The first ‘unglued’ (crowd-funded rights to make a book free to the world in e-format) is available for download under a Creative Commons licence. Oral Literature in Africa by Ruth H. Finnegan. Read Jan Holmquist’s article at Tame the Web to learn more about Unglue It.  

If you have missed this earlier, here’s the news and if you knew already, here’s an update. On February 25th, 2011, the National Library of Australia officially launched the Australian Women’s Weekly digital archive on Trove. NLA has digitised all available issues of this iconic magazine from 1933 to 1982, with permission from Australian Consolidate [...]

Been offline over the weekend? You may have missed the news on HarperCollins new licences for ebooks for libraries. This came to the attention of librarians via a message from Overdrive CEO Steve Potash, who did not actually mention the publisher’s name. HarperCollins confirmed it was the publisher in question. Two key things to note [...]

IzRock’s Joseph (I think that’s his identity) and his mate Rene travel from Sydney to Canberra to visit the National Library of Australia to deposit zines and art books. Their minds are boggled by the size and scope of the NLA’s archiving activities. Check out the photo essay.

Wired reports that more than 2 million public domain books will soon be available for on-demand printing from Google Book Search in partnership with On Demand Books. According to the On Demand Books site, the only locations in Australia are: Angus and Robertson in Bourke St, Melbourne. Baillieu Library University of Melbourne (Fall 2009 – [...]

On 21st April, the World Digital Library was launched. The World Digital Library brings together digitised primary documents including rare books, maps, manuscripts, films and photographs, from countries around the world, with content available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Inspired by James Billington from the Library of Congress in 2004, it [...]

In early 2008, Flickr launched the Commons to showcase the public photo collections of libraries, museums and archives from around the world. The Library of Congress was the first to start adding their collections and New York Public Library (probably) the most recent. The two main objectives of the Commons are to increase access to [...]

Australian Newspapers beta, was recently released and after a short visit to the Courier Mail classifieds of Tuesday 12th April 1864, I can say that the user interface looks great. Users can correct errors in the OCR (optical character recognition) process of scanning the newspapers, add tags, navigate easily between daily editions and pages, and [...]

From Wired Campus, comes a report of an e-book design where users can ‘turn the screen’. Comments on the article suggest that readers are underwhelmed at the possibilities presented by researchers from the University of Maryland and the University of California at Berkeley in a prototype dual-display e-book reader. But the researchers state that “Our [...]

The Live Search team at Microsoft recently announced that they are winding up their Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects. “Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content [...]