Monday, June 18, 2007

E-books in Jewish studies and their place in our libraries

Sara Spiegel began with an examination of digital books.
She found that libraries have embraced e-serials and e-reference books.

She asked "why haven’t they embraced e-books?"
  • Could not afford to buy duplicate works in different formats
  • Were afraid that patrons would only want e-version and books would be eliminated
  • Readers still wanted to read from paper.
There is no one aggregator of Jewish books
Some e-book collections include
  • Otzar ha-hochma (subscription-based)
  • Netlibrary (Suject collections)
  • JNUL - digitized books (over 500 books)
  • Google book
  • Live.com (Microsoft project)
  • Jewish Theological Seminary - digital projects
  • Online books - Univ. of Penn. list
  • DigitalBookIndex
  • Project Ben Yehuda
  • Yizkor books at New York Public Library
How to we supply access to these resources?
  • Put list of links on our homepages
  • Add links to individual records in the OPACS
  • Have some kind of federated search that searches different collectionns
  • Provide A-Z list of available e-books
Heidi Lerner reviewed free and subscription based biographical resources.

One example was the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
I somehow missed the handout, I'll try to find more links that she mentioned.

3 comments:

Steve Bergson said...

There is no one aggregator of Jewish books.

Alas, there isn't, but don't let that stop you from trying to set up one of your own - as short as it might be.

I once made an attempt to put together a list of Jewish e-books, complete with subject heading hyperlinks. It's not on the Internet any longer, but it's been archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20051126003558/http://webhome.idirect.com/~alephtav/booklist.html.

Keep up the great work on the blog reports!

Sheryl said...

I've also been putting together a list on our home page
http://www.huc.edu/libraries/exhibits/digital/index.php

I obviously will continue to be a 'work in progress' for quite a while.

marcel said...

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bye