Smithsonian Libraries

We're taking a break!

Slatless Gentleman's trunk. American Box & Trunk Factory Catalogue, 1906

The Smithsonian Libraries blog is going on a short hiatus while we perform some upgrades and changes. For many years we have been at this location, but the environment has changed and we are moving to a new home. The digital suitcases are packed and the virtual moving van is being loaded to carry all of our authors, posts, comments and images to our new home. 

We expect that the move will take at most a week. Our last post here will be today, February 24, 2012. We'll leave this site up and running for quite a while and when we are moved into our new home and everyting is unpacked and ready to go, we'll announce our new location here. We hope that the new version of the Smithsonian Libraries blog is up and running by March 3rd.

Thank you for your patience in this move. We hope to minimize the growing pains, but we think you'll like our new, bright, airy home. 

–The SI Libraries Blog Staff

Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Smithsonian Research Online

During the week of January 16-19th, I visited the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) to discuss several matters relating to the Smithsonian Research Online (SRO) program and to offer technical support and training to STRI library staff. I was accompanied from Washington by Digital Services Head, Martin Kalfatovic, who was to attend a three-day Encyclopedia-of-Life meeting at Barro-Colorado Island during the same week.

Together we met with Oris Sanjur (STRI Associate Director for Science Administration), Vielka Chang-Yau (STRI head librarian), Angel Aguirre (librarian), Klaus Winter (STRI scientist) and Eldredge Bermingham (STRI Director). Everyone was in agreement that STRI-authored publication data ought to be collected in one place and that the SIL is doing a good job of coordinating this program across all Institution units. The Director and Associate Director will discuss the specific needs of their unit and report back to SIL, who will propose a workflow to accomplish this.

Meanwhile, I held a brief introduction to the bibliographic tools, EndNote and Zotero for STRI library staff and volunteers. While we had a training room available to us, unfortunately there was not a copy of these programs available to all participants. But they were still able to see the possibilities of using these tools in day-to-day library services.

Alvin and Vielka review the SRO website and list of Smithsonian-authored publications using the newly-installed LCD screen in the STRI library. Photo courtesy of martin_kalfatovic via Flickr.

Finally, I met with Fernando Bouché (Head, Office of Information Technology) and STRI programmer, Carlos Caballero, to discuss the management of publication data, its re-use on the STRI web page and inclusion in the SI Collections search system (EDAN).

STRI scientists publish over 300 scholarly papers every year. Approximately 70% of them are captured automatically by the SRO via websites and associated tools. This circumvents the need for manual data entry. The inclusion of the complete corpus of work being done there is an essential part of representing the research being conducted at the Institution and the cooperation between the SI Libraries and STRI will bring the project to fruition.

 

 

 

Free eBooks for Your New eReader

This is the second post in our new series, Library Hacks, where we take a look at cool and interesting online resources from the Smithsonian Libraries and the cyberworld at large.

Are you giving or getting an eReader this holiday season? Maybe you are one of the millions already using smartphones or tablets to access just about everything online. In my humble librarian opinion, one of the greatest uses for such devices is free downloadable books! Of course, you can and should check your local public library to find ebooks to borrow, but there are lots of websites offering access to ebooks, too. However, not all such sites give free access! Many, like Amazon.com, offer ebooks for sale only. So I thought I'd highlight some of the biggest and best sites for finding free ebooks -- which won't put an extra squeeze on your holiday budget.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free full-text ebooks. Its founder Michael S. Hart, who passed away earlier this year, invented ebooks in 1971, so this is really the granddaddy of free downloadable book sites. It currently offers access to over 36,000 titles, but that number increases to over 100,000 ebooks when you include Project Gutenberg’s partners around the world. These books were all previously released by established publishers, which means you won’t just find a bunch of fan fiction self-published by some guy obsessed with Batman. Also, all of the ebooks uploaded by Project Gutenberg have been diligently proofread by volunteers to limit typos/errors.

Project Gutenberg offers a simple book search feature to search by title, author or subject. You can also browse the bookshelves if you’re not sure what you’re looking for. It’s fun to scan all the topics covered –- everything from children’s picture books (many with full-color illustrations) to cookery (lots of recipes!) to German language books (das ist gut!). Keep in mind -– these ebooks are available for free because their U.S. copyright has expired. But this means you won’t be able to access the current New York Times bestsellers here.

No fee or registration is required, and these ebooks can be downloaded to your PC, eReader, tablet, most smartphones, and even some MP3 players and gaming systems. Easy-to-follow instructions are available to help you figure it all out.

