Google has started scanning newspapers and is including them in the Google News Archive. This expands on their earlier efforts to index existing digital news archives like the New York Times and Washington Post.
Read more:
Google Blog - Bringing history online, one newspaper at a time
CNet News - Google raising newspaper morgues from the dead
Issue 3 of The Code4Lib Journal is out! After just a few issues, I think this is turning out to be the best place to learn about new and innovative work being done at other libraries.
In this issue you’ll find:
Library 2.0: an academic’s perspective blog has information about Zotero Commons, a new Zotero collaboration among scholars. (It will rely on the new Zotero 2.0 Server technology when that appears). Zotero Commons is a collaboration between George Mason University and the Internet Archive.
“Its purpose is to create an archive of scholarly resources, contributed by working scholars, in the public domain. The archive will offer a free optical scanning service to make the documents searchable. .. “
An amazing, significant project of course, but what raised some eyebrows was this statement from an Inside Higher Ed article:
“Now, an effort at George Mason University seeks to bypass libraries entirely and delve into scholars’ file cabinets instead …”.
Which, although journalist-speak, raises all sorts of interesting questions, issues and lively discussion in academic libraryland . Anyway, check out the blog post and discussion.
The blog btw is a favorite – deep, thoughtful posts . On your RSS radar, or you can keep up with a live aggregation here (click on Blogs: Libraries and scroll down the page) .
I use Zotero, admire it, and cuss it regularly because it doesn’t do what I want (yet). But the potential is absolutely stunning. If you can imagine a world (perhaps in the not-too-distant future) where our metadata is free from the OPAC and exists as a plug-in module or a web service, then add scholar-produced tags/links and full text access – you get a glimpse of where this could go.