If you need help tracking down case studies, check out the new Case Studies page on the library web site.  You’ll find information on where to find articles and books containing case studies, both online and in print.

For those of you looking for Harvard Business School Case Studies, be aware that they are not made available to libraries (strict copyright restrictions ensure that they provide a large income stream to HBS).  More information on how to get copies of Harvard cases is available on the Case Studies page.

For those of us interested in digital archives of world cultural treasures, there is new reason to rejoice: a new entry has appeared in the growing list of online sites available to view such material.  The World Digital Library, a website in seven languages featuring works from a dozen countries, was launched at UNESCO’s headquarters on Tuesday.   The library hosts digital reproductions of many rare and unique kind works.  Its main purpose is to spotlight hard to reach, fragile written works, but it also includes early multimedia from the electronic age: film, audio and photographs.

One of the major advantages of the online archive is that it groups  together copies of items that are on the same subjects but whose originals may be in widely different locations.  As with many other digital archives, for now the collection is relatively small, but it is expected to greatly expand as more organizations from different countries come on board.  Read the full story from the Associated Press in Humanity’s Earliest Written Works Go Online by AP.  For more posts on digital archives click the Humanities and Social Sciences category on PolyThinkers Pad.  Also, don’t forget to take advantage of the vast collection of archival material available  to the NYU Poly community via the library’s online databases in the Subject Guides: Humanities and Social Science section.

The best time to start planning your future is right now.

No matter where you are in your education process, the earlier you start thinking about where you’d like to be after school the better. For great advice for job-seeking grads – and future job-seeking grads – read, Advice for Students: Start Planning Now for Life After College. It includes useful tips on networking, using your summers wisely, and taking advantage of campus resources like Career Services.

The Dibner Library is another valuable resource to turn to for help when thinking about your future.  We recently acquired a number of new career planning books that can assist you in every every stage of the planning process - whether you’re still trying to figure out which career path best suits you or you’re ready to pound the pavement.

Some of our new career books include:

Europeana, a digital archive combining the collections of libraries and museums, officially went online November 20, 2008, then crashed the next day due to its popularity.  It has been back online in beta form for quite some time now, but it is still not in optimal shape to efficiently serve all the people who wish to use it.   What makes it so popular? It is  a digital collection of European culture. Audio, video, text and image files, including famous paintings and significant documents, can all be found in this multimedia gallery. All works will be copyright free and available for download. The European commission has set a goal of putting ten million items online by 2010.

Europeana is  meant to be a pan-European depository, though the collection is currently dominated by works of French origin.  A similar offering of US cultural works is housed in the Library of Congress’ American Memory.

For links to other free archives of classic texts  and cultural treasures, see Dibner Library’s web resource page on the Humanities and Social Sciences.  Also see Dibner Library’s Humanities bundle on Delicious.

In the pre-World Wide Web days, I once believed that  the only way to see prints, maps, photographs and other archival image collections in libraries was to make an appointment, sign in, move to a seldom visited room and wait for the material to be brought. I cannot say for sure if that is exactly what happened in most places, but I suspect that it is not far from the truth.

Things have changed  considerably.  I have long thought that libraries  made very effective use of the Web from the earliest days. (see Google settlement re-maps online book world.) One of the most valuable services of libraries when the web was young was to begin the process of digitizing and bringing these heretofore hard to reach collections online. The availability of material has grown by leaps and bounds with many well known historical documents now accessible in high resolution digital form.   Prestigious online galleries include the Library of Congress Digital Collections and the New York Public Library Digital Gallery. [Read more →]

Footnote.com archives historical documents on the web. Some items require a subscription to view, but many are free.  Last week the collection was expanded with a large infusion of World War II material.  The bulk of the collection comes from army enlistment records, but family and friends can contribute information.   The collection also includes photographs, official reports from the period, scanned copies of original documents, and other archival records.

Although the collection is massive, those in charge of the project hope it is only a first step in engaging the hearts and minds of WW II veterans, their friends and relatives, inspiring them to  contribute and preserve their memories, recollections and scanned copies of their archives before they are lost for good.

If you are interested in reading contemporary newspaper coverage of the World War II era, try ProQuest Historical Newspapers, available to NYU Poly community in the library’s database collection.

After digitizing the contents of thousands of old books and finding a way to make money from the project, Google has now set its sights on old magazines.  Thousands of magazines have been digitized and indexed and can currently be searched using Google’s “find a book” search function.  Eventually, magazine search results will be made available via the standard Google search.

This is a worthwhile project and a very valuable service for people doing certain types of research, or who like me are simply fascinated by the exploration of vintage material.  However, as with many Google endeavors, it should also prove profitable and sustainable for all parties involved.  Google will link to the magazine copyright holder’s current site where users will presumably, on occasion, click on ads residing there.   Google will share in some of the advertising profit for leading users to the site.

It is important for researchers to understand that much of the periodical content available online is part of the invisible web that cannot be found by Google or viewed for free.  Fortunately for Poly users, the library subscribes to many databases featuring full text content that is not available for free on the web.  Many of the journals, magazines and newspapers go back to the 19th century.  Try a search using ProQuest Historical Newspapers or American Periodicals Series Online 1740-1900 if you want to experiment.

You may be aware that a settlement was announced between Google and several publishers  and authors.  The agreement will allow Google to sell electronic versions of books that are still under copyright protection, but which are currently out of print. Many books are available for free online viewing and downloading, and many are being formatted for mobile devices, but they are older books that are out of copyright.  The Google service will not be free, they will continue to do what works well for them, ensuring a massive audience for  other companies’ copyrighted holdings and sharing revenue with them.

The Google deal will substantially increase the number of books available for online viewing, but it is only one of several initiatives that are expanding the universe of online books.  Also coming soon is Europeana, an online archive of not only books, but records, films, letters and other cultural treasures.   It will join collections like the Internet Archive, American Memory and Aluka in preserving the world’s cultural heritage and bringing portions of it to a greater audience. [Read more →]

In what will be welcome news for anyone with an interest in finding and reading information in old newspapers (either for fun or research), a vast quantity of old newspaper content will soon be available.  An article appearing in the in the New York Times,  Google to Digitize Newspaper Archives, explains that Google will begin scanning newspapers to create a digital archive.  At first, the material will be searchable only through Google Reader, but Google plans to provide publishers with the means to make the archives available on their own sites. Currently you can read newspapers that have already been digitized,  but Google will now scan, and absorb the costs of scanning, papers that have not yet been digitized. [Read more →]

Most of us are accustomed to seeing information originally from print reference sources posted online in some form or another.  Now, in a reversal of this familiar pattern, we are about to see a web creation made available in print format.

It was announced at the Wikipedia conference in Alexandria that the online encyclopedia was about to join forces with the publisher Bertelsmann to put out a one volume encyclopedia featuring the 25,000,000 most popular articles from the German version of Wikepedia.

Anyone who has in any way contributed to one of the articles will be credited, resulting in a volume with the most credited authors ever.  It is scheduled to go on sale in September for the euro equivalent of about $32.  Read more in, A Book With 90,000 authors, featured in the New York Times.