The Folger Shakespeare Library launches collection of digital texts, free plays and code
“Much ado about something: William Shakespeare has gone digital in a big way.
“The Folger Shakespeare Library, home to the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare materials, launched the Folger Digital Texts on Thursday. It’s a set of authoritative Shakespeare plays available for free — along with the source code. Noncommercial app builders, scholars and others can use the code to build their own Shakespeare-oriented projects.
“That’s pretty cool. The plays, of course, are in the public domain and have been available online for a long time. But the code makes things easier. The possibilities are vast: There might soon be a new generation of free Shakespeare-based games, or interactive stories, or literary mash-ups.
“But I’ll make a plea: no zombies, OK guys?
“The plays included in the debut of the Folger Digital Texts are some of Shakespeare’s greatest hits: “Hamlet,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Othello,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “The Taming of the Shrew,” “The Tempest,” “Twelfth Night,” “Much Ado About Nothing” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“The others, along with Shakespeare’s poetry, will be added in 2013.
“A news release from the Folger Library explains, “Users can read the plays online, download PDFs for offline reading, search for keywords within a single play or the whole corpus, and navigate by act, scene, line, or the new Folger throughline numbers. Every word, space, and piece of punctuation has its own place online…. The full source code of the texts may be downloaded by researchers and developers at no cost for noncommercial use — a major time-saver for scholarly research, app development, and other projects. By sharing the coded text, the Folger hopes to significantly advance digital humanities research into the works of Shakespeare and other writers of his time.”
“The digital texts share pagination with the Folger Shakespeare Library print editions, which are widely used in American classrooms. So if you really want to make a “Romeo and Juliet and Zombies” for your ninth-grade English class, well, I guess I’m OK with that.”
From Carolyn Kellogg’s post on the Jacket Copy blog for The Los Angeles Times, Folger Library launches open-source digital Shakespeare
Smithsonian American Art Museum and the University of Southern California to partner and create digital art records and tools for any museum’s database
“WASHINGTON — The Smithsonian American Art Museum is partnering with researchers from the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute to make digital art records more easily searchable with the latest technology.
“Records of more than 40,000 artworks at the museum will be connected to a digital library through the project.
“The records will be converted to linked open data, a system that publishes information online with more precise tagging than current web publishing formats. USC says that will provide easier access to information on the museum’s holdings.
“Officials at the college say the tools developed for the project will work with any museum’s databases and will be made available for free to other museums. As more museums convert to the new system, users can search for art information across many websites.”
From an Associated Press article in The Washington Post, Smithsonian joins USC in effort to make digital museum art records more accessible, searchable
Lontar scanning project for the Internet Archive Foundation’s Digital Library strengthens the preservation of Balinese culture in the face of Westernization
“The central government needs to continue an important project preserving ancient lontar manuscripts after the San Francisco-based Internet Archive Foundation suspended funding of the lontar digitizing project, which ran from January 2011 to the middle of 2012.
“Ketut Suastika, head of Bali Cultural Office, told The Jakarta Post/Bali Daily that the province would propose funding of Rp 1.5 billion (US$155,700) from the 2013 state budget to continue the lontar digitizing project, which had to be halted as the funding agency refused to continue supporting the project.
“The central government must support this significant cultural project in order to preserve Bali’s most precious cultural and literary heritage.
“We had support from an American foundation for the first stage of the project, now it is high time the Indonesian government took over the project,” Suastika stated.
“Led by Ron Jenkins, professor of theater at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and Prof. Nyoman Catra and Made Dewadharma from the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI) Denpasar, the team dealt with more than 3,000 lontar manuscripts stored in the library of the Bali Cultural Office in Denpasar.
“We [the team] were grateful for the invaluable support of Ketut Suastika and the staff of the Balinese Cultural Office. We were also grateful for the support of the Internet Archive Foundation of San Francisco, whose founder, Brewster Kahle, has the goal of digitizing all the books in the world,” Jenkins told the Post via email.
“The wisdom contained in the lontar is essential for Balinese culture to maintain its integrity in the face of Westernization.
“That is why we worked so hard in this lontar project to digitize thousands of lontar palm leaf manuscripts on subjects as diverse as religious philosophy, traditional medicine, ritual offerings, historic events and literature,” Jenkins added.
“The digitizing and preservation of the first stage of the lontar project was started in January 2011 — cleaning, preserving, transcribing and uploading the lontar into the Internet Archive Foundation’s Digital Library.
“As of now anyone can go to the website at archive.org/details/Bali where they can find images of more than two thousand lontar.”
From Rita A. Widiadana and Ni Komang Erviani’s article in The Jakarta Post, Govt asked to continue ‘lontar’ project
eBooks For Libraries website aims to educate the public about current issues surrounding libraries’ access to ebooks
” eBooks For Libraries web site, sponsored by Library Renewal and the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library in Kansas, has relaunched and will now provide public awareness and news about ebooks for libraries.
“David Lee King writes, “Our goal isn’t to complain, but to share information about the current ebook landscape, and how it affects libraries. We’ll explain current issues, and what they actually MEAN for libraries.”
“Earlier this year, eBooks For Libraries began a petition drive asking the Big 6 publishers to make more ebooks available.
“The petition received more than 10,000 signatures and was sent to publishers at the end of June.
“According to Gina Millsap, Chief Executive Officer of the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library, the petition received little response from the publishers.
“Skip Dye at Random House and Josh Marwell at HarperCollins did send “cordial” acknowledgements after Millsap contacted the leadership at each publisher with a personal note. That was about it.
“Millsap also shared this with infoDOCKET:
“Our goal was and is to raise awareness of library users as readers, who want to get stories and information in all forms from their local libraries. We don’t want the importance of readers and reading to get lost in all the issues and angst swirling around in the ebook universe. We also want to provide a one-stop source for librarians, trustees, customers and library advocates to find out what’s going on with ebooks and libraries.” “
From Gary Price’s article on infoDOCKET, eBooks For Libraries Web Site Relaunches, Focus is Now Public Awareness About Issues
Amherst College to start open-access scholarly ebook press
“A new digital initiative from Amherst College will publish and give away peer-reviewed scholarly ebooks (and printable online versions too).
“We will be the first university or college press to publish books solely under an open-access model,” said Amherst College Librarian Bryn Geffert in a statement.
“Digital publishing continually reshapes what books are, what publishers do, and how content is distributed: book agents now use e-tailers’ conversion and distribution services and independent authors sell ebooks directly to consumers (on occasion to great acclaim). So it’s not surprising that scholarly content producers are finding creative ways to bypass conventional publishers too. Especially considering that an academic title, hardcover or ebook, can sell for well over $100, and authors commonly spend more than they earn to get their work published.
“Amherst College Press anticipates filling an unmet need as well. “There are not as many online venues for high-quality writing and scholarship in the humanities as there are in the sciences….Our open-access press will place Amherst at the forefront of a movement that we hope will be embraced by leading scholars in the humanities,” said Amherst College president, Carolyn “Biddy” Martin in the statement.
“Other publishers and organizations have keyed-in on the need for reputable, open-access digital scholarly publishing as well. This past summer Springer Science + Business Media grew SpringerOpen, its open-access offerings, to include books. And, the Public Knowledge Project makes its Open Monograph Press software available at no cost “to assist university presses, learned societies, and scholar-publishers interested in publishing scholarly books in print-on-demand and multiple electronic formats, whether on an open access or purchase basis.”
“Amherst College Press aims to begin accepting manuscripts for review by summer 2013.”
From a press release on Digital Book World, Amherst College Press Plans To Be First, All Open-Access College Press