Europeana announces Pinterest collaboration.
“Our aim is to be a springboard for ideas that inspire and engage people through their culture and heritage. Pinterest is one of the platforms that we think deserves some attention. That is why we invite our users to follow us, and our partners to collaborate with us on the creation beautiful boards that will hopefully attract a lot of people. If you are interested or want more information — contact us at marcomms@europeana.eu.”
From the Europeana blog post, “Pinterest for GLAMs: Europeana’s Experiment”
Elending processes to be streamlined.
“Even as anxious publishers are hoping to increase friction in the ebook lending experience, librarians have been clamoring for vendors of integrated library systems (ILS) to make e-lending a unified, sleek experience. Rather than navigating their patrons away from the library’s web presence to Balkanized, often commercial, third-party platforms, each with a different discovery and delivery experience, librarians have been demanding a single, easy-to-use, easy-to-search platform — an integration of the ILS with ebook vendor platforms.”
From Michael Kelly’s post on The Digital Shift, “Ebook Providers, ILS Vendors Move Rapidly to Remove Friction From E-Lending; OverDrive APIs Coming in April”
British Library digitizes vast array of 19th century books.
“The British Library and JISC eCollections have announced the launch of JISC Historic Books, a new website developed by Mimas for researchers and students that includes recently digitised editions of more than 65,000 books from the British Library’s extensive 19th century collections.
Amounting to more than 25 million pages, the resource spans subject areas including philosophy, history, poetry and literature, with the original typeface, illustrations and fold-out pages for each book. Many rare or inaccessible books published between 1789 and 1914 are now digital, discoverable and searchable for the first time, enabling their use by many more scholars than has hitherto been possible.”
Via INFOdocket
“Life and miracles” of Rumi online in beautiful form.
“The Persian poet and mystic Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi (1207-1273), better known as Rumi, endures as one of history’s most beloved and oft-quoted thinkers. A handful of Persian accounts of Rumi’s life have been written, most famously the first by his son and the third, focusing on Rumi’s moralizing miracle stories, ordered by Rumi’s grandson and written by the dervish Shams al-Din A?mad, called Aflaki (d. 1360). In 1590, some three and a half centuries after Aflaki’s writings, the Ottoman sultan Murad III ordered a Turkish translation of a 1540 abridged version of Aflaki’s text entitled Tarjuma-i Thawaqib-i manaqib (Stars of the Legend). Two illustrated copies of the Murad translation survive — one, dated 1599, is held by Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace and features 22 miniatures; the other, a more lavish manuscript dating to the 1590s and including 29 miniatures, is held by New York’s Morgan Library.”
From Paul Biba’s article for Teleread, “The Life of Rumi: rare images available”