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

According to Springer CEO Derk Haank:

"Up to now, our past titles have been hidden away in our in-house library, but thanks to innovative technologies they can be made available again. We have made significant investments in this project and are convinced that the scientific community will find it useful."

The time frame is due, in part, the company says, to the fact that "Springer proactively contacts authors and copyright holders to clarify the issue of royalties for these digital editions."

Every substantial historical library that makes it online increases the ability of people around the world to gain access to the knowledge it contains. Springer is not a library, and it will cost, but at least these books will be readable whether you are in Berlin or in Pt. Barrow.

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.

Using the site, you can search for people, such as Marlene Dietrich, as well as for film titles and keywords. Doing so returns a list of related digital objects that are available in the various connected archives.

Some of this material is now available online for the first time. This includes magic lantern slide collections, early 20th century erotic films, movie posters from Denmark and a collection of early films from European directors like Rossellini, Antonioni and Comencini.

The European Film Gateway is a project of Europeana, Europe's cultural heritage platform. Europeana has brought together Europe's major cultural institutions - galleries, archives, libraries, museums - to create an Internet portal where this digital content be accessed. Thanks to Europeana's use of linked data, the markup and metadata mean that the content is easily indexed and discoverable - across institutional and national boundaries.

Photo credits: Marlene Dietrich in "Martin Roumagnac" via filmportal.de

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

The project will take several years to complete and Google is to foot the bill for digitizing them, according to the BBC.

The pamphlets are particularly intriguing. They were the pre-electronic age's equivalent of blogs: getting the word out, stirring up people, introducing radical ideas, arguing political stances and more. They give the reader a window into the time as it moved for those living there, as opposed to the more measured and mythopoeic vision of books.

In the first batch to be digitized, a pamphlet on Marie Antoinette, the 18th century queen of France who was executed in the French Revolution.

The amount accessible via this partnership is a mere drop in the library's collection, which features 14 million books, almost a million periodicals and pamphlets, 58 million patents and three million sound recordings.

Chief Executive Dame Lynne Brindley, of the British Library, told the BBC that "the scheme was an extension of the ambition of the library's predecessors in the 19th Century to provide access to knowledge to everyone," making the Internet the modern "reading room."

If you want to see the Sarajevo haggadah or a manuscript of Wilfred Owen's 'Anthem for Doomed Youth,' annotated by Siegfried Sassoon, however, you'll still have to make the trip to Euston Road.

British Library photo by Steve Cadman | other sources: ResourceBlog

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.

If there's any doubt it's an eclectic collection, here are some examples Yale gives.

"(A) small limestone stela with hieroglyphic inscription from the Peabody Museum of Natural History, a Mozart sonata in the composer's own hand from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, a 15th-century Javanese gold kris handle from the Indo-Pacific collection of Yale University Art Gallery and a watercolor by William Blake from the collection of prints and drawings in the Yale Center for British Art."

The most unique element of the offering is the lack of any licensing. From Yale:

"In a departure from established convention, no license will be required for the transmission of the images and no limitations will be imposed on their use. The result is that scholars, artists, students, and citizens the world over will be able to use these collections for study, publication, teaching and inspiration."

Presumably, that means that if someone wanted to make a t-shirt or a liquor ad from one of the images, that would be OK. How this will work with, say Tony Blair's lecture on "Infusing values into the global system" is uncertain. A small number of files are listed as allowing "restricted access" but none seem to be in the iTunes section.

Other sources: ResourceBlog

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).

The act also has a political side. "The purpose of this project is to expose the 'cost savings' of this proposed exercise as nothing more than a charade to appease the detractors to a strong BBC and to curry favour with the current government. BBC's current senior management has demonstrated a lack of leadership and a lack of courage in pushing back on these demands."

Political or not, the archivists of the Internet are thankful. Perhaps the accountants at the BBC should be too.

When you view a contact in Silentale for iPhone, you see their contact details as you would within any Address Book type application, but you also see their social profiles and a complete history of your conversations - whether that included emails, Facebook messages or Twitter posts.

You can then email, reply or forward messages to a contact directly from within the app. You can send an SMS text message or call them, too. And you can view, download and forward the attachments in the messages Silentale finds. Essentially, it's a "CRM-lite" type application for the iPhone.

