ResourceBlog Article: On Demand Digitization and Publishing: New York Public Library & Kirtas Technologies Partner to Make 500,000 Public Domain Books Available

contact us \| suggestion

Receive the weekly sampler of posts and "Resource of the Week".
Subscribe »

My Account »

If you find ResourceShelf useful, please supply a testimonial »

Home > ResourceBlog > Article

« All ResourceBlog Articles

Sunday, 4th October 2009

On Demand Digitization and Publishing: New York Public Library & Kirtas Technologies Partner to Make 500,000 Public Domain Books Available

Note: This is a fee-based service. Books cost $1.99.

From the Announcement:

Readers and researchers looking for hard-to-find books now have the opportunity to dip into the collections of one of the world's most comprehensive libraries to purchase digitized copies of public domain titles. Through their Digitize-on-Demand program, Kirtas Technologies has partnered with The New York Public Library to make 500,000 public domain works from the Library's collections available (to anyone in the world).

[Snip]

Using existing information from NYPL's catalog records, Kirtas will make the library's public domain books available for sale through its retail site before they are ever digitized. Customers can search for a desired title on http://www.kirtasbooks.com and place an order for that book. When the order is placed, only then is it pulled from the shelf, digitized and made available as a high-quality reprint or digital file.

[Snip]

What makes this approach to digitization unique is that NYPL incurs no up-front printing, production or storage costs. It also provides the library with a self-funding, commercial model helping it to sustain its digitization programs in the future. Unlike other free or low-cost digitization programs, the library retains the rights and ownership to their own digitized content.

Whether patrons are looking for a title about a president--such as, "Memories of President Lincoln," by Walt Whitman--or by a president--"African Game Trails; An account of the African wanderings of an American hunter-naturalist," by Theodore Roosevelt--The New York Public Library is the place to turn. Collections available on http://www.kirtasbooks.com are from NYPL's General Research Division and include books from the local and U.S. history, genealogy, humanities and social sciences collections. Titles include several 19th century cookbooks, a first print edition of "Casey at the Bat" by Ernest Thayer, "The Origin of the Werewolf Superstition" (1909) by Caroline Taylor, and first edition version of Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" from 1851.

Books cost $1.95 to digitize/publish.

Here's a direct link to various collections (by source) Kirtas offers. The University of Pennsylvania, McGill University, Rochester Institute of Technology, McMaster University also work with Kirtas. According to the web site, nearly one million titles are available in the Kirtas database.

Source: Media Release, NYPL, Kirtas

Category:

Search News (ResourceShelf)

blog comments powered by Disqus

« All ResourceBlog Articles

FreePint Family

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 »

Latest Family Articles:

Quilting big data threads
Thursday, 24th May 2012

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.

The fallacy of information overload
Wednesday, 23rd May 2012

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: fact, fantasy or filter failure?
Wednesday, 23rd May 2012

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.

Newsdesk: tracking millions of pieces of information a day
Tuesday, 22nd May 2012

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 adds managerial oversight
Tuesday, 22nd May 2012

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).

All Family Articles »
Family Articles by Category »

Tell us what you're working on,
and we'll talk to you about how FreePint can help »

FreePint Family Testimonials

"Fabulous resource to learn of unique tools and insights. Very useful." Manager, Futures and Forecasting, Virginia, USA

More testimonials »

Subscribe to the ResourceShelf Newsletter and receive the weekly sampler of posts and Resource of the Week.

Find out more »

ResourceShelf sponsored by:

Article Categories

Search News (9339)
Source File (9518)
Web 2.0 (2568)

All Article Categories »