 

Open Library

The goal of Open Library, an initiative of the Internet Archive, is stated simply: One web page for every book ever published. But this definitely is not a simple task! So far the site has over 20 million edition records, and new records are constantly being added. This is truly an open project, with information being contributed by a wide variety of libraries. Individual people also are encouraged to participate by adding and/or fixing book records, writing book descriptions, adding book cover images, or editing nearly any page on the site.

Open Library offers direct access to over 1 million free ebooks in a variety of formats (PDF, plain text, ePub, DjVu, MOBi, DAISY, and "Send to Kindle"). And it's easy to use -- a simple search box is offered at the top of each page on the Open Library site. Right below that, you will find a small check box to limit your search to only ebooks. You also can browse on the Accessible Books page to see what is available for free. Open Library even has its own Lending Library with over 10,000 ebook titles available to borrow, one copy at a time for two weeks. These include mainly 20th century works which might be hard to find elsewhere online for free. For example, I found The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham, a book I've been wanting to read, which I was able to borrow, even though it's not offered for free download here or on other sites.

Another great service from Open Library is the availability of books in Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) format. DAISY presents written material in an audible format for people with print disabilities such as blindness, impaired vision, and dyslexia. Details on accessing DAISY books are provided in Open Library's FAQ section, and a list of all the devices that can read DAISY files is available at daisy.org.

 

HathiTrust Digital Library

This is one of the less well known ebook sources, but it's particularly valuable for research. The mission of the HathiTrust is "to contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge." It is a partnership of over 60 major research institutions and libraries worldwide, and the HathiTrust Digital Library brings together their collections to be preserved in digital form for posterity. In fact, the name "Hathi" comes from the Hindi word for elephant, an animal known for its long memory.

It is important to realize that currently the main focus for this organization is preservation, not necessarily free public access. So while the HathiTrust has digitized nearly 10 million volumes (including both books and journals), only about a quarter of them are available free online -- a total of about 2.5 million volumes, mostly ones in the public domain. Also, these items are offered only in PDF format, which is a less eReader-friendly format than some of those available at the other ebook sites mentioned in this post.

The search options allow you to do a catalog search by title, author, subject, etc., and you can check a box to limit it to full view only (meaning complete books you can read online or download in PDF). A handy feature for doing research is the full-text search option, which allows you to look for terms within the full-text of all 10 million+ volumes that the HathiTrust has digitized. While you can't access the full-text of them all, you can determine if your search term shows up only once or multiple times in the volume, which can help you decide if it might be a resource worth tracking down for your research.

 

Google Books

Did you know that digitizing books was part of the driving force behind the creation of Google? Back in 1996, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were computer science graduate students working on a project about digital libraries and the use of a “web crawler” to search through the contents of electronic books. Google certainly grew way beyond this idea, but it wasn’t forgotten -- it evenutally became Google Books. The ultimate goal for Google Books is to scan all the books in the world, allowing people to easily search for and find the books they need. While this goal is still far off, Google Books reports that it has already scanned over 15 million books in over 400 languages.

Now a caveat -- most of these books are not available in full-text for free. Where possible, Google Books does provide free access, mainly for books that are in the public domain because the copyright has expired, or those where the copyright holder has given permission for free access. Most of these scanned books give access to only part of the text, along with links to find libraries that hold physical copies of the book or sources that sell copies. Keep in mind that, unlike the other ebook providers included in this post which are nonprofits, Google is a profit-making venture. And there has been some debate about whether Google Books should be allowed to provide even limited access to books that are still protected by copyright.

That said, Google Books is still a good resource for finding books you are interested in. It lets you browse by broad subect areas, or you can use a simple search box to search for specific words. Like the HathiTrust, this site also offers the capability of looking for terms within the full text of all its scanned books, even if the entire text is not available for free download. Your search will take you to where your term appears within the book, providing access to a limited section surrounding that term (the amount of surrounding material you can see will vary, depending upon the copyright holder's agreement with Google). This can help you determine if the book seems to be relevant to your subject and may be worth trying to find in a library or for sale if it's not available to download.

Google Books also offers both iPhone/iPad and Android apps that sync automatically with your own account on the site, as well as different formats for use with eReaders, making it even easier to take ebooks with you.

 

Have you used any of these sites to download books? If so, what did you find there? Where else have you gone to get your ebook fix? Feel free to share your experiences in the comments section below. And if you're giving an eReader as a gift, be sure to let the recipient know about these free ebook sites to get the most out of their new gadget!