Silentale: Easy, Great...When it Works

In the past, we were surprised that Silentale didn't get more media coverage - the online service it offers is fairly robust... and free, at least to start. The basic version of the online service lets you import up to 3 accounts, is updated every 3 hours and imports 4 weeks of conversation history. For $49/year, you get 6 accounts, 2 years of history and hourly updates. For $99, you get 12 accounts, unlimited import and half-hour updates.

As to why Silentale seems to be somewhat ignored, our first guess was its name - "Silentale" doesn't really roll off the tongue nor does it give you an idea of what this service offers. Its competitor, "Gist," is branded better, in our opinion. Gist does a bit more, too - it provides dashboards for viewing people and companies, for example, and it incorporates RSS feeds, Web mentions, Google image results and more. It's not "CRM-lite," by any means, but its complexity may also be more than what some people have need of. For those that just want a searchable conversation archive, there's Silentale.

However, it's now starting to become clearer as to why Silentale isn't making waves the way Gist is - the service often seems to suffer from stability issues. During testing, we encountered errors and timeouts more than a few times, both with the iPhone app and when previously testing the online service. The iPhone application wouldn't allow us to authenticate upon first launch, for example. Although today's issues and the prior ones could just be chalked up to launch day jitters (and the problems were soon corrected), it's still a concern. We don't know if the company needs to throw more servers at the problem, acquire more bandwidth or just hire better network engineers, but they can't expect busy people to rely on an app that doesn't consistently work.

No matter, we suppose: it works now and works as advertised, albeit after a lengthy "import" process (and one that required closing, then relaunching the app). But given the prior issues and time-consuming set up, we can't 100% recommend this app until the company gets things straightened out. (And we do hope it does - Silentale is incredibly useful when functional!) All that being said, the app is free, so if you want to brave it, you can download a copy for yourself here on iTunes. Just don't say we didn't warn you if you hit bugs.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/view_complete_contact_and_conversation_history_with_silentale_for_iphone.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/view_complete_contact_and_conversation_history_with_silentale_for_iphone.php Apple Wed, 21 Jul 2010 06:58:08 -0800 Sarah Perez 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.

If you've ever searched through your inbox for that email you just know you received..sometime...somewhere...and have come up dry only to find it later in your Facebook or Twitter inbox, then Silentale is an ideal solution for you.

The system is designed for those of us who consistently communicate over multiple channels and then can't remember where to find the information we need. This "information overload" problem is something many companies are trying to address whether by offering an email prioritization system, universal inbox, inbox CRM add-on or external contact management type service.

Yet no system is perfect. In fact, earlier today, Fred Wilson, venture capitalist and principal of Union Square Ventures, declared "email bankruptcy" via a post on his blog, despite his use of external contact management services like Gist and Etacts. He says that he has to perform 30 Gmail searches to find the messages from his top contacts. There are better ways to do this using just Gmail, of course, as the blog commenters pointed out, but Silentale could help him address another issue: what if the message wasn't sent as an email? Silentale can pull all the messages associated with a contact and present them in one view.

In the future, Silentale will continue to grow their search offering to allow for combination searches, the ability to save searches plus access to search history and last contacts viewed.

The Info Overload Problem

The problem with many of today's external email and contact management solutions is that they either expect you to use their inbox over the much more robust webmail or desktop-based email program you already have in place or they aggregate your messages, but don't archive them.

Silentale's closest competitor may be Gist and in many ways, it reminds us of that service. Gist retrieves contacts from your email and social networks and gives you a combined view of their activity, including related news, events, attachments and links. Silentale does much of the same.

But while Gist is more focused on being more of a business-ready social CRM tool, Silentale focuses more on being a searchable communications archive. "No one else provides your complete history of emails combined with tweets, Facebook messages etc., that you can search and access from anywhere," explains Silentale's GM, Shannon Ferguson. "We're a complement to the services you already use to communicate vs. a substitute."

Another difference between some of the competitive solutions out there and Silentale is the application ecosystem. You don't necessarily have to log in to the web service to use this system. It also functions by way of a Firefox add-on and search plugin and will soon arrive as an iPhone app, Android app and Outlook plug-in. An API for developers is also available for the creation of additional third-party applications.

Pricing and Sign Up Information

For those connecting five or fewer accounts, Silentale will remain free, although your message archive will be limited to six months. A "Pro" plan will backup 10 accounts and import 2 years of message history for $49/year and the "Pro Plus" plan supports 20 accounts and unlimited import. Enterprise plans are also available and will receive group discounts, depending on volume.

