TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Library of Congress’ Category

By Tony Bandy

Besides ebooks, one of my favorite things to view on my Sony reader is newspapers. Not just today’s newspapers, but historical ones. Being a history fan, it’s a great way to keep up with current topics I’m researching for my blog, Adventures in History (http://history.writingwithtony.com). Do you like old newspapers as well? If so, let me share with you one of my favorite resources as well some tips and tricks on getting the information to your reading device of choice.

Chronicling America

The Library of Congress Chronicling America Project, located at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/, is my all time favorite site for viewing newspapers. With over a million pages and full digital coverage from the late 1800’s up through the early 1920’s, from stories of the pioneer West to the “growing up” of America after World War One, there’s a lot of great stuff to get interested in! (more…)

By David Rothman

As if the Kirkus and E&P shutdown announcements aren’t enough for traditionalists, here’s a warning for savvy librarians eager to avoid the fate of this bird—if they want to stay at an academic or public library rather than end up in the corporate world.

Project Information Literacy’s recent paper (PDF) says librarians were “rarely” used by eight out of ten college students participating in a survey. And that’s for “course-related assignments,” the very kind of situation where a librarian might make the most difference.

The paper isn’t so much about librarians per se as it as about how students seek out information for assignments, and Karen Schneider and Sara Houghton-Jan very smartly see this as a “must-read.”

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By David Rothman

Since the early 1990s, I’ve been pushing for a well-stocked national digital library system. The Obama White House so far has ignored the TeleRead idea as recently presented in the Huffington Post (and forwarded to White House staffer Shin Inouye on Oct. 23). But could we be getting there anyway?

Via the Reading 2.0 list, here’s an except from Harvard Professor Robert Darnton’s article in the New York Review of Books—about the Google Books controversy:

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By Paul Biba

Gary Price, who runs that wonderfully informative site Resource Shelf, send me the following email. Nice to see the Library of Congress stepping up to the times.

Launching today is a new site from the library called Read.gov. I have
an overview post here if you’re interested but that’s really not the
reason I’m writing.

http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/09/26/all-sorts-of-features-read-gov-launches-today/

Part of the site is the reason. At the moment they have 29 “classic”
books for teens and kids that can be read in their entirety online.

Move through a book page-by-page (forward or backwards) by simply
clicking on the page you’re currently reading or looking at. The LC
Book Reader also allows you to see facing pages, the option to go
directly to a specific page, zoom (in and out), and the ability to
view the book in “scroll” mode. At the moment books are available in
two categories: Teens and Kids.

Some of the titles available today are: The Raven, A Christmas Carol,
A Wonder-Book for Girls & Boys (Teens) and The Baby’s Own Aesop,
Baseball ABC, Denslow’s Humpty Dumpty, Mother Goose Finger Plays, The
Pied Piper of Hamelin, The Story of the Three Little Pigs, The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and The Wonders of a Toy Shop (Kids).

Available at: http://www.read.gov/books/

Hopefully, more titles will be added in the near future.