Farewell to the Printed Monograph. Scott Jaschik. Inside Higher Ed. March 23, 2009.
The University of Michigan Press announced it will shift its scholarly publishing from a traditional print operation to primarily digital. They expect most of their monographs to be released only in digital editions. Readers will still be able to use print-on-demand systems, but the press will consider the digital monograph the norm. They say it's time to stop trying to make the old economics of scholarly publishing work. The press expects to publish more books, and to distribute them electronically to a much broader audience. "We will certainly be able to publish books that would not have survived economic tests and we'll be able to give all of our books much broader distribution." Michigan plans to develop site licenses so that libraries could gain access to all of the press's books over the course of a year for a flat rate.
Other presses are also experimenting with the digital format. Pennsylvania State University Press publishes a few books a year in digital, open access format. All chapters are provided in PDF format, half in a format to download and print, and half in read only. Readers may pay for print-on-demand versions.
PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata. Sarah Higgins. DCC Watch Report. 25 March 2009.
This is a 3 page overview to the PREMIS data dictionary, “the current authoritative metadata standard for digital preservation” and a brief look at its use in an Institutional Repository.
Thomson Introduces mp3HD File Format. Press Release. March 19, 2009.
The company has introduced the new mp3HD format which “allows mathematically lossless compression of audio material while preserving backward compatibility to the mp3 standard.” The mp3HD files have additional information, that when combines with the mp3 portion of the file, can be played on an mp3HD-capable player. Standard mp3 players would play only the mp3 portion of the file. A program can create mp3HD files from stereo material in 16 bit 44.1Khz wav files. It is available on Linux and Windows.
Internet Archive to unveil massive Wayback Machine data center. Lucas Mearian. Computerworld. March 19, 2009.
The Internet Archive has a new computer that fits in a 20-foot-long outdoor metal cargo container filled with 63 server clusters with 4.5 million petabytes of storage and 1TB of memory. They have 151 billion archived web pages in addition to software, books and a moving image collection with 150,000 items and 200,000 audio clips. The Internet Archive also works with curators in about 100 libraries to help guide the Internet crawls.
1 comment:
Digital Editions are online versions of print publications or sometimes they are simply publications developed specifically to be viewed in a digital format. With print and postage rates climbing and an increasing audience of readers looking for their content on the Internet, digital editions are quickly Becoming a must-have for publishers.
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