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Eighteenth Century Collections Online is the single most ambitious digitization project ever undertaken. It delivers every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.

The American Revolution. The French Revolution. The Industrial Revolution. The Eighteenth Century saw what many scholars believe to be the three most significant events in world history. The most ambitious digitization project ever undertaken, Eighteenth Century Collections Onlinevividly brings this period to life with materials ranging from books and directories to Bibles, sheet music, sermons and advertisements.

• Part I contains 26 million pages of text from more than 136,000 titles (155,000 volumes)
• Part II contains nearly 50,000 new titles of previously unavailable or inaccessible materials
• Full-text search capabilities
• Well-known and lesser-known authors
• Canonical titles of the period as well as contemporary works that analyze and debate those titles"

Wanna have a digital library in your handbag?

If you like books but think that they are a little heavy to carry around you should try a digital reading device. We thought so and are experimenting with it now. The university library of Trondheim is promoting reading devices with e-books and e-articles form the reading lists of Archaeology spring semester 2010. The project is the first attempt to use e-books actively and read them in the devices of inc-technology. A Phd candidate has got the possibility to use the amazon kindle for 2 weeks to see whether he would be happy with such a service from our library! A master student will try to use that as a service next week. Their comments will be submitted to this blog soon. By January 2010 it will be possible for 10 students from 2 different subjects to participate for a pilot project in trying out the devices and give us feedback. The academic editor Tapir is involved in the project as well.
More about that to come!

Do Libraries Cater for Today's Researchers and Research Students?

Apparently not...

A recent story in the Times Higher reviews an interim report from "[a] three-year study by the British Library, Researchers of Tomorrow, [which] is tracking the research behaviour of doctoral students born between 1982 and 1994 - dubbed 'Generation Y'" (Next-gen PhDs fail to find Web 2.0's 'on-switch', via Peter Morgan/@tweeterpeter) describes how researcher are making use of 'emerging technology' tools. The THES describes how interim results:

... show that only a small proportion of those surveyed are using technology such as virtual-research environments, social bookmarking, data and text mining, wikis, blogs and RSS-feed alerts in their work. This contrasts with the fact that many respondents professed to finding technological tools valuable.

Just under half of those polled used RSS feeds and only about 10 per cent used social bookmarking, with Generation Y students exhibiting the same behaviour as other age groups.

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