How the New York Public Library digitizes its vast map collection

While much of the city's mapping community is focused on creating something new, a great deal of energy also goes into recovering maps that are quite old.

The New York Public Library, the spiritual heart of the city's mapmaking community, is gradually putting online its vast collection of 435,000 maps. Using a software program called "Building Inspector," more than 1,000 users are manually inputting information or checking contained on old maps that computers can't easily handle, such as street addresses. It's arduous work—only 33,000 of the library's maps have been digitized—but so far the volunteer army has completed 1.2 million tasks and helps the library to bring old maps online much faster than it could otherwise.

More from Crain's New York

Can books save us from what digital does to our brains?

from Medium.com

When I think back on my life, I can define a set of books that shaped me — intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. Books have always been an escape, a learning experience, a saviour, but beyond this, greater than this, certain books became, over time, a kind of glue that holds together my understanding of the world. I think of them as nodes of knowledge and emotion, nodes that knot together the fabric my self. Books, for me anyway, hold together who I am.

Books, in ways that are different to visual art, to music, to radio, to love even, force us to walk through another’s thoughts, one word at a time, over hours and days. We share our minds for that time with the writer’s. There is a slowness, a forced reflection required by the medium that is unique. Books recreate someone else’s thoughts inside our own minds, and maybe it is this one-to-one mapping of someone else’s words, on their own, without external stimuli, that give books their power. Books force us to let someone else’s thoughts inhabit our minds completely.

FCC Continues E-rate Reboot to Meet Nation's Digital Learning Needs

Taking significant additional steps to ensure that the nation’s schools and libraries have access to robust high-speed broadband connections, the Federal Communications Commission this week approved further modernization of its E-rate program, the nation’s largest program supporting education technology.

Broadband is transforming 21st Century education and life-long learning. The Commission is implementing a fundamental reset of E-rate, the first such effort since the program’s creation 18 years ago, so that it can keep pace with the exploding demands for ever-faster Internet service placed on school and library networks by digital learning applications, which often rely on individually connected tablets and laptops.

The Commission adopted an Order aimed at closing this connectivity gap by making more funding available for libraries and schools to purchase broadband connectivity capable of delivering gigabit service over the next five years. The Order also provides schools and libraries additional flexibility and options for purchasing broadband services to enable schools and libraries to meet their Internet capacity needs in the most cost-effective way possible.

The Order builds on action taken by the Commission in July to meet another critical need: robust Wi-Fi networks inside libraries and schools capable of supporting individualized learning.

More from the FCC

The Survey of Library & Museum Digitization Projects, 2013 Edition

Primary Research Group, ISBN 978-157440-230-8.

This report, based on detailed data from approximately 80 libraries and museums in the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, continental Europe and other countries and regions, looks closely at the collection digitization efforts, covering budgets, costs, fundraising, staffing and manpower, use of consultants, outsourcing, revenue generation, productivity, software, marketing, licensing, cataloging, rights management, content selection, and many other issues in collection-related digitization. Data is broken out separately by many variables including but not limited to size of institution, by type of material digitized (ie text, photographs, audio-video) and separately for libraries and museums and by type of library, ie, public, special and academic.

Just a few of the study’s many findings are that:
• Digitization projects or departments in the sample have a mean annual budget of $105,907 for digitization.
• 37.97% of survey participants have an unfavorable outlook for raising money for digitization from sources outside the main institutional budget.
• Digitization spending will increase somewhat to substantially among 45.45% of institutions focusing their digitization efforts on film, video and audio recordings.
• Special libraries in the sample have a mean of 6.87 employees doing digitization work of some kind and devote nearly 7,300 hours in staff time to this work annually.
• A mean of 19.23% of the physical exhibits staged by survey participants are accompanied by a substantial online exhibit that reproduces a significant portion of or adds to the exhibit in a significant way.
• Organizations or divisions that focus their digitization efforts on text documents have outsourced a mean of 30.7% of their digitization, nearly twice as much as those focusing their efforts on photographs.
• 11.11% of survey participants share an asset management system with other departments or divisions of their institution.

The 165 page study is available directly from Primary Research Group or from major book distributors such as Baker & Taylor, Midwest Library Services and Amazon, and through eBook distributors such as MyiLibrary and Overdrive. A PDF version of the study is currently available from Primary Research Group and a print version can be ordered as well. For a table of contents and sample pages, or to place an order, view our website at www.PrimaryResearch.com or call us at 212-736-2316.

A Digital Library Better Than Google's

ON Tuesday, Denny Chin, a federal judge in Manhattan, rejected the settlement between Google, which aims to digitize every book ever published, and a group of authors and publishers who had sued the company for copyright infringement. This decision is a victory for the public good, preventing one company from monopolizing access to our common cultural heritage.

More HERE.

A Well-Stocked National Digital Library System?

Why We Can't Afford Not to Create a Well-Stocked National Digital Library System
The Atlantic
by David Rothman, a writer in Alexandria, Va, the founder of TeleRead, the oldest English-language site offering general e-book news and views.


E-book gadgets have finally cracked the mass market here in the United States or at least have come a long way.

Consider a memorable Kindle commercial from Amazon, in which a brunette in a bikini one-ups an oafish man reading off a rival machine. Mr. Beer Belly asks about her e-reader. "It's a Kindle," she says by the pool. "$139. I actually paid more for these sunglasses." Mad Men would be proud. A year or two from now, count on twice as much ballyhoo and on better machines for less than $99.

