Category: Publishing
September 13, 2010, 11:00 AM ET
Crowdsourcing Project Hopes to Make Short Work of Transcribing Bentham
Thousands of unpublished pages of Jeremy Bentham's manuscripts are ready for transcription with a new crowdsourcing program from University College London's Transcribe Bentham project.
Researchers at UCL are counting on Bentham enthusiasts around the globe to help transcribe and digitize thousands of handwritten pages of the influential philosopher’s work. The university has about 40,000 untranscribed pages of Bentham in its collection. It photographed 4,500 pages for the initial phase of the project—accessible through the Transcribe Bentham Web site—and is calling on Bentham scholars, armchair philosophers, or almost anyone with an Internet connection to turn the handwritten prose into machine-readable type.
“This is a groundbreaking project—the first crowdsourcing transcription project—so we are unsure of what to expect,” said Valerie Wallace, a research associate on the project....
Read MoreSeptember 7, 2010, 10:00 AM ET
Monographs on Handheld Devices: Good, but Could Be Better
The ACLS Humanties E-Book project wanted to know how users liked reading its books on their handheld devices. So it selected three of its titles and asked users what it was like to read them on a Kindle, a Sony Reader, or other e-reader. Of the 142 people who responded, 88 percent "expressed overall satisfaction" with how the books looked and could be used on handhelds. But half found the search function frustrating, and only a quarter "felt they would have an easy time citing and referencing these editions," according to a white paper about the survey.
Librarians made up more than 60 pecent of those who took part in the survey. Eighteen respondents identified themselves as scholars or researchers; another 18 said they were in the faculty/instructor category.
Survey participants missed some aspects of working with print books and of browsing e-books online. Individual e-books made for ...
Read MoreJuly 14, 2010, 05:09 PM ET
Latest Attempt to Hawk E-Textbooks: Make Them Easier for Professors to Use
It has been hard to get most professors excited about e-textbooks, but publishers continue to try new ways to sell them on the format. The latest strategy seems to make the e-textbooks even easier for professors to use, by integrating them more tightly into the course-management systems they are already familiar with.
Today Blackboard announced deals with a major textbook publisher— McGraw Hill—and two college bookstore chains—Barnes & Noble College Booksellers and Follett Higher Education Group—to sell textbooks through the tech company's course-management system and to tie online assignments from the e-texts directly into existing online gradebooks.
And earlier this week, CourseSmart, which distributes electronic editions of books by major textbook publishers, announced a new feature that better links its e-textbooks with the leading course-management systems.
CourseSmart calls...
Read MoreJune 28, 2010, 05:40 PM ET
Springer Announces New Open-Access Journals
The Springer publishing company today announced that it is setting up a new open-access journal program. Called SpringerOpen, the program will initially include 12 new online-only, peer-reviewed journals in science, technical, and medical fields.
The Chronicle sat down with Eric Merkel-Sobotta, Springer's executive vice president for corporate communications, and Bettina Goerner, the company's manager of open access, to talk about the program. (They were in town for the annual meeting of the American Library Association.) They emphasized that all SpringerOpen journals will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows reuse of articles as long as the authors are given credit. So if you're an instructor who wants to use a SpringerOpen article in a course you're teaching, "you can include it in course packages without e-mailing Springer's rights department," Mr. ...
Read MoreJune 11, 2010, 02:00 PM ET
Blind Students Get Free Access to Cambridge U. Press Books
Texts for visually impaired college students are hard to come by. But a new agreement between Cambridge University Press and Bookshare, a nonprofit organization that converts books and journals into formats that blind people can read, may enlarge this library.
And in the U.S., it won't cost students a cent.
Bookshare, which already has digital-copy sharing agreements with 11 colleges and universities, as well as with the open-access textbook publisher Flatworld Knowledge, gets digital files from the publishers and converts them to files that can be read using text-to-speech software or Braille embossers.
The group operates under an exemption to U.S. copyright law known as the Chafee Amendment. "That allows any U.S. student with a disability that affects their ability to read standard print to join Bookshare and get a free copy of a book," says Valerie Chernek, a spokeswoman for...
