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...

Are you on Twitter? That tweet you sent this morning about what your cat ate for breakfast is now part of history. The Library of Congress announced today—first via its Twitter feed—that it will archive all public tweets posted since Twitter went live in March 2006.

"That's a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions," a news release from the library points out. Pity the future historians who might spend their careers sifting through billions of our 140-character blurts about weather, irritating co-workers, and the antics of pop stars.

But one man's Twitter flotsam is another man's cultual and historical gold, and Twitter has already made its mark as a way to spread word of signicant events. "Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition," the library said. "Just...

That's Archivist with a capital A, as in the person who heads up the National Archives and Records Administration. The latest person to hold that position is David S. Ferriero, who became AOTUS (Archivist of the United States) in November 2009. Mr. Ferriero used to be the director of the New York Public Libraries, and it looks like he has brought some of that public-outreach sensibility to his new role.

He's blogging, for one thing. (Imagine his predecessors doing that.) AOTUS: Collector in Chief debuted last week with the tagline "The Archivist's Take on Transparency, Collaboration, and Participation at the National Archives."

In his first post, Mr. Ferriero lays out (a little drily, it must be said) his aim to have NARA "reclaim its records management role." He emphasizes that "we understand that electronic records are now a fundamental part of our documentary record." And, he says, ...

The February 18 fairness hearing on the revised settlement in the Google Books lawsuit has come and gone, and the world now waits for word from Denny Chin, the federal judge in charge of the case. It could be a long wait. At the Association of American Publishers meeting held in Washington this week, there was talk that we might not hear from the judge for a couple of months. (He could issue a ruling anytime, of course.)

One question on the minds of everyone following the settlement is : What happens after the judge rules? Jonathan Band, a specialist in technology law and policy, has created a nifty chart of possible paths the settlement might take, depending on what Judge Chin decides. Called "GBS March Madness: Paths Forward for the Google Books Settlement," the chart lays out a many-branched tree of appeals or litigation, all the way up to the Supreme Court.

In a note, Mr. Band...

The U.S. Department of Justice has weighed in on Google Book Search Settlement 2.0, saying that despite "substantial progress, substantial issues remain." In a statement of interest filed on Thursday, the department said that the revamped agreement "suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: It is an attempt to use the class-action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the court in this litigation." As a result, it concluded, the deal "purports to grant legal rights that are difficult to square with the core principle of the Copyright Act that copyright owners generally control whether and how to exploit their works during the term of copyright."

As in its earlier filing in the class-action case between Google and authors' and publishers' groups, though, the department made a point of noting the "vast...

Stanford University reaffirmed its commitment to Google Book Search today, announcing that it has a signed a new, expanded agreement that makes it a full partner library in the book-digitizing project. In a written statement, the university called the deal "a milestone in Stanford's commitment to the program and to the provision of public access to millions of its books." The university joins the Universities of Michigan, Texas, and Wisconsin at Madison in signing stronger participation agreements with the company.

Stanford also expressed strong support for the revised settlement in the Google Book Search lawsuit.  "We are highly supportive of the amended settlement, which offers an enormous public good, making the full text of millions of books available to the American public," Stanford's librarian, Michael A. Keller, said in the statement. The university's vote of confidence for the ...

We hope you enjoyed a holiday break from news of the Google Book Search settlement. A month into the new year, though, it's time to check back in with the case. January 28 was the deadline to file objections to the revised version. Denny Chin, the federal district judge charged with reviewing the settlement, is scheduled to hold a fairness hearing on Settlement 2.0 on February 18th.

Here are some of the latest developments and reactions to catch our eye. If you have come across other useful commentary or reactions, please share those in the comments.

--A group of some 80 professors, led by Pamela Samuelson, a professor of law and information at the University of California at Berkeley, has sent Judge Chin a letter explaining some academic authors' concerns over Settlement 2.0. The letter-signers write that "whatever the outcome of the fairness hearing, we believe strongly that the...

Cornell University Library announced today that it wants the top institutional users of arXiv.org to help pay for the online scientific repository. "Keeping an open-access resource like arXiv sustainable means not only covering its costs, but also continuing to enhance its value, and that kind of financial commitment is beyond a single institution's resources," Oya Rieger, Cornell's associate university librarian for information technologies, said in a statement describing the new strategy.

The experiment is shaping up to be a test of how well multiple institutions can band together to support critical scholarly resources. For scientists in physics, mathematics, quantitative biology, statistics, computer science, and related fields, arXiv has become an indispensible clearinghouse for the latest research. The brainchild of a physics professor, Paul Ginsparg, the repository holds nearly 6...

... and you'll be surprised what he or she can do with it. That's what the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Energy figured. Last year, they staged a competition for "computationally intensive" humanities projects that would draw on the DOE's High Performance Computing (HPC) resources at Nersc, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Was the gamble worth it? Yes, to judge by the results on display at the Coalition for Networked Information membership meeting, held in Washington, D.C., this week. Several scholars involved in the HPC competition reported on their supercomputing experiences. Among them were Gregory Crane, editor in chief of the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University, and David Bamman, a computational linguist with the project, which has been experimenting with computer-enhanced ways...

Washington, D.C.—Don't de-accession those print materials yet. The digital research library is not quite ready for prime time, according to Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University, and Geneva Henry, executive director of Rice's Center for Digital Scholarship.

At a session of the membership meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information, held here yesterday and today, Ms. Spiro and Ms. Henry talked about research they have done into how close we are to all-digital (or even mostly digital) research libraries. To find out, they did case studies of several libraries founded since 2000, including facilities at the University of California at Merced, Olin College, Soka University of America, California State University-Channel Islands, and New York University's Abu Dhabi campus.

Signs of the digital shift are everywhere. E-resources expenditures "are only...