Happy Holidays from the Library Hacks!

Captivated by Science, Mathematics, and Imagination: An 18th Century Lady's Commonplace Book

Blogs across the Smithsonian will give an inside look at the Institution’s archival collections and practices during a month long blogathon in celebration of October’s American Archives Month. See additional posts from our other participating blogs, as well as related events and resources, on the Smithsonian’s Archives Month website.

Mary Smith's "Commonplace book concerning science and mathematics"

 

A couple of years ago, I saw a production of Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia. One of the central characters is Thomasina Coverly, a precocious girl in early 19th century England whose student notebooks were bursting with ideas on how to unlock the greatest mysteries of science and mathematics. I was reminded of the voracious intellect and efforts of Stoppard's Thomasina recently in the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology when I came across an 18th century vellum-bound volume filled with more than 300 pages of carefully handwritten notes on a wide variety of scientific themes. Arranged in two parts, the volume includes a detailed table of contents indexed with a set of hand-cut alphabetical thumb tabs, followed by hundreds of pages filled front and back with summaries of articles, experiments, and questions on science, mathematics, medicine, and religion.

 

Pages 57-58.

 

The manuscript (MSS 001281 B SCDIRB) provides remarkable evidence of a lively, inquiring mind absorbing a level of information that would be impressive anywhere, but it seems particularly surprising that this volume was apparently produced by a girl or woman named Mary Smith, who resided in the remote village of Thorney, part of the Earl of Bedford's model agricultural estate in the Fens of Cambridgeshire during the 1760s and 1770s. Who was Mary Smith? She was wealthy or well-connected enough to have her own folio volume elegantly bound in vellum, and her own specially printed bookplate, shown here, consisting of an elaborate architectural design created by artfully arranged printer's ornaments. The bookplate was printed by Thomas Fletcher (fl. 1762-1779) and Francis Hodson (d. 1812), partners in Cambridge who also printed the Cambridge Chronicle, a magazine frequently cited in Smith's manuscript. Otherwise, there are almost no details in the volume that help to further identify its compiler.

 

Book plate of the manuscript

 

According to an accession list kept in the Dibner Library, the manuscript was acquired by Bern Dibner for his Burndy Library collection of landmark works in the history of science and technology in 1958 for $40.00 from the London antiquarian book dealer Ben Weinreb. Weinreb described the manuscript as a "commonplace book relating to scientific and mathematical subjects, including notes from several 18th century books." The volume apparently was created after 1764 and continues into the 1780s, based on references cited in the text. Mary Smith's notes indicate she had access to several of the most popular periodicals of the time, including the New Universal Magazine, the London Magazine, the Philosophical Transactions, the Gentleman's Magazine, the Monthly Review, and the Universal Museum, and she frequently refers to lectures and articles sponsored by the Royal Society and the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. She was particularly interested in the latest debates over scientific theories and inventions, for example filling up several pages of notes dated 1765 summarizing contemporaneous reports about the marine chronometer invented by clock-maker John Harrison, who was awarded a prize of £10,000 from the commissioners of the British Board of Longitude.

Unfortunately, with a name as common as "Mary Smith," a search for more information about the person who kept this notebook has quickly gone cold, but perhaps one of the readers of this blog who knows more about the Smith family or the local history of Thorney will be able to supply more detail. There is a tantalizing possibility that another tome of her notes may exist somewhere, since the detailed index occasionally refers to a second volume.

 

Page 20

 

With such a wealth of material ranging over a wide variety of topics, it was difficult to select just a few representative pages from Mary Smith's manuscript to show here. There are some carefully drawn diagrams in the volume, including one for the mathematical exercise of dialling (from p. 20) and an astronomical illustration (from p. 37). The page opening for p. 57-58 discusses the cause of thunder and its relationship to electricity and magnetism, citing sources ranging from the Bible (Job 28, verse 26) to Welsh mathematician William Jones to the scientific observations of Benjamin Franklin.

 

Page 37

 

This blog entry was written in recognition of Ada Lovelace Day (October 7, 2011), an international initiative to highlight the contributions of women in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm of Mary Smith is almost forgotten to time, except for this volume she left behind testifying to her love of scientific inquiry. Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), an amazing woman who corresponded with some of the most noted scientists and mathematicians of her day, is generally recognized as the first computer programmer. I hope that the stories of these two women, Ada Lovelace and Mary Smith, will inspire generations of students with their passion for learning.

-- Diane Shaw, Special Collections Cataloger