Can the nonprofit world create a national digital library to put America's collective intellectual wealth within everyone's reach? Robert Darnton, the historian who directs the Harvard University Library, has been one of the most public champions of the idea.

This past weekend, Mr. Darnton convened a group of 42 top-level representatives from foundations, cultural institutions, and the library and scholarly worlds to talk about how to build that library. In a short statement, the group endorsed the idea of "a Digital Public Library of America," envisioning it as "an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources" drawn from the country's libraries, archives, museums, and universities.

The Chronicle tallked with Mr. Darnton about the discussions and what will happen next. Surprisingly, the biggest obstacle to the Digital Public Library, in his view, is not money but "finding...

Books take up space. That's a problem for any librarian tasked with finding room on overcrowded shelves. It's also a problem for a book-loving scholar who lives in a small New York City apartment with a toddler and more than 3,000 books. Under those conditions, something's got to give. Chances are good it won't be the toddler.

Alexander Halavais, an associate professor of communications at Quinnipiac University, found a partial solution to his city dweller's no-space-for-books dilemma: Slice and scan. A digital file takes up a lot less room than a codex book does.

In a post on his blog, A Thaumaturgical Compendium, Mr. Halavais described what he had done to some 800 of his books so far: "First I cut the boards off, and then slice the bindings. I have tried a table saw, but a cheap stack cutter works better. Then I feed [the pages] into my little page-fed scanner, OCR them (imperfectly) ...

If you're serious about thoroughbred racing, you know the Daily Racing Form, the newspaper that has been "America's turf authority" since 1894. With the help of the library staff at the University of Kentucky, 132,000 pages of the paper—some 531,000 articles—have been digitized and posted online. The articles date from the 1890s, when the paper was founded, up through the 1990s. The selection represents each decade's racing highlights, including Triple Crown coverage and reports on the careers of Seabiscuit, Secretariat, and the other great horses of the past hundred years.

The Daily Racing Form archive is a recent addition to the Kentuckiana Digital Library, a continuing project that provides access to digital archives of material particular to the state. "Nothing says Kentucky like thoroughbred racing, unless it's bourbon," says Mary Molinaro, associate dean for library...

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 ...

The dog days of summer—it's been an especially oppressive season here in the nation's capital—have us thinking about air-conditioned museums and the sunless stacks of libraries. Here are some cool digital archives or archive-related projects we've come across lately. If you can't make it to a museum, library, or archive in real life, cool off with some virtual browsing through one of these. Consider this an overture to the Society of American Archivists's annual meeting, which will be held here in Washington next week.

—The Churchill Archives Centre, at Churchill College, Cambridge, houses the great man's papers along with more than 570 collections "of personal papers and archives documenting the history of the Churchill era and after." It's supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, which makes us wonder how proposed cuts to arts-and-culture funding in Britain might affect projects...

It will surprise very few people to learn that having grown up in a computer age does not make today's students automatically savvy consumers of electronic resources. "It’s almost like information overload—like there’s so much of it out there, they just tend to gravitate to what they’re comfortable with," Mark McBride says of the students he works with at Buffalo State College of the State University of New York. "If they find a need for it, they don’t really evaluate it, they just start using it."

Mr. McBride is a blended librarian at Buffalo State. "Blended librarian" sounds like some kind of power smoothie. It's actually a fairly new model of academic librarianship that took root about five years ago. It combines traditional reference skills with hardware and software know-how and an interest in applying them to curriculum development and teaching. (Read more about the movement's...

Helen Lucas's career in cataloging began with an IBM Executive typewriter. Fairfield University's library had just acquired the machine in 1960 when Lucas, then a new high-school graduate, landed a job there. Because most of her job involved typing call numbers, access numbers, authors' names, and book titles, Ms. Lucas and the Executive spent a lot of time together back in the day.

"I had a long relationship with that typewriter, believe me," she recalls. "It had proportionate spacing on it. Every letter took up a certain amount of space, and they were all different."

By the time Ms. Lucas retired from the university library this summer, the Executive had long since been superseded by computers. The Chronicle asked her to describe some of the other technological shifts she encountered in a half-century's worth of cataloging.

When Ms. Lucas started work at the university, in...

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. ...

Thanks to videoconferencing, literary criticism is playing a small part in the rebuilding of Iraq.

At the end of last year, Steve Wilson, a professor of English at Texas State University at San Marcos, got an email from a U.S. official working on provincial reconstruction in Iraq. Through contacts at Iraqi universities, the official had met some professors of English who wanted to find a way to talk to their U.S. counterparts about literature. So he went looking on the Internet for American professors who had experience that might be relevant and found Mr. Wilson, who had taught in a largely Muslim country, Malaysia.

Mr. Wilson and two of his Texas State English-department colleagues, Nelly Rosario and John Blair, were invited to talk with the Iraqi scholars via videoconferencing. The first conversation took place in March. To participate, the Iraqi scholars had to dodge curfews and be...