digitization
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The New York Times taps Google's AI to find stories in old photos
The New York Times has somewhere in the realm of five to seven million physical photos in its enormous archive, many of which date back more than a century. The images document vital moments and contain valuable records of our recent history, but the hard copies are vulnerable to deterioration (they fortunately survived flooding in 2015). To protect the photos, the Times is digitizing the archive with Google Cloud.
Afghanistan team digitizes films saved from Taliban destruction
During the brutal reign of the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, which was in power from 1996–2001, popular entertainment such as films and music were banned. The Taliban systematically destroyed all the movies they could find, specifically targeting Afghanistan's state-run movie production company. They burned all the movie reels they could find before leaving, and tried to destroy generations of culture in the process.
Of course the UK's depressing tower blocks are getting a digital archive
Where would we be without digital archives? Not playing old MS-DOS games and browsing defunct GeoCities Labyrinth fan sites while we should be working, that's where. And while some institutions are busying themselves preserving such things as classic literature, one is embarking on a far more important task: building a fully searchable image archive of all the UK's miserable concrete housing blocks. The "Tower Blocks - Our Blocks!" project is the brainchild of social and architectural historians at the Edinburgh College of Art, because how else would you manage to snag over £50,000 in Heritage Lottery funding to scan pics of ugly buildings if it didn't have something to do with art? That money will be put towards digitizing 3,500 old photos of high-rises, some of which have long been demolished, and "support local outreach initiatives" to get residents to tell of their experiences within these concrete melting pots.
EU court rules libraries can digitize books without permission
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled that libraries have the right to digitize books and distribute them to dedicated reading terminals without first obtaining the publisher's permission. The decision rests on exceptions built into the EU Copyright Directive for reproducing and communicating intellectual property. Specifically it says that publicly accessible libraries may make works available at "dedicated terminals... for the purpose of research or private study." German publisher Eugen Ulmer, which filed the suit in question against the Technical University of Darmstadt, can't be happy with the result. But, the court didn't hand libraries a blank check to freely pass around digitized content either. The law still prevents these digitized copies from being stored on USB keys or printed out. Under the Copyright Directive, the act of printing or storing the files would mean the individual, not the library, was making the copy -- which would violate the law.
BFI to digitize 10,000 British films as part of Film Forever investment plan
The British Film Institute plans to digitize and provide easier access to 10,000 British flicks as part of a new £500 million (approximately $800 million) "Film Forever" initiative. In addition to driving growth in the UK industry by investing in education, filmmaking and the like, the institute wants to put a mixture of free and paid content on its website, YouTube and VoD services. A BFIPlayer app will be providing a similar service to Samsung Smart TVs, PCs and mobile devices. Cinemas, DVDs and TV channels will also play host to the films, selected for digital rebirth by a bunch of experts and in part, by the general public. And, in the spirit of digitization, full details of the ambitious Film Forever enterprise (slated to run from 2012-2017) are available in e-brochure format at the source link below.
British Library and Google Books partner up to digitize 250,000 out-of-copyright works
Oh paper, ye olde guardian of human wisdom, culture, and history, why must you be so fragile and voluminous? Not a question we ask ourselves every day, admittedly, but when you're talking about the British Library's extensive collection of tomes from the 18th and 19th century, those books, pamphlets and periodicals do stack up pretty quickly. Thankfully, Google's book digitization project has come to the rescue of bewildered researchers, with a new partnership with the British Library that will result in the availability of digital copies of works from that period -- spanning the time of the French and Industrial Revolutions, the Crimean War, the invention of the telegraph, and the end of slavery. In total, some 250,000 such items, all of them long out of copyright, will find a home on Google Books and the British Library's website, and Google has even been nice enough to bear the full cost of transforming them into web-accessible gems of knowledge. Jump past the break for the similarly digital press release.
Google's deal for book digitization rejected by judge, Books plans sent back to drawing board
It's taken a long, long time to fully consider Google's proposed $125 million settlement with publishers and authors of out-of-print works, but now the ruling has been handed down and it's not the one the Mountain View team wanted. Circuit Judge Chin, who had preliminarily approved the deal back in November 2009, has returned with the new conclusion that actually it goes "too far" in Google's favor. The origins of this settlement stem from a class action lawsuit filed against El Goog for a book digitization project it began back in 2004, and it's important to note that terms were agreed way back in 2008, before a bunch of external objections made them revise the document to its current state and refile it with the court in '09. Since then, the Department of Justice has had a look at antitrust concerns relating to Google potentially having a monopoly on orphan works (those whose author cannot be identified) and Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo have all piped up to say it's a bunk deal. Now, the one man standing between us and a whole ton of web-accessible reading materials has agreed with them. He does leave a pretty large door open for reconciliation, however, should Google be willing to accede to less favorable terms. Let's just hope whatever else transpires doesn't take another year and a half to do so.
Stanford cuts down on clutter by removing 70,000 books from its Engineering Library
Guess this is one way to tighten your belt. Stanford University has opted to drastically reduce the catalog of physical volumes within its Engineering Library down from its original 80,000 to a svelte 10,000 copies. Before you cry foul and analogize between this and the prep school that threw out all its paper books, note that we're mostly talking about periodicals here, which tend to be used for quick references -- something that the newly digitized and searchable copies will probably make a lot easier. This action was prompted when the University noticed a large proportion of its leafy volumes hadn't left their shelves for over five years, and now the librarians are all aflutter with excitement about using the freed up space and resources for more productive causes. Such as educating us on the unappreciated benefits of indexing.
IRENE seeks to digitize, preserve fragile recordings
Granted, it's no Commodore 64, but the Library of Congress is yet again warming up to modern technology in order to save some of its most precious at-risk recordings from decades (or longer) ago. Dubbed IRENE (Image, Reconstruct, Erase, Noise, Etc.), the system was created by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to help preservationists "rapidly convert 78 rpm shellac and acetate discs" to digital form, and it is slated to also "remove debris and extraneous sounds that contribute to the deterioration of recordings." The next step in the sound restoration project is to create a fetching system that is simplistic enough for employees to understand and utilize, and we suspect the RAID vendors are already lining up to provide the terabytes exabytes of storage that will likely be needed.[Image courtesy of IRENE]