Read MoreJune 3, 2010, 04:30 PM ET
21st-Century Research Collections: Mostly Digital, Ever Larger
Can a new research library be all digital? How much does it cost a library to preserve a codex? What do large-scale text-digitizing projects mean for scholarship in the humanities? Those are driving questions behind a new report, "The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship," released today by the Council on Library and Information Resources.
The report is presented as a trio of essays. In their contribution, Geneva Henry, executive director of Rice University's Center for Digital Scholarship, and Lisa Spiro, director of Rice's Digital Media Center, study the question "Can a New Research Library Be All Digital?" Ms. Henry and Ms. Spiro give an extended overview of experiments with going digital and obstacles that libraries have encountered, including technological shortfalls and librarian and faculty resistance.
They conclude that the all-digital...
Read MoreApril 7, 2010, 12:34 AM ET
Visual Artists Plan to Sue Google Over Digital-Library Project
In another potential setback for the vast digital library planned by Google, several groups representing photographers and other visual artists plan to file a federal lawsuit against the company on Wednesday, alleging that its efforts to digitize millions of library books amounts to a large-scale infringement of their copyrights, The New York Times reported.
Google has reached a potential settlement with authors and publishers who sued on similar grounds in 2005, but a federal judge has not yet signed off on it. Possibly prolonging the lengthy proceedings, the U.S. Department of Justice has recently filed court papers saying the settlement still needs work.
The photographers' groups in the new lawsuit had sought to intervene in the settlement with authors and publishers, but were rejected. The pending settlement agreement largely excludes photographs and other visual works.
Read MoreApril 1, 2010, 12:46 PM ET
Study Finds Copyright Concerns Affect Communications Research
A new survey has found that many communications scholars lack confidence in their knowledge of copyright laws in relation to their research.
On Thursday, American University's Center for Social Media and the International Communication Association released a survey of ICA members titled "Clipping Our Own Wings: Copyright and Creativity in Communication Research." The e-mail survey—to which about 8 percent of ICA members, or 387, responded—found that nearly half of all communications scholars were not confident about their knowledge of copyright laws. The survey also found that nearly a third avoided research subjects or questions because of that lack of knowledge, and a fifth abandoned research that was already under way because of copyright worries.
The report's authors say that the abandoned research is perhaps the most important part of the study because it results in unrealized...
Read MoreFebruary 12, 2010, 12:53 PM ET
North Carolina State U. Gives Students Free Access to Physics Textbook Online
Physics students at North Carolina State University can get their introductory-level textbooks for free thanks to a new program by the college.
Each year about 1,300 students at North Carolina State take Physics 211 and Physics 212. Beginning this semester, the university's libraries and physics department have offered the courses' textbook online for free. Students can also print pages of the text or buy a printed copy at the university's bookstore for about $45.
Michael A. Paesler, head of the physics department at North Carolina State, said his department wanted to find a cost-effective way for students to get course material and felt an online option might work well. The department hopes to offer more material online, including an optics text written by Mr. Paesler to be used for a course next semester.
"This is just the way students nowadays communicate and apply learning," Mr....
Read MoreFebruary 4, 2010, 04:00 PM ET
ScrollMotion to Develop iPad E-Books for Major Publishers
Software developer ScrollMotion announced this week that it will make textbooks compatible with the new Apple iPad for four major publishers: McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson, and Kaplan Publishing. The e-books, in addition to providing the original content of textbooks, will allow users to highlight text in multiple colors, take audio and printed notes, search content in different ways, take quizzes, and watch videos.
ScrollMotion has worked with other publishers to adapt more than 7,000 titles for the iPod and iTouch, but the new deal with the textbook publishers "represent tens of thousands of textbooks," said Josh Koppel, chief creative officer and a co-founder of ScrollMotion. Although his company is "platform neutral," he said, the electronic textbooks it is developing are now compatible only with Apple devices.
Rik Kranenburg, McGraw-Hill's president for higher...
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