I too lived, (I was of old Brooklyn,) I too walked the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it, I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me, In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me, In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me.

Those lines, from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the version that appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, are a good reminder that Walt Whitman was a Brooklyn boy as well as a citizen of the world. Next fall, some modern New Yorkers — students at City Tech, CUNY’s New York City College of Technology — will explore the Fulton Ferry Landing that Whitman described in the poem and record their investigations on a Web site. Meanwhile, thanks to open-source software, students at three other institutions — New York University...

WASHINGTON, D.C.—If you’re used to the decorum of a big academic conference—the Modern Language Association’s annual confab, for instance—the atmosphere at last week’s WebWise Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital Age comes as a bit of a shock. No more furtive tapping away at your laptop in the dark corners of meeting rooms. Laptops are not only tolerated at WebWise, they’re practically mandatory.

At this year’s WebWise conference, held here Feb. 26-27, the organizers—the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Wolfsonian museum at Florida International University—arranged for a designated conference wifi connection. They also set up a backchannel Twitter-style feed (via a service called Today’s Meet

Manx, Aasax, Ubykh, Eyak: Once spoken in, respectively, the Isle of Man, Tanzania, Turkey, and Alaska, all four languages have died out in the last 35 years. Of the 6,000 or so languages still heard in the world, about 2,500 are at risk, and 199 have fewer than 10 speakers left, according to Unesco.

To bring attention to the plight of these endangered linguistic species, Unesco today unveiled an interactive online version of the latest edition of its Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. (The print edition comes out next month.) The atlas draws on the work of more than 30 linguists, supervised by its editor in chief, Christopher Moseley of Australia.

Users of the atlas can search by country or area, language name, number of speakers, or vitality, which includes five categories: unsafe, definitely endangered,...

Thousands of medieval manuscripts have been digitized by libraries around the world. The trick has been finding them. Matthew Fisher, an assistant professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles, thought up a solution: the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts, a centralized online archive of holdings around the world.

For decades, even centuries, scholars have had to find their way around library holdings using shelfmarks, unique identifying numbers assigned to each document — a kind of Dewey Decimal System without a unifying organizational principle, according to Mr. Fisher. The catalog will pull many of those records into one spot, so that researchers who cannot hop on a plane to faraway libraries can still get their hands, virtually, on manuscripts they want to work with.

So far Mr. Fisher and his team...

Lynne Brindley, the chief executive of the British Library, is worried about whether we’re saving enough—not enough money, but enough of the digital evidence of our times. In an essay in Sunday’s Observer, Ms. Brindley worries that whole chunks of national memory are being lost and that “historians and citizens of the future will find a black hole in the knowledge base of the 21st century.”

She cites two examples (no jokes about the ephemeral nature of the Bush legacy, please):

At the exact moment Barack Obama was inaugurated, all traces of President Bush vanished from the White House Web site, replaced by images of and speeches by his successor. Attached to the Web site had been a booklet entitled 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration—they may never know them now. When ...

Part of an occasional series of conversations about digital archives.

In the early 1860s, Walt Whitman wrote a poem, never finished, called “The Vault at Pfaff’s,” about a New York City saloon where “where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse.” Those “drinkers and laughers” included creative types like Whitman, the actor and writer Ada Clare, William Dean Howells, and Henry Clapp Jr., whose literary weekly, The Saturday Press, published fiction, poetry, and social commentary turned out by the “Pfaff’s bohemians” in the 1850s and 1860s.

You can find biographies of about 150 Pfaffians and an annotated bibliography of about 4,000 of their literary works at the Vault at Pfaff’s, an online archive dedicated to the collective creative scene Whitman described in his poem. The site went live in 2006. The...

In the mid-1990s, Ed Folsom, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, and another scholar, Kenneth M. Price, set out to create a digital scholarly edition of Walt Whitman’s works. The Walt Whitman Archive began life as a CD-ROM. Now housed at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where Mr. Price teaches, the archive contains thousands of digital facsimiles of Whitman’s poetry and letters as well as writings about Whitman, and it’s constantly growing. It averages more than 20,000 visits a day from scholars, students, and Whitmaniacs everywhere. Money to keep the archive afloat comes from the co-directors’ home institutions and a series of grants, and an endowment is in the works.

The Chronicle asked Mr. Folsom to chat about how the archive has evolved and where it’s headed. This is the first in an occasional series of...

It’s tough enough to afford textbooks these days. Students with disabilities that make it hard to read standard type sizes face another challenge: getting textbooks in formats they can use.

The Association of American Publishers and the Alternative Media Access Center, part of the University System of Georgia, have come up with a way to help: AccessText Network, a “membership exchange network” that will serve as a clearinghouse for publishers and campus-based disability-service offices.

The idea, as the project’s Web site describes it, is to “facilitate and support the nationwide delivery of alternative files for students with diagnosed print-related disabilities.” AccessText will be a conduit for information about what is available and in what formats. Campus disability offices will be able to convey ...

Too many people are excited about Europeana, a pan-European digital library, archive, and museum. Last week, when the project’s prototype Web site debuted, it got 10 million hits per hour — and crashed.

Reporting the news, Library Journal quoted Martin Selmayr, a spokesman for Viviane Reding, the commissioner in charge of the project. Mr. Selmayr managed to find a silver lining in the situation, telling reporters that Europeana was a “victim of its success.”

With 27 countries participating, the online venture already has some two million digitized objects in its virtual collection, including not just books, newspapers, maps, and manuscripts, but also sound recordings, paintings, and even movies. The journal described it as “Europe’...

Your book is finally out—congratulations. Good luck getting some ink from the ever-shrinking pool of review outlets.

If you happen to be an author affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin, though, promoting that book just got a little bit easier. Late last month, the university’s Office of Public Affairs started ShelfLife@Texas, a new blog devoted to books by the university’s professors, alumni, and staffers.

The university had noticed “declining opportunities for coverage of faculty books in traditional media,” according to Jennifer McAndrew, a public-affairs specialist who edits the blog. Plus, “we’re constantly getting requests from alumni wanting to reconnect with the literary life at the university,” she said.

The blog seemed like a good way to spread the word about university books and attract alumni readers at ...