G. Sayeed Choudhury named 2012 OCLC/LITA Kilgour Award recipient

The Library & Information Technology Association, a division of the American Library Association, has announced G. Sayeed Choudhury as the 2012 winner of the Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology. The award, which is jointly sponsored by OCLC, is given for research relevant to the development of information technologies, especially work that shows promise of having a positive and substantive impact on any aspect(s) of the publication, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information, or the processes by which information and data is manipulated and managed. The awardee receives $2,000, a citation and travel expenses to attend the award ceremony on June 24 at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, California

New edition of The Algernon Charles Swinburne Project

In March, 2012 a major new edition of The Algernon Charles Swinburne Project was published online. The new edition includes a fresh architecture and design and a great deal of new content, including:

* All six volumes of the collected Poems (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904).
* Swinburne's one finished novel, Love's Cross-Currents (London: Chatto and Windus, 1905).
* Facsimile page images for all the above texts.
* A new section of the project, Swinburne's Study, features a collection of digital encounters with the edited and encoded text corpus of the Swinburne Project: visualizations, image and text analysis tools, and creative works.
* An Introduction to Swinburne's life and work.
* An updated Chronology.
* A significantly expanded version of Terry Meyers' “Supplementary Material” to his Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 3 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005). The revised material includes an illustrated essay on the controversy surrounding Swinburne's funeral

Princeton Theological Seminary is developing the Theological Commons

Princeton Theological Seminary is developing the Theological Commons in partnership with the Internet Archive, a nonprofit dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library. Princeton Theological Seminary shares in the vision and mission of building a digital library freely accessible to scholars, pastors, and other readers around the globe. The Theological Commons is a digital initiative of the Princeton Theological Seminary Library. Begun in 2011, its purpose is to improve access to the digital and non-digital material held in the Library and, in particular, to bring Princeton Seminary's digital collections together in a single more convenient framework, making searching and viewing of those collections easier and quicker

Search new Royal Artillery records (UK)

Search for your ancestors in two new sets of Royal Artillery records on findmypast.co.uk: Royal Artillery Military Medals 1916-1993 and Royal Artillery Honours & Awards 1939-1946

ERIC updates peer-reviewed designation on journal records

ERIC searchers will now find it easier to identify the peer-reviewed status of more materials in ERIC, thanks to the addition of this field for journal articles indexed from 1966 to 2003 (the status was already available on ERIC records added from 2004 forward). ERIC is updating the backfile of article records on a journal by journal basis. Enhanced records will appear daily on the ERIC Web site at www.eric.ed.gov, and vendors will receive the changes on a monthly basis. It is expected that the updates to more than 680,000 journal records will be completed within the next six months

Digital Humanities Congress 2012 – Call for papers (UK)

The Digital Humanities Congress, 6-8 September 2012, is a new conference which will be held in Sheffield every two years. Its purpose is to promote the sharing of knowledge, ideas and techniques within the digital humanities. Digital humanities is understood by Sheffield to mean the use of technology within arts, heritage and humanities research as both a method of inquiry and a means of dissemination. Proposals on all aspects of digital humanities are welcome, and the deadline is 30 April 2012

First Monday - March 2012

First Monday - Volume 17, Number 3, 5 March 2012 now available. First Monday is a Great Cities Initiative of the University of Illinois at Chicago University Library, USA

Library campaigning alliance lobbies Westminster government (UK)

A new campaigning alliance Speak up for Libraries will today (13 March) send the government a strong message that support for libraries is long overdue, as people from across the country meet for a rally and lobby in central London. Speak up for Libraries is calling on the government to give libraries its backing, warning that the service faces a bleak future due to drastic cuts, underfunding, and the lack of a clear vision for the future. The group is calling on Ed Vaizey MP, Minister with responsibility for libraries, who is giving evidence to the Select Committee today, to recognise the crisis hitting the service and to take urgent action. More than 100 libraries across the country have either closed, are now run by volunteers, or have been turned into social enterprises since April 2011. A survey by UNISON reveals that those that remain open are being pared to the bone by cuts to book budgets, opening hours, mobile and outreach services as well as to jobs. The rally in Methodist Central Hall will hear from speakers including authors Kate Mosse and Philip Ardagh, Dave Prentis, UNISON General Secretary and Ruth Bond, chair of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI) as well as Dan Jarvis MP. Visitors will also have a chance to visit a pop up library staffed by fully trained librarians

