digitization - ReadWriteWeb

Springer to Digitize 65K Tech Books from 1840 to 2005

Curt Hopkins — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 15:00:00 -0800

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.

]]> The "Springer Book Archive" of historical books will be available on the company's Springerlink site, where its contemporary digital offerings currently reside, and will bring the total number of e-titles up to 100,000.

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.

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Google Funds Preservation of Apartheid History

Curt Hopkins — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:01:00 -0800

Google has awarded $1.25 million apiece to the Nelson Mandela Foundation's Memory Programme and the Desmond Tutu Peace Center. The money is earmarked for the preservation, digitization and sharing of thousands and thousands of documents tracing the transition of the Republic of South Africa from apartheid to democracy.

Mandela's organization will be preserving and digitizing the archive of a man who served as the democracy movement's most public face, a long-term prisoner on the notorious Robben Island and later the first black president of the country.

]]> Reverend Tutu's group will do the same for his archive. Tutu, formerly the Anglican Archbishop of Capetown and another prominent public voice against racism, served as the leader of post-apartheid South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Materials included in the digitization project include journals, letters, photos, video and audio recordings, documents and more. The next step will be to offer the electronic archives to the public for research and education.

Google has funded similar projects to this, such as the Yad Vashem holocaust digitization project and the Google Art Project to bring the world's art to digital viewers.

"At Google we want to help bring the world's historical heritage online -- and the Internet offers new ways to preserve and share this information, in Africa and elsewhere."

At the same time as announcing these linked grants, Google also announced a number of projects they are funding to bring more people online in Africa. These include the Tertiary Education and Research Network, the Nigeria ICT Forum and the Network Startup Resource Center.

Robben Island photos by Caroline Ödman | other sources: Discuss

EU Report Warns of "Digital Dark Age" if Digitization of Cultural Heritage Left to Private Sector

Audrey Watters — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 12:30:54 -0800

The European Union says its member states must do more to digitize Europe's cultural heritage and not simply leave that work to the private sector. To do otherwise, suggests a recently commissioned report, could steer Europe away from a digital Renaissance and "into a digital dark age."

The report by the "Comité des Sages" was delivered to the European Commission earlier this week and calls for continued development of Europeana, the portal to Europe's digital libraries, as well as for efforts to expand access to public domain material. EU member states must ensure that all material that's digitized with public funding is available online and that all public domain masterpieces are available via Europeana by 2016. Works that are still covered by copyright but are no longer distributed commercially need to be brought online as well, and if the rights holders do not do so, cultural institutions must have the opportunity to digitize the material and make it available to the public.
]]> "We are of the opinion that the public sector has the primary responsibility for making our cultural heritage accessible and preserving it for future generations," the report argues. "This responsibility for and control over Europe's heritage cannot be left to one or a few market players, although we strongly encourage the idea of bringing more private investments and companies into the digitisation arena through a fair and balanced partnership."

That's an oblique reference to Google, whose efforts to digitize the world's books have caused some concerns in Europe over copyright issues and licensing agreements. The report notes that Google has digitized about 15 million of the world's 130 million unique books and has entered into exclusivity agreements with some institutions. The report urges agreements of this sort between the private sector and public cultural institutions to be made public, with the preferential use for the digitized material to be kept to a maximum of seven years.

The report does recognize the importance of these private efforts and says that EU member states need to find a way to match private investment and build partnerships with private companies. But as the report notes, "Can Europe afford to be inactive and wait, or leave it to one or more private players to digitise our common cultural heritage? Our answer is a resounding 'no'."

Photo credits: Trinity College Library via Plants Need Water
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Codex Sinaiticus: The World's Oldest Bible Goes Online

Frederic Lardinois — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:10:28 -0800

The Codex Sinaiticus is the oldest version of the Christian Bible in book form, and, according to many scholars, one of the world's greatest written treasures. The actual leaves and fragments from the book are in the British Library in England, as well as in various archives in Germany and Russia, and the St. Catherine's Monastery of Sinai, where the text was originally discovered. Starting today, however, anybody with access to an Internet connection and a modern browser can now see a virtual facsimile of the book online.
]]> While large parts of the text are still missing (including most of the text of Genesis), this marks the first time that such a complete version of the Codex has been available to both scholars and the public.

The site is currently quite slow, thanks to some heavy demand right after launch, but we got a chance to test the site while it was still running smoothly. One nice aspect of the project's web site is that it was built with open standard and modern web development techniques in mind.

As these projects typically take years to come to fruition and have to conform to pretty stringent accessibility and long-term storage standards, their web sites often also look like they were developed five years ago. Here, however, the Codex Sinaiticus team did a good job at making the text accessible to the general public (with translations into German, Russian, and Greek), as well as students and scholars who need access to more detailed information and images taken under different lighting conditions.

As is also typical for these projects, however, there is no way for the public or other scholars to directly participate by fixing potential errors in the transcription or translation, for example.

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The project website also has more information about how the book was digitized, and the philosophy behind the development of the site.
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