You can sign up for a free beta account here: http://silentale.com

First, my hat is off to the folks at Twitter. They deserve credit for coming up with such an innovative and visionary approach. To those who say Twitter is full of insignificant mumblings or that it's great the company can free up its own storage at the expense of the taxpayer, I say this, respectfully: Get a clue. Millions use the medium to curate the news of worldwide elections, pop culture, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and human interest stories - it should be clear that Twitter is living up to its tagline as "the pulse of the planet."

Bottom line: Archiving is the act of collecting data in raw form so that it can be manipulated in a variety of ways in the future. I believe that archiving Twitter, and certainly other moves to follow, will significantly change the way history is made available to future generations. Two huge wins come to mind:

Wide-open content: Twitter is first but others will follow. I would love to see the photos on Flickr follow this same path. How much of the last 6-plus years of the world's history is in picture form on Flickr?

Wide-open history: People all across the world, starting immediately and continuing on forever, will toil over this rich pool of data. It is safe to expect tools will emerge to mine this data and these tools will be available to more than authors and researchers.

It occurs to me that this level of detail - often the mundane interspersed with the magical, the dredges of the workday intermingled with short snippets encapsulating world events - that this information, when looked back at in some distant future, is a snapshot of the thoughts of millions - and therefore is our worlds' history.

Certainly one can argue that the users of Twitter are not a representative cross section of society, and that there are dangers in only seeing events through the eyes of any subset of culture - let alone the worldwide, tech-savvy intelligentsia. But Twitter is evolving and it will continue to represent a broader audience. If you doubt that, look where it was one year ago.

It is my hope that from this archived data future generations will move from textbook packaging of history in one monolithic form to a model where students can interrogate history as if it were standing there in the classroom taking questions. This is the fundamental tenant that is core to every archivist's heart: the belief that data has valuable and that today we can't imagine all the ways someone will want to analyze this data in the future. All we know, in our heart of hearts, is that once gone, it is gone for good.

And yes, what I am saying is that each tiny 140 character morsel is history in the making, right before our very eyes. And now we are going to hang on to it forever. Bravo!

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.

1. The Archivist: A Desktop Tool for Archiving Searches

The Archivist is a Windows desktop software application built by members of Microsoft's Mix Online team. With this program, you can create Twitter searches which will then be archived to your PC so they can be data-mined by you at a later date. Recently, the program was updated so that it can be minimized to the system tray - especially helpful for when you want to track a Twitter search over a long period of time. They also added a data visualization feature which calculates who's tweeting the most about your topic.

2. Twapper Keeper: Archive Tweets Based on Hashtags

Twapper Keeper is an online tool which archives tweets based on a given hashtag. Once you set up a query, Twapper Keeper will periodically scan Twitter for that tag and then archive the tweets it finds on its own servers. Tweets are scanned approximately every 5 minutes but that can vary based on the velocity of the incoming tweets. Once archived, you can then organize the tweets into categories of your choosing which show up on the right-hand side of the archived page.

3. Twitter Tools: Archive Tweets in WordPress

Twitter Tools is a WordPress blog plugin which integrates your blog and Twitter account. Once installed and configured, the plugin can be used to both Twitter links to your blog and to create posts which contain your recent tweets. While this is handy for the WordPress blog owner, keep in mind that post after post of "Today's Tweets" isn't all that appealing to blog readers. You may want to create a separate blog for this if you intend to use WordPress as your own personal Twitter archive.

4. Twistory: Tweets in Your Calendar

Twistory is a service which lets you add your Twitter backlog feed to your favorite calendar application. The service lets you subscribe to any user's Twitter RSS feed which can then be integrated into a calendaring application like Google Calendar, Outlook, Thunderbird, or any other application that supports the iCal format. Tweets are added immediately to the calendar upon posting and the service can even import almost all the way back to your first tweet ever.

5. SweetCron, AmpliFeeder, or Storytlr: A Lifestream of Tweets

We reviewed SweetCron back nearly a year ago when it first launched. Essentially, this self-hosted lifestreaming application lets you create your own customizable version of a FriendFeed-like service, but one that's hosted on your own server. The software is installed on a server with PHP and MySQL running on it and then must be configured with the social media sites you want to aggregate. Of course, one of the sites you can pull in is Twitter.

AmpliFeeder works the same way and includes a number of themes to choose from. This service can also generate XML files which can be used to backup all your social streams' data, too. Recently, Amplifeeder launched their hosted version of the service (get started here), but unfortunately, it relies on FriendFeed to import your lifestream. And who knows how long that will be around.

