothers, of course, two of the earliest filmmakers. But rousing applause should go to the European Film Gateway, which is now online, giving free and open access to much of Europe's rich film history.

The collection includes about 400,000 digital videos, photos, film posters and text materials, a number that is expected to grow to over 600,000 items by the fall.

One of my favorite places on earth, the British Library, and the world's most popular search engine, Google, have struck a spectacular deal. The BL will allow the search and media company to scan and index 250,000 texts dating from between 1700 and 1870.

The two organizations will make the historical books, pamphlets and other periodicals available both on the library's site and on Google Books.

Yale University has one of the larger collections of art, objects and documents of any organization in the U.S. Now, digital images and audio files of the collection are free to access by anyone in the world online, according to an announcement by the university's communications office.

Yale Digital Commons has debuted with just under 260,000 images. The idea is to encompass the whole of the university's collections in time.

The BBC announced last month that it would be slashing much of its online programming due to severe budget cuts. As part of the cutbacks, it planned to axe jobs and websites. Some 172 of those websites are scheduled to not just go dormant but to actually be deleted within the coming year.

But one good online citizen - an anonymous one at that - has taken the time to spider and archive the endangered content and provide the material in a BitTorrent file (available here).

Silentale, the searchable archive of all your email and Web-based communication, is now available as a mobile app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Like the desktop version of the service, the new app provides a "360 degree view of your contacts," explains the company, including conversation history with email recipients, Facebook friends, Twitter, Google and Highrise contacts and LinkedIn connections.

Silentale, the new web service that backs up and archives your contacts and messages from all the communication platforms you use, has now launched into public beta as of this morning. The online application is part universal inbox, part social CRM tool and part contact management solution. But unlike some of its competitors, the best part about Silentale is that it archives your messages - all of your messages, including every single email, Twitter reply or direct message, Facebook message and more and then makes those searchable from one location.

I was on vacation when the news came through that Twitter was going to archive all past and future tweets with the Library of Congress. I'm a big fan of Twitter.

Did you know that your tweets have an expiration date on them? While they never really disappear from your own Twitter stream, they become unsearchable in only a matter of days. At first, Twitter held onto your tweets for around a month, but as the service grew more popular, this "date limit" has dramatically shortened. According to Twitter's search documentation, the current date limit on the search index is "around 1.5 weeks but is dynamic and subject to shrink as the number of tweets per day continues to grow."

What that means is something tweeted prior to a week and a half ago can never be retrieved via search.twitter.com. That's bad for users and it's definitely bad for data-mining. Unless Twitter corrects this issue on its own, we have to find another solution for archiving tweets ourselves. Here are 10 ways to do so.

A new project called ContextMiner has been created by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The tool lets anyone automate the collection of links to online videos and blogs along with their extensive metadata. Although they're calling ContextMiner a YouTube archiving tool, it doesn't actually download the videos off the site...yet. Instead, it extracts the embed, and the provides that to you along with other details like the number of views and what sites are linking to the video.