A publisher looks back in time nearly 150 years to complete its digital collection

Discusses print-on-demand as well.

Standards summaries for video, audio, more

There was a time, perhaps back in the early misty years of the twenty-first century, when the completion of big digitisation projects would be greeted with whoops and cheers from the nascent digital humanities community. Enthusiastic mailing list emails would trumpet how much easier scholarly access would be and librarians breathed a sigh of relief […]

Can we create a National Digital Library? That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public. Simple as it sounds, the question is extraordinarily complex. It involves issues that concern the nature of the library to be built, the technological difficulties of designing it, the legal obstacles to getting it off the ground, the financial costs of constructing and maintaining it, and the political problems of mobilizing support for it.  Despite the complexities, the fundamental idea of a National Digital Library (or NDL) is, at its core, straightforward. The NDL would make the cultural patrimony of this country freely available to all of its citizens. It would be the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress, but instead of being confined to Capitol Hill, it would exist everywhere, bringing millions of books and other digitized material within clicking distance of public libraries, high schools, junior colleges, universities, retirement communities, and any person with access to the Internet.

A collaborative effort by federal agencies to articulate common sustainable practices and guidelines for digitized and born digital historical, archival and cultural content.