Congressman Frank J. Guarini Library Blog

Late last year, the Library of Congress hosted the first International Summit of the Book. Distinguished scholars, national librarians, and publishers hosted panels on such topics as books and copyright, and the past present and future of  the book. All these panels are now available for viewing.

Springer Publishers has rendered this ten-volume major encyclopedia into an open-access wiki under the auspices of the European Mathematical Society. More than thirty international mathematical scholars serve on the editorial board, ensuring the highest quality articles. Scholars are invited to either submit new articles or update articles already in the encyclopedia. As it now stands, more than 8.000 articles are online, exploring 50,000 mathematical “notions”.

With the cost of required texts for college courses spiraling ever upwards, more than a few faculty are trying to reduce this onerous financial burden. Many either write or have recourse to use open access textbooks that are freely available online. OATS: Open Access Textbooks from the Iowa State University provides a portal to numerous sites where free books are available. Also, check out our library’s books section for additional links where you will find millions of volumes.

Originally published in 2002, The Encycloepdia of Mathematics, is considered a primary tool for this field. Recently, a free, wiki-based  online version has been released by its publisher containing all the original articles which can be updated along with new submissions, all under the editorial auspices of the European Mathematical Society. More than 8,000 can be accessed in all the sub-fields of mathematics.

Not content to be a retailer, Amazon recently announced that it will publish around 40 titles a year beginning this fall. This article – Larry Kirshbaum shares many more details on how Amazon Publishing will work – provides an excellent overview of this new venture. For those unfamiliar with Mr Kirshbaum, he is the former head of the Time Warner Book Group and one of the industry’s giants. C-SPAN has video interviews and discussions with him. More information on this development is found at: Business Week, Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.

The Theological Commons, residing at the Princeton Theological Seminary, features tens of thousands of books freely available in digital format. The vast majority of these titles date from the 1801 to the present; almost 40,000 are in English. Searching can be done by author, title, date, language, and full text; if you go to the Internet Archive version of this collection, you can search by subject. When we were earnest gaduate students, our doctoral work (alas, never completed) centered on the Waldensian faith, a pre-Reformation dissident group whose descendants still practice both here and in Europe. (For those interested, here are some brief treatments from encyclopedia.com as well as a short monograph written in 1880 but still referenced – Waldo and the Waldensians before the Reformation by Emilio Comba or its longer companion from 1889 – The History of the Waldenses of Italy) Using the Theological Commons and searching under “Waldensians,” and its variants ”Waldenses” and “Vaudois,” we were able to call up works that 35 years ago were very difficult to find, let alone read. A great place to research the history of religions using contemporary sources. (For those further intrigued by the Waldensians, please peruse these volumes of the Bollettino della societa di studi valdesi. Again, if we only had had access to these digital versions back in the day!)

Spearheaded by the University of Chicago, the twenty-eight modern literary languages of South Asia are being represented online in this freely accessible site: Digital Dictionaries of South Asia. Ranging from Assamese to Urdu, the dictionaries, primarily from the previous two centuries,  were chosen by language experts and digitized. As of this writing, eighteen languages have digital dictionaries. Needless to say,  this is an ongoing project as more works are expected to be added. In addition, primers and readers in some of these languages are also online.

Fanboys and fangirls alike! Rejoice! The beta edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fictions has been released! (In the spirit of transparency, we must reveal that we were a charter member and executive officer of the NYU Speculative Fiction Society and co-editor of its ‘zine – Aurora. And still read the stuff to this day.) To be completed at the end of 2012 with a word count north of four million, this iteration contains 3.2 million words of enlightenment. You can search via author, theme, media, or culture. The articles offer frank assessments of their subject matter, contain extensive author checklists, and are full of links. We’ll be reading this over the weekend; after all, we have finished going through the Internet.

Justice Chin, in a written opinion, has turned down the Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA) originally worked out between Google and copyright holders. Including a legal memo from  Germany that considers Google a ”serial scanning infringer,” Justice Chin concludes that the ASA is not “fair, adequate and reasonable”(22) Background information on this important case can be found at: Google Books Settlement and Privacy (EPIC); Google Book Settlement (American Library Association, please read the informative Guide for the Perplexed: Part I, Part II, and Part III); The Google Library Project: Is Digitization for Purposes of Online Indexing Fair Use Under Copyright Law? (CRS); Google Book Search (New York Times Topics); and Google Books Bibliography (replete with many links).