I myself own both a Kindle 3 and the Brand X iPad and can attest to the improved readability of the latest E Ink from Amazon's supplier, even indoors, despite lack of built-in illumination. Outside on walks, as with earlier Kindles, I can listen to books from publishing houses savvy enough to allow text to speech. No matter where I am, I can instantly see all occurrences of a character's name in an engrossing Louis Bayard novel. I can also track down the meanings of archaic words that Bayard's detective narrator uses in this murder mystery set at West Point and featuring a
fictionalized Edgar Allan Poe.

But there is one thing I currently cannot do with my Kindle despite all the sizzle in the commercials--read public library books. Local libraries do not use the Kindle format for their electronic collections, relying instead on rival standards used by Sony Readers and certain other devices. Amazon undoubtedly would love to fix this under terms favorable to CEO Jeff Bezos and friends. But then other issues will remain. How many Kindle books--or those readable on Sony Readers, iPads, and others--will cash-strapped libraries in poorer cities be able to lend? What range of
titles will be available? And shouldn't we look beyond books and consider the needs of researchers who, for example, could benefit from reliably preserved electronic discussions linked to individual books.

Might the time have finally come for a well-stocked national digital library system (NDLS) for the United States--a cause I've publicly advocated since 1992 in Computerworld, a 1996 MIT Press information science collection, the Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, the Huffington Post, and elsewhere, including my national information stimulus plan here in the Fallows blog?

PBS Launching Digital Learning Library Aimed at Educators

From the Announcement:

PBS announced the launch of the PBS Digital Learning Library, a PBS system-wide online repository of digital education assets from public broadcasting programs and services nationwide. The PBS Digital Learning Library will be a comprehensive source of “learning objects,” including video, audio, images, games, and interactive simulations designed specifically for classroom use, delivered to teachers exclusively through local PBS stations. Services to deliver these resources to teachers and learners will be available in fall 2009.

As part of an ongoing, multi-year research initiative to identify and provide effective digital media in the classroom, PBS is aggregating its educational content to make it more accessible and practical for classroom use.

Learn More About the PBS Digital Learning Library

A New TV Age

If you are receiving your television signal through rabbit ears and you've been procrastinating about getting your coupon for the digital converter box, you should know that they are out of coupons until enough coupons already sent expire. I ordered my coupons about six weeks ago, right after the ice storm and they arrived only two days ago.

This means you've got only about three weeks to figure out how you're going to keep up with 60 Minutes. Get on the coupon waiting list by visiting this website and keep your fingers crossed.

Library of Congress Leads Nationwide Digitization Effort

The Library of Congress will digitally scan "The Heroic Life of Abraham Lincoln: The Great Emancipator" as the 25,000th book in its "Digitizing American Imprints" program, which scans aging “brittle” books often too fragile to serve to researchers. The program is sponsored by a $2 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Library, which has contracted with the Internet Archive for digitization services, is combining its efforts with other libraries as part of the open content movement. The movement, which includes over 100 libraries, universities and cultural institutions, aims to digitize and make freely available public-domain books in a wide variety of subject areas.

All scanning operations are housed in the Library’s John Adams Building on Capitol Hill. Internet Archive staff work two shifts each day on 10 "Scribe" scanning stations. The operation can digitize up to 1,000 volumes each week. Shortly after scanning is complete, the books are available online at www.archive.org. Books can be read online or downloaded for more intensive study. The Library of Congress is actively working with the Internet Archive on the development of a full-featured, open-source page turner. A beta version, called the Flip Book, is currently available on the Internet Archive site.

New York Heritage Digital Collections

The New York 3Rs Association has launched a new digital heritage web site, www.newyorkheritage.org. The site connects more than 160 digital collections from around the state, contributed by libraries, archives, museums and other cultural institutions, and builds on existing digital repository services administered by each of the nine reference and research library resources councils.
NewYorkHeritage.org uses OCLC’s CONTENTdm Multisite Server to bring these collections together, allowing the public to search across all items simultaneously. This project provides free, online access to images of cultural and historical significance in New York State.

A variety of materials can be found among the New York Heritage Digital Collections, including photographs, postcards, correspondence, manuscripts, oral histories, yearbooks and newspapers. Many kinds of institutions from New York State have partnered to make this project possible, including public, academic and school libraries, museums, archives and historical societies. The power of collaboration is what makes this new service possible.

Participants to New York Heritage Digital Collections are committed to enhancing the site by adding both content and contributing institutions on a regular basis. The goal of the project is to eventually connect one thousand collections and one million items from throughout New York State. All institutions interested in participating in the project are encouraged to contact the 3Rs organization that serves their region.

The New York 3Rs Association is a partnership among New York’s nine reference and research resource systems. The New York 3Rs was incorporated in 2003 to further the ability of those systems to provide statewide services. The members of the New York 3Rs Association are: the Capital District Library Council, Central New York Library Resources Council, Long Island Library Resources Council, Metropolitan New York Library Council, Northern New York Library Network, Rochester Regional Library Council, Southeastern New York Library Resources Council, South Central Regional Library Council, and Western New York Library Resources Council.

Digital Quality of Life:

Understanding the Personal and Social Benefits of the Information Technology Revolution from Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF)/. "In the new global economy information technology (IT) is the major driver of both economic growth and improved quality of life."

Smithsonian to put its 137 million-object collection online

The Smithsonian Institution will work to digitize its collections to make science, history and cultural artifacts accessible online and dramatically expand its outreach to schools.

Will we get to the point that we NEVER have to leave the house?

(And is that necessarily a good thing?)

In nation's capital, librarians on a mission storm the streets

Their message: We're still vital in the digital age

By Angela Haupt, USA TODAY, June 27, 2007, page 6D