From Klaus Graf, via Open Access News, The Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden has digitized more than 656 books in their collection about Aceh, in several languages (Indonesian, French, Dutch, etc). Their website, Aceh Books. This is exciting news for me, since I have found it very hard to [...]

I’ve long been fascinated by book scanning projects, and written before about OpenLibrary and Universal Library, as well as Google Books. However, as neat as these projects are, we shouldn’t forget sites like Project Gutenberg, which have been around for much longer. Project Gutenberg relies on volunteers to scan, OCR and proof-read texts that have [...]

Background
Back in May 2007, when I attended the World Book Day in Jakarta, I heard about plans to purchase the copyrights for school textbooks, and make the books freely available, to alleviate the problem of students who could not afford to purchase them. I thought it was a very interesting idea, but hoped that they [...]

I love seeing material in multiple languages, even languages I don’t understand. As populations have become more diverse around the world, public libraries have risen to the challenge, and whether you visit the Public Library in Oslo, or in Toronto, they have wonderful collections of children and adult books (and often films, DVDs, magazines and [...]

The article below was written for the IFLA Section of Libraries for Children and Young Adults Newsletter, December 2008 (just published), edited by Singaporean librarian Ivan Chew, whose blog I have been reading for a long time, and whom I was lucky enough to meet in Singapore in 2007, while getting a new visa for [...]

Image via Wikipedia

I have previously written about the OpenLibrary, both how much I liked their interface, and how it frustrated me that they didn’t communicate better to the public about their progress. Recently, a workshop was held in San Francisco, “to share progress and plans for continued growth of open web access to digital books”. [...]

During my undergraduate degree in International Development Studies, we had to spend a year working in a developing country, and develop a thesis based on primary research conducted in that country. I spent my year working in Jakarta (for CARE). While there, I came across the phenomenon of community-run libraries, which was extremely widespread and [...]

The OpenLibrary
I wrote about the OpenLibrary previously, and since then they have only gotten better. They have added a lot of books, but more importantly, their website has turned into a real portal, where you can access all of their scanned books (over 234,000). This is only part of their quest, which is also to [...]

It was great being back in Hangzhou, where I spent half a year in 2004. Already, Hangzhou was known as one of the most beautiful cities in China, and the local citizens were very proud of it. Coming back this time, my friend told me of many small changes that in different ways improved the [...]

Below is a brief report I wrote for Rural China Education Foundation, based on my visits to two field sites, where they are experimenting with starting rural school libraries. This report was written for RCEF and based on their needs, and my observations. I am releasing it publicly, because it might offer interesting ideas or [...]