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A new partnership between the HathiTrust Digital Library and a popular academic search service will bring the searchable text of the HathiTrust’s 8.4 million digital-volume collection to more than 200 institutions.

The arrangement will make the full text of all the titles in the HathiTrust collection searchable through Summon, a library search engine created by Serials Solutions, a subsidiary of ProQuest. The collection contains the digital content of more than 50 partner institutions.

Users will be able to access 2.2 million volumes of HathiTrust material in the public domain and their library’s own digital collection directly from the Summon page. For any texts available only in print, users will be told how to obtain them.

Being able to search all of the texts in the HathiTrust collection will make it easier for users to determine the value of a book or article directly from their Web browser, says John P. Wilkin, executive director of HathiTrust.

“You always want to have the…

Wired Campus

Pearson and McGraw-Hill announced on Wednesday that they will take a minority stake in Inkling. The move is seen as a major endorsement from the publishing industry of the electronic-textbook start-up.

Inkling offers existing print textbooks in a multimedia-rich format designed for the iPad. The company now offers only 14 titles, but officials said it plans to make 100 available by the end of the year.

Despite the explosion of the wider e-book market and high hopes among publishers for the future of e-textbooks, colleges and their students have yet to adopt them in large numbers.

Matt MacInnis, Inkling’s chief executive, said that students have resisted e-textbooks because they have been difficult to use, but that the success of the iPad offers a chance to start over. Inkling’s focus on painstakingly rebuilding textbooks from scratch in an iPad-friendly format, along with their lower price, will make the difference, he said.

“We believe that this market is going to make an…

Wired Campus

This is an interesting argument that I hadn’t met previously: Pagination is better for long digital texts because it’s easier for sustained reading.  What are the implications for reading source code?  Is pagination (and perhaps formatting via something like Knuth’s WEB) better than a scroll bar?

Let’s put it under the umbrella term ‘scrollable’. Scrollable content works very well for two or three screenfuls of content, because it lets you adjust, pixel by pixel or line by line, to your changing context. You can say “I want this thing on the screen, and this nearby thing on the screen at the same time”, which is often useful — particularly if the content has varied elements like buttons and links and images as well as text. That is to say, scrollable content generally works very well for web pages.

But for anything of real length, it is seriously hard work. It’s important to realise what you’re doing when you’re scrolling. You’re gazing at the line you were reading as you draw it…

Computing Education Blog

In October 2010, Robert Darnton, the historian and university librarian at Harvard, talked to Wired Campus about the possibility of building what was then being described as a National Digital Library. Since then, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, with money from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has stepped into the role of coordinating plans for what’s now being designated a Digital Public Library of America.

The planning has a public component as well: The Berkman Center has set up a wiki to which anyone can contribute. “We very much hope that this wiki will be the embodiment of a consensus-based and peer-produced approach,” the center notes on the welcome page.

The wiki lays out major topics related to the proposed DPLA project: content and scope (which includes a handy roundup of digitizing projects in the United States and abroad), governance and business models, legal and technical issues. It’s early days, but to get a sense of how the conversation’s shaping…

Wired Campus

Over at the excellent Working Class Perspectives blog, Sherry Linkon has posted a thoughtful and provocative post The Digital Divide Goes to College. Spurred by a recent professional development day in which faculty at her working-class college were encouraged to use technology in innovative ways to support students’ learning, Sherry grapples with what New Media and new uses of technology might mean for poor and working-class students who are likely to have more limited access to technology off campus, who may arrive at college less experienced and less confident in technology, and who have very limited time to learn new skills.

These are vital questions and Sherry is so right when she notes that advocates of technology in teaching may glibly assume that all students (and all campuses) have access to similar resources.

They don’t.

Yet as Sherry notes:

Technology provides opportunities for more active, inquiry-based learning, and many faculty are excited by the possibilities. We…

Education and Class