A Handful of Digitization Projects Profiled in NY Times; Plus a ResourceShelf Guide to a Few Other Digitization Projects
History, Digitized (and Abridged)
It's wonderful to see a bunch of smaller but none-the-less very important getting attention in the NY Times.
However, we read little in the article about the large amount of newspaper digitization coming from sources like ProQuest CSA, NewspaperArchive.com, Thomson Gale, and PaperofRecord. These companies are digitizing papers (full text and full image) from around the world. For example, from the NY Times back to 1881 to the Wall St. Journal back to Vol. 1, No. 1. In fact, the NY Times sells pay-per-view access while many libraries offer the database and its contents at no charge for personal use. Thomson Gale offers the Full Text and Page Images of the Times of London back to 1785. Btw, most of these projects include digitized articles as well as digitized ads.
Complementing three previously launched series, the two new collections—Early American Newspapers, Series 4, 1756-1922 and Early American Newspapers, Series 5, 1777-1922—will expand the coverage of America’s Historical Newspapers by adding more than 200 new titles, including newspapers of unique historical importance, regional weeklies and big-city dailies.
For more on digitization projects, here are some other articles:
To keep this post shorter, all of the URL's posted below are available here:
+ Brock Reed from Wired Campus points to an article in the Tri-Valley Herald about a bunch of people (students) who page after page, book after book are scanning pages for The Internet Archive / Open Content Alliance.
+ In 2005, we posted a profile of a person who scans books at the University of Toronto (via Wall Street Journal, free).
U of T is part of the OCA.
+ Video Clips Show the “Book Scanning Robot” Being Used at the University of Toronto
Remember, book digitization in one form or another has been going strong for 35 years via Project Gutenberg founded my Michael Hart.
1) World eBook Library
More than 400,000 full text books all in PDF. $8.95/year. Includes a large number of PG titles.
2) Impressive!!! http://shop.ebrary.com
Free remote access to more than 20,000 books. All full text and full image. Pay only to print or copy a page. About 25 cents. No limit on how much you can view.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
