Digital Library Digest: May 13, 2012 (Mother’s Day Edition)

Ars Technica writes up DPLA West; appraises project goals, promise, and obstacles. “Despite the challenges facing the Digital Public Library of America, it’s a concept that needs to come to fruition sooner than later. Not simply because a Digital Library would be a professional accomplishment for many well-meaning intellectuals, but because citizens deserve a way to access, even just for the duration of a rental, the same ideas that people who live near better-funded libraries can access, without having to engage in piracy.

One of the earliest speakers at the conference, Dwight McInvaill, a local librarian for North Carolina’s Georgetown County Library, spoke of how important it is to digitize works for the good of the public. His own library’s digital collection gets over 2 million hits a month. ‘Small libraries serve 64.7 million people,” he said, many of those in poverty. “We must engage forcefully in the bright American Digital Renaissance,’ McInvaill proclaimed.” From Megan Geuss’s post, “Exercises in democracy: building a digital public library”

Libraries continue to adapt to challenges of providing digital content and services across publishers’ restrictions and the digital divide. “One of the biggest challenges libraries face in this new digital age is the friction in their relationship with publishers, caused largely by the advent of e-books.

Publishers argue that borrowing a printed book from a library requires a patron to physically visit the building and then return a few weeks later to bring it back, which is more difficult thanpurchasing it from an online retailer. When libraries allow patrons to download e-books through one click on a website, the convenience factor that might drive a reader to purchase a book is eliminated. Penguin Group recently blocked Kindle owners from the ability to download library e-books directly from their devices — now they must transfer the e-book from the library site to a computer, and then to a Kindle.” From Jenny Shank’s article on MindShift, “Changing Policies On Digital Books Wreak Havoc on Libraries”

American Library Association solicits information on library-as-publisher model. “At this moment in our profession, an increasing number of libraries are engaged in the creation, publication, and preservation of digital content. This may represent an opportunity, or shift in our profession, moving us from the end of a publishing and distribution chain to somewhere closer to the source. The issue we’re investigating here is not generally library relations with existing publishers, but activities where the library takes a lead or key partnership role in getting the content into digital format and delivering it over the long term. That takes us into archiving and preservation. In addition to the processes of gathering, preparing, and posting such content, we are also grappling with the challenges of copyright, fair use, and licensing in the digital environment.” From Kathleen Hughes’s post on the PLA Blog, “ALA seeks advice about ‘library as publisher’”

Terse,  journalistic prose of Ernest Hemingway now available in digital form from his days as a terse journalist. “Ernest Hemingway was a columnist for the Toronto Star from 1920-1924 where he wrote 191 stories. More than 70 of them are currently accessible via the digital archive (free). A newsprint version of the material is also available for sale.

Direct to The Hemingway Papers’ Digital Archive

The legendary writer’s reporting from the Toronto Star archives, featuring historical annotations by William McGeary, a former editor who researched Hemingway’s columns extensively for the newspaper, along with new insight and analysis from the Star’s team of Hemingway experts.” From Gary Price’s post on TeleRead, “Toronto Star Releases Digital Archive of Articles Written by Ernest Hemingway For the Newspaper (1920-1924)”