Thomson Reuters launches Academic Reputation Survey for 2012

The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters has announced the launch of its 2012 Academic Reputation Survey, for a current evaluation of higher education institutions globally. This is the third consecutive year the reputation survey has been conducted. The survey, which is sent to over 200,000 academics and researchers around the world, engages professional scholars to obtain a more accurate assessment of the institutional landscape. Survey respondents are asked which institutions they consider the best in terms of research, teaching and other factors, such as geographical region. These assessments are combined with other key variables to create a comprehensive profile for each institution

DEMOGRAPHICSNOW: Business & People

DEMOGRAPHICSNOW: Business & People is a comprehensive business and residential reference and research tool. Users can produce comprehensive business and residential lists as well as detailed demographic reports - they can even utilize a unique mapping tool that "visualizes" trends. With these powerful assets, DEMOGRAPHICSNOW allows libraries to replace multiple product subscriptions with one affordable resource your users will return to time and again for many of their business information needs

Join Libraries Thriving for its second Online Seminar

Credo Reference and Libraries Thriving will be hosting two free online seminars this week as part of the Spring 2012 Credo Reference Online Seminar Series: Tech Tools and their Place in the 21st Century Library

André Studios 1930-1941: Fashion Drawings & Sketches (USA)

After two years of planning, the Picture Collection of the New York Public Library and the Special Collections & FIT Archives of the Fashion Institute of Technology Library have recently started a digital archive of fashion drawings and sketches by André Fashion Studios. The collection, André Studios 1930-1941: Fashion Drawings & Sketches in the Collections of the Fashion Institute of Technology and the New York Public Library, includes more than 5,000 original drawings

Boston's French Cultural Center expands access to digital library (USA)

Boston's French Cultural Center has expanded access to its electronic library to Francophiles nationwide making it the first French language e-Library in the country. The Marlborough Street center had previously allowed only New England residents to access their e-Library of 550 eBooks and eAudiobooks, but the center has removed the geographic restriction to registering for a library subscription

Historic Iowa Children's Diaries

This collection seeks to connect Iowa's youth with state history by showing them how young settlers 150 years ago recorded their lives through diary writing. Led by the staff of the Old Capitol Museum on the University of Iowa Pentacrest, it contains a sampling of diary entries from the 1860s through the 1900s, some with searchable transcriptions

Call fo Papers: Journal of Library Innovation

The Editors of Journal of Library Innovation are accepting submissions of research articles and articles about innovative practices in libraries on an ongoing basis. Information about the focus and scope of JOLI, along with the previous issues, can be found at the journal's website

41st Annual Conference of the International School Librarianship (Qatar)

41st Annual Conference of the International School Librarianship incorporating the 16th International Forum on School Librarianship will be held this year in Doha, Qatar on November 11-15, 2012

The Library in the City: Changing Demands and a Challenging Future (Pew)

Pew: Big-city public libraries have rarely been as popular as they are today and rarely as besieged. The hard economic times of recent years have generated increased demand for the free and varied services libraries provide, even as revenue-challenged local governments have cut back on contributions to library budgets. All of this comes at a time when libraries are being asked to perform a new and changing range of functions. "The Library in the City: Changing Demands and a Challenging Future" looks at how Philadelphia is faring and the challenges facing urban libraries across America. It examines The Free Library of Philadelphia's operations and compares them to those of 14 other library systems

Google begins to scale back its scanning of books from university libraries

Chronicle: Google has been quietly slowing down its book-scanning work with partner libraries, according to librarians involved with the vast Google Books digitization project. But what that means for the company's long-term investment in the work remains unclear. Google was not willing to say much about its plans. "We've digitized more than 20 million books to date and continue to scan books with our library partners," a Google spokeswoman told The Chronicle in an e-mailed statement

Museums and the Web 2012 (USA)

Museums and the Web is an annual conference exploring the social, cultural, design, technological, economic, and organizational issues of culture, science and heritage on-line. Taking an international perspective, MW reviews and analyzes the issues and impacts of networked cultural, natural and scientific heritage – wherever the network may reach - April 11-14, 2012 - San Diego, CA, USA

Gloucestershire added to the Manorial Documents Register (UK)

The Manorial Documents Register for Gloucestershire has now been revised and is available online for the first time. The index is searchable by county, parish or manor name. The completion of the project now allows researchers to find details of the manorial documents which survive for Gloucestershire in one place regardless of where those records are kept. These records still have legal relevance today, safeguarding rights and defining privileges, and give a wonderful insight into the day to day life of ordinary people in the Middle Ages