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Dear all: please find enclosed a smattering of recent news of relevance to digital library issues. David *********************************** 1) New NSF news 2) British Library lists rare books on Amazon 3) Amazon's Search Inside the Book 4) Bartleby.com Adds Dictionary of Cultural Literacy 5) OCLC on Google 6) University of California Books Online 7) Library of Congress Announces The Atlantic World 8) A Digital Library of Library and Information Science *********************************** 1) New NSF news: The Information Technology Research solicitation is now posted on the NSF web site, with a series of new rules and instructions. http://www.nsf.gov/pubsys/ods/getpub.cfm?ods_key=nsf04012 ********************* 2) British Library lists rare books on Amazon [Extracts from a report by Matthew Broersma, ZDNet UK, November 24, 2003] The British Library has opened up its extensive bibliographic records to the Internet, adding millions of records to Amazon.co.uk's books listings. The move will make it possible for rare and antiquarian books, including nearly two million titles published before the 1970 introduction of the ISBN, to be listed on Amazon's site for the first time. In some cases, the information will be added to existing book listings, but it will make its most noticeable impact on Amazon's ability to list out-of-print, pre-ISBN and rare books, making rare books far easier to find online. The ISBN is an identifying number introduced by the publishing industry in 1970. An Amazon service introduced last year called Marketplace allows third-party sellers, such as antiquarian bookshops, to list their wares directly through Amazon's main book listings. A book can only be sold through Amazon's site if a catalogue entry for it already exists, and the addition of the British Library's book data means that Amazon's catalogue has been greatly expanded. It includes relatively recent volumes such as a 1967 edition of Ivor Herbert's The Queen Mother's Horses, as well as more obscure works such as Phillippe de Monte's second book of madrigals and other titles dating back to 1570. The library said that 1.7 million of the 2.55 million records contributed to Amazon date from before 1970. "Our bibliographic catalogues are second-to-none and we are delighted that Amazon.co.uk will be using them to underpin and support the marketplace service," said Natalie Ceeney, Director of Operations and Services at the British Library, in a statement. Source: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/ecommerce/0,39020372,39118066,00.htm ************************************* 3) Amazon's Search Inside the Book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/10197021/104-3824843-90407 04 "Search Inside the Book" allows you to search the full text of 33 million pages (120,000 books) for sale on Amazon. Now instead of just displaying books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords match your search terms, your search results will find items based on a full-text search of every word inside. As of today, there are 455 results for the phrase "digital library" and 23,878 results for "digital" and "library". ************************************ 4) Bartleby.com Adds Dictionary of Cultural Literacy The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, James Trefil Third Edition: Completely Revised and Updated, featuring over 6,900 entries http://www.bartleby.com/59/ . ******************************************* 5) OCLC on Google. OCLC is making 2 million commonly consulted records for widely held books available to Web search engines, starting soon with Google. Searches on Google will retrieve the records and link through OCLC to library holdings. http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb031027-2.shtml ******************************************** 6) University of California Books Online The University of California has launched the eScholarship Editions collection, which represents about a third of the University of California Press books in print with an additional 300 out-of-print titles. Most of the books are available only from computers on the UC campus, but about four hundred of them are available to all readers and can be reached at http://texts.cdlib.org/escholarship/ . ******************************************** 7) Library of Congress Announces The Atlantic World The LOC announces The Atlantic World: America and the Netherlands, which is now available at http://international.loc.gov/intldl/awkbhtml/awkbhome.html This site, which is available in both English and Dutch, "explores the history of the Dutch presence in America and the interactions between the United States and the Netherlands from Henry Hudson's 1609 voyage to the post-World-War-II period." To this end the site contains over 11,000 images from the LOC, the National Library of the Netherlands, and other Dutch institutions. *********************************************** 8) A Digital Library of Library and Information Science From D-Lib Magazine, November 2003, Volume 9 Number 11 The Documentation Research and Training Center (DRTC) (http://drtc.isibang.ac.in) is pleased to announce a digital library for Library and Information Science. The Documentation Research and Training Center, Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), is a premier research institute, founded by Prof. S.R. Ranganathan. The DTRC digital repository contains a specialist collection of Library and Information Science resources. The digital library can be accessed at <https://drtc.isibang.ac.in>. (Please note the "s" in https, i.e., the DL uses a secure layer over http.) Our objectives for the DRTC digital library are to: * Provide an open platform for information professionals to enable the sharing of resources worldwide * Provide access to papers published in DRTC conference and seminar proceedings * Facilitate Digital Library research interactions through a discussion forum-the Digital Library Research Group (DLRG) at <http://drtc.isibang.ac.in/dlrg> The DRTC digital library: * Is powered by the DSpace Digital Library System (Thanks to MIT-HP DSpace Team! <http://www.dspace.org>) and is OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiatives-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) Version 2-compliant (http://www.openarchives.org). The metadata format used by the DTRC DL is the Dublin Core Standard. * Holds and provides access to multilingual documents in various Indian languages. (Formats used are Unicode-compliant.) However, we also solicit submission of resources in languages other than the English and Indian languages. * Uses the CNRI Handle SystemR (http://www.handle.net), which generates a unique persistent identifier for every digital object in the repository. * Provides worldwide access to our collection of digitized documents, beginning with conference and seminar proceedings. We plan to extend our collections by including student theses/dissertations in the future. * Incorporates a collection of Prof. Ranganathan's photographs. We also encourage other information professionals to contribute memorabilia and photographs of their activities and important occasions for inclusion in the DRTC digital library. The international community of LIS professionals, researchers and academicians are encouraged to submit their pre-prints and author copyright retained material. Membership is open to all library and information professionals (mediated by moderator). Registration to the DL is at <https://drtc.isibang.ac.in/password-login>.