Anyone teaching history these days knows how ubiquitous the Wikipedia has become in our students’ imaginings of what sorts of historical information they might use in their research. This semester I’ve received more papers that rely almost exclusively on the Wikipedia than ever before. To try to get my students to think a little more…
Google Book Search
On Monday I attended a talk sponsored by the Center for History and New Media and the Visual Knowledge Project on Google’s plans to digitize essentially every book in several major university or research libraries (Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, Harvard, New York Public Library). The speakers were Clifford Lynch from the Coalition for Networked Information and…
World Digital Library?
In case you didn’t see Librarian of Congress James Billington’s op ed piece in the Washington Post on November 21, he announces a big initiative to create a World Digital Library in which the great works of print are digitized. Guess who’s helping to pay for it? Google did you say? Give the lucky lady…
Off the desktop
What will happen to digital history when it moves off the desktop and into the handheld device? The day of the migration from desktop computer to handheld portable device is closing in on us fast, but will it transform what we do with digital history in the same ways that the migration from CD-Rom to…