Storytlr is a third option for creating a lifestream at your own custom URL. However, it's doesn't just function as an aggregator - it also lets you post your own, unique content too. (Our review).

6. Twinbox: Tweets in Your Outlook

TwInbox is an Outlook plugin which lets you receive your friends' updates directly in your Outlook inbox. With this plugin activated, you can search, archive, and group your tweets the same way you manage your email. You can also update your Twitter status from Outlook or retrieve tweets based on keyword searches. Of course, if you're in a corporate environment, your I.T. admin may enforce mailbox size limits which means you'll have to archive your "tweets" folder more often than you'd like to keep your PST/OST to a manageable size.

7. RSS Feeds

One of the simplest ways to archive tweets is to simply grab the RSS feed for your tweet stream of choice and add it to your preferred RSS reader. If you use Google Reader, for example, the service's "infinite scrolling" feature lets you go back to the very first item ever tracked for that subscription. Plus, Reader has a search box at the top for searching for keywords or phrases in your feeds which will also help you rediscover older tweets. (Update! See our post "How to Backup and Search All Your Friends Tweets in Google Reader" for how-to instructions on using RSS as a backup method.)

8. Tweetake, TweetDumpr, Tweetscan, BackupMyTweets, TweetBackup: Twitter Backup Tools

Tweetake is a third-party service which lets you back up your Twitter account including tweets, DMs, followers, friends, and favorites. However, Tweetake is limited to backing up only the first 1000 contacts and there's no way to re-import the data into Twitter at the moment. It's mainly used as a personal archive of data which you can store for safe-keeping. TweetDumpr is a similar service but only focuses on backing up the tweets themselves from public timelines. Tweetscan also lets you download your Twitter message archive including replies to a CSV file. BackupMyTweets and TweetBackup are yet two more Twitter backup services which lets you backup your tweets daily.

9. Archive Tweets with Evernote

The popular note-taking application Evernote offers a feature which lets you send your public Twitter messages and private DMs right into Evernote where they can be searched and stored permanently. Unfortunately, in order for this service to work, you have to put "@myEN" into the body of any public tweet, making it less-than-ideal for archiving your every missive. Instead, this is a good way to archive select tweets you wouldn't want to lose.

10. Geek Tools Let You Archive in XML, PDF, HTML, TXT...or even with Python

RSS guru Dave Winer released a tool earlier this year which archives Twitter posts using the OPML Editor and optionally synchronizes with a structure on Amazon S3. Alternately, there's this simple Python script for archiving tweets. Sourceforge also hosts an app with lets you backup up tweets of different users as XML, HTML, PDF, or TXT. However, it can only perform backups of 3200 tweets at a time. Each subsequent backup will append the additional tweets to the current existing archive.

Why Use ContextMiner?

Marketers will probably be interested in how this free tool is able to track views and links, but that's not really the purpose behind ContextMiner's creation. Instead, the tool is designed more for research than anything else. For example, one of the main reasons to use ConextMiner is its ability to document the cultural phenomena of viral videos.

Often, when a video goes viral, very few people are aware of where it came from, what the story is behind it, who created it and why. As time goes by, finding the original video creator and source is even harder as the video spreads across the internet. But now, thanks to ContextMiner, the history behind a video's creation is no longer a mystery.

Take for instance, Vote Different, the mashup of Hillary Clinton with the famous Apple 1984 Super Bowl ad and one of the most popular videos on YouTube. We've probably all seen this video at one point or another, but did you ever want to know who created it and why?

With ContextMiner, that information can easily be discovered. Because of its ability to pull the inbound links to a video, we can see that the original creator of the video, a user by the name of "ParkRidge47," is the subject of one of the inbound links to the video. A blog post on TechPresident titled "Who is ParkRidge47?" gives us a great history of this particular video's creation. You could also sort through the links provided to find the very first person to link to the video, which is often the creator themselves.

ContextMiner is still under development. In the future, the developers hope to offer tools and policies for exporting the videos, blog pages, and metadata. That's probably not an empty promise - there's already an an option to "download Flash video from YouTube" on the campaign creation form, it's just disabled right now. When that feature becomes available, we think it would be fine to then call ContextMiner a YouTube archiving tool. Since "Archive" implies making a backup copy, until then we think ContextMiner should really just be considered a research tool. Still, we have to say, it's a pretty good one.