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International library news

New Humanities Open Book program to revive backlist titles

In the US, the Andrew W Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) are working on a pilot grant program to help publishers digitise out-of-print humanities books, reports Library Journal. The Humanities Open Book (HOB) program, which was launched in January 2015, will assist publishers in identifying significant out-of-print books, securing their rights and converting them to freely accessible EPUB format ebooks available under the Creative Commons licence. Grants range from US$50,000 to US$100,000 per recipient. NEH chief information officer and director of the Office of Digital Humanities, Brett Bobley, told Library Journal that the aim of the project was to get scholarly ideas out to an audience. ‘Most humanities books are not bestsellers … Let’s see if we can come up with creative ways of getting that material spread as widely as possible.’

China’s first metro digital library opens in Ningbo

In China’s seaport city of Ningbo, three metro stations—Zemin, Gulou and Yinghua Park—have been fitted with digital libraries, reports Ningbo News. The Ningbo Rail Transit Digital Libraries are stocked with 3000 ebooks, 500 audio books, a 20G-scale resource repository for Chinese traditional culture and 100 classic movies. Items can be accessed via USB sticks or by scanning with a mobile phone.

 

Category: Library news