Online with Tom Nixon

Posts Tagged ‘digital books’

31 Days of TED: Brewster Kahle on building a free digital library

4 July 2011 | No Comments » | tcnixon

31 Days of TED: Mike Matas on Interactive Books

1 July 2011 | No Comments » | tcnixon

I have decided to spend the next month finding and posting the best of TED. Well, the best of TED that relates to me and what I do. The first is Mike Matas discussing the first feature-length interactive book.

Digital Public Library of America

21 February 2011 | No Comments » | tcnixon

In October 2010, Robert Darnton, the historian and university librarian at Harvard, talked to Wired Campus about the possibility of building what was then being described as a National Digital Library. Since then, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, with money from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has stepped into the role of coordinating plans for what’s now being designated a Digital Public Library of America.

The planning has a public component as well: The Berkman Center has set up a wiki to which anyone can contribute. “We very much hope that this wiki will be the embodiment of a consensus-based and peer-produced approach,” the center notes on the welcome page.

The wiki lays out major topics related to the proposed DPLA project: content and scope (which includes a handy roundup of digitizing projects in the United States and abroad), governance and business models, legal and technical issues. It’s early days, but to get a sense of how the conversation’s shaping up, check out the most active pages on the wiki. (It’s also instructive to poke around the least-revised pages so far.)

For the rest of the article, click here.