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E-mails don’t have the inky charisma of handwritten manuscripts, but they’re more and more a part of literary archives. For instance, when the British Library announced this week that it has acquired the poet Wendy Cope‘s archive, it made much of the hybrid nature of the material, which includes thousands of e-mails.

“Retrieved from ‘the cloud’, the collection of approximately 40,000 e-mails dating from 2004 to the present is the most substantial in a literary archive acquired by the British Library to date, affording among other things a fascinating and extensive insight into writerly networks,” the library said. The acquisition cost £32,000 (nearly $ 53,000), according to the announcement.

“It’s new territory for us,” Rachel Foss, lead curator of modern-literary manuscripts at the British Library, told The Independent newspaper. “This is the second major e-mail acquisition we’ve made, after Harold Pinter’s archive in 2007, but contains more material than that. We are…

Wired Campus

Amazon.com announced today that it will make Kindle books available for library lending later this year. Its partner in the Kindle Library Lending program is OverDrive, a widely used distributor of e-books and audiobooks.

“Customers will be able to check out a Kindle book from their local library and start reading on any Kindle device or free Kindle app for Android, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, PC, Mac, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone,” the company said in its announcement. “If a Kindle book is checked out again or that book is purchased from Amazon, all of a customer’s annotations and bookmarks will be preserved.”

How? “Normally, making margin notes in library books is a big no-no,” said Jay Marine, the director of Amazon Kindle. “But we’re extending our Whispersync technology so that you can highlight and add margin notes to Kindle books you check out from your local library. Your notes will not show up when the next patron checks out the book. But if you check out the book…

Wired Campus

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

Does Congress have the right to restore copyright protection to foreign works that have fallen into the public domain?

That issue is at the heart of a major copyright case that the Supreme Court agreed to hear yesterday. Its resolution could have implications for libraries’ ability to share works online, advocates say.

In dispute are decades-old foreign works that slipped into the public domain in the United States while still copyrighted abroad. Congress in 1994 adopted a bill to place those works back under the shield of copyright protection, in an effort to align U.S. policy with an international copyright treaty called the Berne Convention. The aim of that convention was to ensure that works copyrighted in one country get comparable protection elsewhere, “since there is no such thing as international copyright,” according to SCOTUSblog, which tracks the Supreme Court.

But the Internet Archive argues that the American law poses “a significant threat to the ability of libraries…

Wired Campus

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