Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard

This week Harvard announced the public launch of its scholarly repository, DASH, which supports the school’s open access policy. In the repository I found an interesting article by Robert Darnton, “Collecting and Researching in the History of Books.”

The Last Library?

Is Google’s Book Search the last library? See: “Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars.”

Google's five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project. Of course, 50 or 100 years from now control of the collection may pass from Google to somebody else—Elsevier, Unesco, Wal-Mart. But it's safe to assume that the digitized books that scholars will be working with then will be the very same ones that are sitting on Google's servers today, augmented by the millions of titles published in the interim.

A rebuttal to Nunberg’s complaints about quality is available over at Northwest History. More serious objections to Google’s book-scanning project have been raised elsewhere.

Another concern about this project has to do with preservation: I wonder to what extent digital preservation is covered in the settlement. Will this collection exist 50 or 100 years from now?

There’s Too Much Confusion: Or, the Great Mall of Alexandria

The claimant heir to the legacy of the Great Library or Museum at Alexandria, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, is opening a food court at the center of its facility.

The metaphor of the library as mall prevails. There must be some kind of way out of here …

Ritual and Retention

An article in today’s Inside Higher Ed, “Early Pomp and Circumstance,” highlights a trend to revive convocation ceremonies. The goal is to build a sense of community and commitment. The article points out that convocations have a long and continuous history at many small liberal arts colleges and selective four-year universities.

Yesterday, Inside Higher Ed featured a convocation address—“Convocation Critique of ‘I Love College’”—that was delivered at my place of employment.

Update: Later, looking at the above image, I was reminded of the ending of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, which reminded me of the ending of the “I am death” bit in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

Digital Lincoln

For its special issue “Lincoln at 200,” the Journal of American History created a companion online project called “Building the Digital Lincoln.”

This special resources site offers a snapshot of how historians and digital humanists have helped to build a new understanding of Abraham Lincoln with a series of innovative and powerful Web-based tools.

Lots of Literacies

From the August 2009 issue of Primary Source, the newsletter of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS):

IMLS has just released Museums, Libraries, and 21st Century Skills. The booklet outlines a vision for the role of libraries and museums in the national dialogue around learning and such 21st century skills as technology literacy, problem solving, creativity, and global awareness. It also provides a self-assessment tool that enables museums and libraries to determine where they fit on the continuum of 21st century skills.

The Northwestern Wanderer

I just came across some materials from a 1920s railroad advertising campaign for the Pacific Northwest. I was interested to see that the image in one advertisement (above) is based on Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic painting “Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer” (below).

From the advertisement copy:

Into the lives of most men comes at some time an urge—

An impulse to journey out and see what lies beyond the local horizon, to prospect other, newer lands.

The story of many a man’s success is a record of that impulse acted upon—of a fortune found in the “land beyond.”