I just wrote about two articles published based on my MA thesis about Chinese Open Courses, and this inspired me to look at some of the download statistics from my website. Back in 2008, I wrote about the idea of a “Fair Trade” symbol for research, and the idea the research ethics shouldn’t stop with the [...]
I have always been interested in Open Educational Resources from around the world, and in my presentations, I do my best to highlight not just MIT and Stanford, but also the amazing contributions from Indira Gandhi National Open University in India, the Virtual University of Pakistan, the open textbooks from Indonesia, the Chinese Top Level [...]
I’ve been waiting for this moment for quite a long time. Living outside of Norway for many years, I’ve always been interested in technologies that enable me to access Norwegian culture from afar. I enjoy reading Norwegian newspapers online, I listen to a few podcasts from the national radio station, I follow some of the [...]
Open Access Week is a great idea – now in its fourth year, it really enables communities to come together across the world to promote the concept of Open Access. Last year, we had a number of very successful events at University of Toronto, I gave a talk about institutional models for OER (video, Mp3, [...]
I am a big fan of Cory Doctorow‘s work. Without planning to, I have actually read his entire oeuvres on screen. If I ever came across a paper copy of one of his books, I would love to pick it up, but I haven’t seen one at the airports I frequent. It started when I [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
