Books are weapons in the war of ideas. Poster 20 x 27.9 , 1942. Published by the United States Government Printing Office. In the this installment of In the Stacks we visit the newly launched and much anticipated Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The opening of DPLA represents a watershed moment in the history of American libraries and will undoubtedly become a seminal resource for our nation in the years ahead. It is safe to say this will be the first of many trips for Book Patrol through the "stacks" of DPLA. We begin with a couple of posters produced by the Unites...
The first e-book of Google fingers
It had to happen sooner or later. An e-book composed entirely of digitized fingers that have crept into a page scan.It's listed under the guise of A True Copy of a Letter from the Reverend Mr. Greenshields (1709) which was originally digitized April 27, 2009 from Oxford University and is available for freeAbove image is the page spread, below some sample pages:A True Copy of a Letter from the Reverend Mr. Greenshields. From the Goal of ... - James Greenshields - Google Books: h/t The Art of Google BooksPreviously on Book Patrol:The Hands of Google
BiblioTech: The First Bookless Library
The Bexar County, Texas satellite office. The future home the first bookless library. Photo: Kin Man Hui, San Antonio Express-NewsYou knew it was coming and I am not sure how it is going to last but here it is.The first bookless public library system in America. The name is a play on the Spanish word for library — biblioteca.artist’s conception of what the interior of the BiblioTechIt was the brainchild of Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff who got the idea while reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs.“It's not a replacement for the (city) library system, it's an enhancement,” says Wolff who also...
Yiddish Goes Digital (with a Little Help from Its Friends)
The first page of the Polish Yidel, July 1884Calling all Yiddish speaking people...Two archives, one at Cornell University, the other at University of Warwick in the UK, have teamed up to digitize more than 1,500 pages from journals and newspapers originally written for working-class Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.Much of the original material has never been translated into English and with the number of Yiddish speakers in the world in significant decline the project was opened up to the public: relying on individuals’ to help translate the publications, which include The Polish “Yidel” and “Hashulamith” newspapers and “The Ladies’ Garment Worker,”...
The Future is Here: A Book-Scanning Robot
Featuring the latest in robotics and 3D technology the BFS-Auto is a lightning fast, hi-definition scanner that just might change the playing field. Developed at the noted Ishikawa Oku Laboratory at the University of Tokyo the BFS-Auto digitally scans books at an amazing rate of 250 pages a minute without modifying the book by cutting !Let's repeat: it scans 250 pages a minute in hi-definition without damaging the book. No more hands in the picture, no more fuzzy pages and no more destruction. In fact the scanner has the ability to "restore a captured image which is distorted because of page curling to a...