NYLA announces plans for digital literacy workshops
“Being digitally literate allows people to interact using the tools and technologies that are increasingly being used at home, in school and in business. As NYLA trains the library community in teaching digital literacy, libraries will begin to offer workshops to the public to enhance their skills.
“The workshops will be held throughout the state over the next two years, and introduce the state recommended digital literacy curriculum to library staff. The goal of the program is to develop a cadre of trained library staff who can advance the digital literacy skills of their colleagues and patrons. The workshops are open to all library staff who interact with the public.
“This project is a partnership between the New York State Office of Cyber Security & Critical Infrastructure and the New York Library Association to ‘convene, support, coordinate and enhance programs that provide digital literacy training.’ This innovative project integrates and expands multiple New York statewide technology and broadband sustainability initiatives as well as leverages current private, state, and federal technology-related grant programs.”
From the New York Literacy Association article, NYLA Announces Digital Literacy Training Workshops to Promote Digital Literacy for All New Yorkers
Princeton’s Lapidus Collection digitizes thousands of Revolutionary-era texts
“Nearly 150 books, pamphlets and prints from the Sid Lapidus ’59 Collection on Liberty and the American Revolution were recently digitized in their original form and are available online for free. Readers may virtually flip through the frayed-edge pages of ‘Common Sense,’ which helped inspire the Declaration of Independence after it was published in 1776, or enlarge detailed text and images featured in the works of Founding Fathers John Hancock, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and many others.
“The Lapidus Collection’s themes include the intellectual origins of the American Revolution; the Revolution itself; the early years of the republic; the resulting spread of democratic ideas in the Atlantic world; and the effort to abolish slavery in both Great Britain and the United States.
“Stephen Ferguson, assistant University librarian for Rare Books and Special Collections and curator of rare books, said it took a team of eight people nearly a year to scan the approximately 32,000 pages for the digital library. Ferguson said the library plans to add more content to the website over time.
“The library’s hard work was recently recognized by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries’ Scout Report, which named the Lapidus Collection one of the best online resources for the 2011-12 academic year.”
From Emily Aronson and Princeton’s Office of Development Communication’s featured story, Princeton library brings Revolutionary-era texts alive online
Open Library platform grants North Carolina library patrons access to over 200,000 free e-books
“Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based non-profit, teamed up with NC LIVE, a conglomerate of about 200 public and academic libraries in North Carolina, to develop an e-book lending platform called “Open Library” that currently allows library users to download more than 200,000 e-books published between 1923 and 1999, as well as a small collection of recently published titles and more than a million public domain titles, according to a recent press release from NC LIVE.
“Open Library is free to all North Carolina library card holders, and users can download up to five books at a time, for two weeks each. Books can be read online in a web browser or downloaded and transferred to a compatible portable device.
“’The Open Library platform allows patrons to access digital copies of books that were never available to them before, and even features the DAISY eBook program, making them accessible for the visually impaired,’ said State Librarian Cal Shelphard, in the release. ‘Libraries can now obtain books for patrons on a much larger scale than was previously possible.’”
From Amanda Wilcox’s article in the Jacksonville Daily News, Library patrons granted access to more than 200,000 free e-books
Battle lines drawn in ongoing HathiTrust case
“In its copyright infringement suit, filed in September of 2011, the Authors Guild alleges that the HathiTrust, a digitization collective of research libraries, is built with millions of “unauthorized” scans created by Google. The suit seeks an injunction barring the libraries from future digitization of copyrighted works; from providing works to Google for its scanning project; and from proceeding with its plan to allow access to ‘orphan works.’ It also asks the court to ‘impound’ all unauthorized scans and to hold them in escrow ‘pending an appropriate act of Congress.’
“In their memorandum in support of summary judgment, attorneys for the Authors Guild ramped up their rhetoric against the libraries. ‘Discovery has only reinforced how brazen Defendants, and their business partner, Google, have been,’ the brief states. ‘For all intents and purposes, Defendants permitted Google to back trucks up to university library loading docks, empty every book from every shelf, drive the trucks to one of several top secret Google-operated scanning centers, digitize each work, keep a digital copy for Google’s own commercial purposes and then return the printed work and a digital copy to Defendants for their own use.’
“While the HathiTrust began in 2008, digitization efforts in libraries are over 20 years old, and offer significant public benefit, attorneys argue: digitization preserves books, enables search and new methods of research, such as text-mining, and increases access for students and scholars with print disabilities. And the collaboration between research libraries, and Google, has created a more stable, secure corpus in just a decade than could have been achieved in centuries by individual libraries, while fully respecting copyright: not one line of text is displayed via HathiTrust for books presumed to be in copyright, attorneys note, not even snippets (unlike Google’s commercial index).”
From Andrew Albanese’s article in Publishers Weekly, HathiTrust, Authors Guild File Motions for Summary Judgment in Digitization Battle