In a new Publisher’s Weekly Blog Post, Peter Brantley talks about enhanced e-books.
From the Post:
I think it is inevitable that over the next few years we’ll see most non-fiction works move into this form of cross-media narrative. Peter Osnos observes in The Atlantic that “What is essential to the process of producing an enhanced e-book such as Jacqueline Kennedy is having full access to the relevant archival material. Creation of altogether new content just for enhanced e-books like these would be a major expense.” This is perhaps true, but if one considers the amount of rights clearing work that already takes place for historical non-fiction treatises, then it is not too hard to imagine that future non-fiction will be a collaboration between historians, film archivists, geographers, information architects, user interaction specialists, and librarians.
Read Brantley’s Complete Blog Post
eBooks: "Non-fiction, Cinema, and Libraries" by Peter Brantley
New Online Database: "UNODC Launches First Global Database of Human Trafficking Cases"
From the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime:
UNODC has developed a human trafficking case law database to provide immediate, public access to officially documented instances of this crime. The database contains details on victims’ and perpetrators’ nationalities, trafficking routes, verdicts and other information related to prosecuted cases from across the world. In doing so, it provides not only mere statistics on numbers of prosecutions and convictions, but also the real-life stories of trafficked persons as documented by the courts. The database aims to assist judges, prosecutors, policy-makers, media researchers and other interested parties by making available details of real cases with examples of how the respective national laws in place can be used to prosecute human trafficking. At its launch, more than 150 selected cases from over 30 countries and two regional courts have been uploaded, with an additional 100 cases from over a dozen states to be added in the coming months.
By creating the database, UNODC is working to increase the visibility of successful prosecutions and at the same time promote awareness of the realities of this devastating crime. Such a database of human trafficking cases enables users to take experiences and court decisions from other countries into account when dealing with human trafficking issues, consult on practices in different jurisdictions and broaden their knowledge of human trafficking crimes.
Direct to Human Trafficking Case Law Database
Much More in the Complete UNODC Announcement
eBooks: U. of Georgia: "University Library Waiting for More Data in Judgment of Students’ Digital Preferences"
From The Red and Black (Ind. Student Paper):
University Head of Access Services Viki Timian said there are some signs that print circulation may be down at the University.
But changes have been minimal. From 2009 to 2010, checkout numbers for undergraduate leisure reading dropped by 83 books, but graduate checkout numbers rose and the numbers could fluctuate from year to year.
“There is a slight downward trend, and I’m not sure what the percentage is, for the checkout of books overall,” she said. “But it’s a very small amount.”
Nielsen said it’s also hard to compare the checkout rate of the University’s 30,000 volume e-book collection to the main circulation materials.
“For e-books, we can get numbers on there as far as usage,” she said. “The problem is that they come from different publishers and vendors so we have to get them from all the different suppliers. It’s not all one place like regular books.”
Read the Complete Article
The Library as eBookseller: "Entire eBook Catalogs to be Available for Discovery, Sampling & Links to Booksellers…From the Public Library"
From an OverDrive News Release:
A key part of OverDrive’s WIN platform enhancements (“Want It Now”) for its network of 15,000 libraries worldwide, the WIN Catalog will maximize discovery and potential sell-through by providing samples and links to national and local booksellers for library website visitors that discover a title and “Want It Now.”
The WIN Catalog will feature complete long tail collections of eBook and audiobook titles that comprise a publisher’s catalog, 90% or more of which libraries do not have available for lending. Libraries that opt-in to offer access to OverDrive’s WIN Catalog will earn affiliate fees for all sales referred through a link from their public library website.
To enable the ‘buy-it-now’ links from the library websites, OverDrive has entered into associate and affiliate programs with national and independent bookstores including Amazon, Barnes&Noble.com, Powells.com and Books-A-Million, and is in dialogue with major and independent booksellers in the UK, Canada, Australia and other markets. For every retail sale referred from a WIN Catalog, the library will earn a credit for the entire affiliate fee.
Good to see that libraries who opt-in will earn an affiliates commission but this might continue to blur the lines between the public library and the online bookstore. Of course, if users are going to by eBooks it’s good to see that the library can make a few dollars from it but again if the integration is not clear to the user, confusion and aggravation are possible.
Confusion and aggravation that the library will have to deal with and could possibly damage the library’s reputation as a community organization vs. an online merchant.
True, users will be purchasing the material from online book vendors but it’s the LIBRARY that’s offering the service and we should be doing all that we can to not pass the buck to others. When we do bring others into the mix, we should have direct contact with them and not have to go through others to get to the source of the issue.
We’ve asked OverDrive a few questions about the program and will update when we hear back. One of the questions is once again asking if the local library receives an affiliates commission if a user downloads a Kindle ebook and at some point in the future purchases it (using the same account) from the Amazon.com web site.
Digital Humanities: UNC’s Innovate@Carolina Opens Virtual Lab
From the Daily Tar Heel:
UNC’s Digital Innovation Lab, a part of UNC’s $125 million effort to spur innovation, launched Monday, aimed at sparking collaboration in the digital humanities.
The virtual lab features projects and resources that can be easily used and accessed by large audiences. It will encourage the creation of public projects that have social value
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Lab manager Pam Lach said members of the project are interested in the kind of scholarship that reaches out to the community.
The 24 undergraduate and 12 graduate students in the lab will make an impact on the conceptual level, Lach said.
“It really goes beyond those concrete numbers because what we’re really trying to do is change how the humanities are taught, and that’s at every level,” Lach said.
Read the Complete Article
Direct to UNC Digital Innovation Lab Web Site
See Also: UNC to Launch Digital Innovation Lab (September, 2011)
Article: "Multimedia Classification" From BBC Research
From a BBC R&D Blog Post:
As John Zubrzycki mentioned yesterday, this project is running as part of BBC R&D’s Archive Research Section, is developing new ways in which to open up the BBC’s archive to the public. The aim of the project is to allow people to search and browse the archive to find content that they want to watch or listen to, but didn’t know existed.
[Clip]
In R&D, we are currently developing systems that can watch and listen to a programme in a similar way to people. We are developing systems that can recognise, and more importantly understand, what is in a programme (e.g. people, places, objects such as cars or Daleks), what these are doing (e.g. are character’s talking or shouting to each other? Is someone running? What are the characters saying to each other?) and what is the mood, or feeling of the programme. The mood element helps people find the programmes they want in order to be entertained – to match the mood of the programme to their current mood or desired mood.
In order to do these we are focussing on three main areas. The first is what we’ve termed characteristics extraction. This is where we analyse the audio and video signals and try to identify key properties of it – such as cuts, motion, luminance, faces, any key audio frequencies or audio frequency combinations or especially strong or weak parts of the signal – using signal processing techniques such as the power spectral density or taking a Fast Fourier Transform of a section of the signal. This then gives us a set of numbers, or vectors, which represent the audio and video signals based on their key properties.
The next stage is what we’ve termed feature extraction. Using the extracted characteristics, we aim to use them to identify key features, or objects in the programme. We do this using machine intelligence techniques which map the extracted characteristics to a library of characteristics taken from known features. These systems then make a decision as to which of the known features the extracted characteristics most closely match.
Read the Complete Blog Post
See Also: “BBC Archive and Digital Public Space: an Overview of Our Work on the Archive from Preservation to Multimedia Classifications”