(11 Aug 2021) The Papers Past website is a goldmine of information, with millions of pages of digitised historical content from all over New Zealand. Papers Past first saw the light of day in August 2001. Over its 20 year life-span there are have been a number of iterations. Tracy Powell, Digitisation Advisor, gives a brief history…
(3 Aug 2021) The Chevening Fellowship Programme is the UK government’s international awards scheme aimed at fostering knowledge exchange and collaboration, and developing global leaders. In 2015, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) has partnered with the British Library to offer professionals two new fellowships every year, and recently the two organisations have announced…
(2 Aug 2021) The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) is an international collaborative project based at the British Library and with centres around the world. The Project aims to preserve and digitise collections from archaeological sites along the Eastern part of the ancient trade routes known as the Silk Roads, including the Mogao caves near Dunhuang…
(18 Jun 2021) Stanford Libraries is embarking on an exciting collaboration with the National Central Library of Taiwan (NCL) to digitize a selection of Chinese rare books in the holdings of the East Asia Library and the Bowes Art & Architecture Library. The scanned titles will be added to the NCL’s Rare Books and Special Collections…
(12 Jul 2021) New Zealand: The National Library will donate 600,000 books that it was planning to cull from its overseas collection to a United States-based internet archive that will make digital copies of the works freely available online. (official press release) National Librarian Rachel Esson announced the “historic” agreement on Monday, saying books…
(19 May 2021) The digitization of Chinese classics is challenging, as Chinese ancient characters are complex. Throughout history, one Chinese character might have several variants and written forms. Digitizing Chinese ancient books through optical character recognition (OCR) not only facilitates machine reading but also gives a new life to numerous ancient books for public peruse. …
When they realised even Miles Franklin winners can be sent to the pulp pile, authors, librarians and academics began building a digital ark for bereft books (24 Jun 2021) Of the 62 books that won Australia’s Miles Franklin Award between 1957 and 2019, 23 are currently not available as ebooks, 40 are not available…
(3 May 2021) In 2013, through the generous support of William and Judith Bollinger, the British Library embarked upon a five-year project, in collaboration with the National Library Board of Singapore, to digitize materials in the British Library of interest to Singapore. The project initially focused on Malay manuscripts, early maps of Singapore, and archival…
(22 April 2021) The National Library of China (NLC), in collaboration with nine other libraries across the country, has made over 1,700 sets of ancient books available digitally, in a bid to preserve the books and make them more accessible to the public. The newly uploaded resources, including copies of ancient books in the…
(Apr 2021) From National Diet Library Newsletter: With the COVID-19 pandemic, remote library services are becoming more and more important. In this article, we would like to introduce the NDL’s online services and examples of their use: Digital Exhibitions of the National Diet Library The digital exhibitions introduce unique collections of the NDL with…