One of the kinks in the harried digital evolution for university special collections and archives has been the focus on getting their best stuff processed first. This selective approach to digitization, which of course has its roots in the pervasive financial and human resource constraints faced by most repositories, can have a profound long-term effect on what information finds the public realm. Project REVEAL, which stands for Read and View English & American Literature, by The Harry Ransom Center hopes to change that. For Project REVEAL the entire manuscript collections of 25 of some of the best-known writers from nineteenth and early twentieth century...
Tub Lit: Kickstarter project offers waterproof books
The latest crowdsourced gem for the book crowd comes to us from Bibliobath. Thanks to Wing Weng and Jasper Jansen, a Dutch-Chinese couple based in Amsterdam, we finally have the waterproof book! They have 4 titles ready to go; a selection of short stories by Mark Twain, one of the selected poetry by W. B. Yeats, an edition of Shakespeare's Macbeth and a special Kickstarter-only edition of the Chinese classic The Art of War. The campaign just launched and the goal is to raise about $10,000 in the next month. Among the rewards are a couple geared...
Brewster Kahle says ‘Digitize Everything’
[youtube]https://youtu.be/fDGKfVJQRkk[/youtube] What a perfect way to follow up my look at John Palfrey's new book BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google then with a short video from EDUCAUSE Review Online of Brewster Kahle talking about the absolute necessity of digitizing everything we can get our hands on. Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, has been at the forefront of the digital revolution, especially when it comes to the role of the 'library'. His mantra is simple - take the twin attributes that define the library, preservation and access, and apply it to the online...
Plant this Book
In 1968 Richard Brautigan published Please Plant This Book a collection of eight seed packets, each bearing an original poem related to its contents. Now almost 50 years later the Argentine publisher Pequeño Editor has unveiled a book that you can actually plant! The project is called Tree Book Tree and is designed to teach kids a little about the origin of paper books and sustainability. For its first release it took the popular children's book "Mi papá estuvo en la selva" (My dad was in the jungle), by Gusti Llimpi and Anne Decis, which is a true story about the...
Orange is the new green at the Multnomah County Library
The Multnomah County Library in Oregon (think Portland) has become the first major library in the country to sustainably source the paper it uses to print patron receipts and hold slips. The library, which uses upward of 10,000 rolls of paper each year for these slips, has moved from the traditional white paper that contains bisphenol A (BPA) or bisphenol S (BPS) to an alternative paper that uses a vitamin C formulation instead. That's right vitamin C, though the paper has a yellow tone it is actually sourced from oranges! And just how many oranges are needed for a years supply? How about...