Much criticism on fusion plans of the Vrije Universiteit

The Vrije Universiteit shall be radically reformed.  The management wants to merge several faculties and enter into an intensive collaboration with the University of Amsterdam.  The University Library (UB) is to be joined together with the IT-department (UC-IT).  400 employees shall loose their jobs due to these cutbacks. 

Many of the staff disagree with the plans.  They fear an excavation of the academic standard of the organization. Anonymous employees have written as such in a pressing letter (Dutch) to the universitypaper ‘Ad Valvas’.  The employees consider the managers at the VU too powerful and speak of ‘colonization by the management culture’. 

Apart from that, Richard Oerlemans, director of UC-IT, is keen on the idea of a fusion between his department and the UB.  He states (Dutch) in Ad Valvas that a new organization will mean an improvement in supporting the education.  Because of the increase of digitalization of the library, a merge with the IT-services of the university becomes a logical next step. 

Source (Dutch): Informatieprofessional

Source Image: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Read Full Post »

Bodleian and Vatican libraries to digitise ancient texts

The Bodleian Libraries of Oxford University are engaging in a four years’ collaboration with the Vatican to digitalize 1,5 million manuscripts and rare books.  Two thirds of the material is coming from Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV), the remainder from Oxford.  The works that shall be digitalized fall into three catagories: Greek manuscripts, incunabula and Hebrew manuscripts and early printed books.  These works include some early, illustrated copies of the New Testament and works of Homerus, Sophocles, Plato and the Church Fathers. 

Source: The Bodleian Libraries and Vlaamse Erfgoedbibliotheek  (Dutch)

 

Read Full Post »

KB digitalizes volumes of NRC Handelsblad

The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) (the national library of the Netherlands) is going to digitalize the complete volumes of NRC Handelsblad, beginning with the first issue in 1970 until 1995.  The newspapers will be available on the website Historical Newspapers of the KB.  This as agreed by NRC Media (the publisher of NRC Handelsblad) and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek on 10 January 2012.  The volumes as from 1995 will be available digitally at NRC Handelsblad itself. 

The volumes of NRC Handelsblad will be part of the digital archive of historical newspapers that the KB has built since 2006.  Until the end of this year the web service will be enlarged from 3.4 million to nine million pages from the period 1618-1995.  The web service kranten.kb.nl has been visited over a million times since its launch .  After De Telegraaf, NRC Handelsblad is the second large national newspaper that has agreed to digitalization by the KB.  It is expected that approximately 300.000 pages from NRC Handelsblad will become available in the course of 2014.  The KB also aims at digitalizing the volumes of the Algemeen Handelsblad and the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche courant – the precursors of NRC Handelsblad- from the period of 1940 to 1970.  The volumes of the Algemeen Handelsblad, from 1828 to 1940 have already been included in the web service of historical newspapers. 

Photo: On the left Bas Savenije (KB) and on the right Dick van Eijk (NRC Media), signing the digitalization agreement. 

Source (Dutch): Informatie Professional

Read Full Post »

A Gateway to European Newspapers

A group of 17 European partner institutions have joined forces in the “European Newspapers” project and will, over the next 3 years, provide more than 10 million newspaper pages to the EUROPEANA service.

The European Newspapers project (funded under EC’s CIP 2007 – 2013) aims at the aggregation and refinement of newspapers for The European Library and Europeana. In addition, the project addresses challenges particularly linked with digitized newspapers:

• use of refinement methods for OCR, OLR/article segmentation, and named entity recognition (NER), and page class recognition to enhance search and presentation functionalities for Europeana customers,

• quality evaluation for automatic refinement technologies, 

• transformation of local metadata to the Europeana Data Model (EDM) 

• metadata standardization in close collaboration with stakeholders from the public and private sector. 

Each library participating in the project will distribute digitized newspapers and full-texts free of any legal restrictions to Europeana. There will be a special focus on newspapers published during the First World War, thus providing a meaningful addition to the resources aggregated by the current Europeana Collections 1914-1918 project. 

The project has started on 1st February 2012. The kick-off meeting of all partners of the project will take place on 1st – 2nd March 2012 in Berlin, hosted by the project leader – The Berlin State Library.

Source tekst: LIBER

Source image: Vlaamse Erfgoedbibliotheek

Read Full Post »

British Library scans newspapers

Four million pages of newspapers from the 18th and 19th Centuries have been made available online by the British Library. The public will now be able to scan the content of 200 titles from around Britain and Ireland. These will include historic events such as the wedding of Victoria and Albert and the rise of the railways. The archive is free to search, but there is a charge for accessing the pages themselves. Other stories contained within the scanned pages include reporting on the Charge of the Light Brigade.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15932683

Read Full Post »