At Temple, the next frontier of print is digital. Librarians at Charles Library are digitizing hundreds of sci-fi books, preserving them in a new format and making it possible for researchers to analyze more books than they would ever be able to read at once.
The books are part of the Paskow Science Fiction Collection, which was founded in 1972 when the family of David Paskow, EDU ’69, ’71, donated 5,000 sci-fi paperbacks from his personal library to the university. The collection soon expanded to include other material that might not last long if it wasn’t archived—magazines, posters and personal papers—and branched out to incorporate fantasy.
The collection reflects Temple’s commitment to preserving what might otherwise be overlooked, said Margery Sly, director of special collections at Temple University Libraries. “Since the ’60s, [Temple has] been interested in documenting contemporary 20th century modern movements, which is somewhat unusual for rare books and special collections,” she said.
Source: Temple Now
[Clip]
Digitizing a book means not only scanning its pages, but also running them through Optical Character Recognition, a process that transforms images into text. “Once you have converted the text into data, there are a lot of things we can learn about texts that we can’t by reading them,” [Alex] Wermer-Colan, [a postdoctoral fellow at the libraries’ Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio] said.
[Clip]
About 300 sci-fi books have been scanned over the past two years. They’re usually only accessible on library computers (the material is IP-restricted due to copyright) but since Temple also uploaded them to HathiTrust Digital Library, they’ve been made available to read online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers who would like to study them as data can access them through the HathiTrust Research Center.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.
From Fox 17 (Grand Rapids): The folks over at the Grand Rapids Public Library made a fascinating discovery while digging through their massive archives back in March 2021, and are ...
The article linked below was recently published by the International Journal of Communication. Title Knowledge Work in Platform Fact-Checking Partnerships Authors Valérie Bélair-Gagnon University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, USA Rebekah Larsen ...
A Guide to Communicating With Others: Messaging Apps (via Privacy International) De Gruyter Acquires Mercury Learning and Information Report by the French Committee for Open Science Working Group on Electronic ...
From an Internet Archive Blog Post by Jason Scott: It’s time to add another family of emulated older technology to the Internet Archive. The vast majority of platforms within what ...
The article linked below was recently published by Quantitative Science Studies. Title Crossref as a Bibliographic Discovery Tool in the Arts and Humanities Authors Ángel Borrego Universitat de Barcelona, Melcior ...
Colorado: Suspensions Increase at Pikes Peak Library District Under New Security Protocols (via The Gazette) Montana: ImagineIF Trustees Hold Special Meeting on Library Security Concerns (via Daily Inter Mountain) North ...
From the Associated Press: A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were ...
From The Sydney Morning Herald: Authors, illustrators, and editors will be compensated for e-book and audiobook library borrowings for the first time, in a move by the federal government to ...
From the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA): A draft Customer Research Agenda was open for public review and comment in October 2022. “We’re grateful for the feedback we received ...
From MIT Technology Review: Hidden patterns purposely buried in AI-generated texts could help identify them as such, allowing us to tell whether the words we’re reading are written by a ...
From the Congressional Research Service: Nearly one in four Americans has a disability, according to 2018 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Congress has recognized that in addition to making ...
From The NY Times: When [Joan] Didion died in 2021 at age 87, the news set off an outpouring of tributes to a writer who fused penetrating insight and idiosyncratic personal voice, ...
