When press is not printed : the challenge of collecting digital newspapers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France

Since its birth in the early seventeenth century, the press has played a prominent role in the political and social life of France. Over the two last decades, the economic and even cultural pillars on which the press ecosystem is built has been challenged by the growing use of digital technologies, and by the increasing role of the Internet as a way to distribute and access information.

Heritage libraries need to address the accelerating shift from analogue to digital in order to maintain the continuity of their objectives and of their missions. Many aspects need to be taken into account: legal, scientific, technical, economic and organizational issues have to be identified and addressed.

This paper looks at the example of the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France or BnF), and at the way it has dealt with collecting newspapers in digital form. During the ten last years, the BnF has launched several experiments, testing different approaches, with varying degrees of success: – Direct deposit of electronic publications on physical media (CDs and DVDs) or through FTP. – Fully automated web harvesting.

Since December 2010, almost 100 news websites (national and daily newspapers, pure players, news portals…) are collected on a daily basis. -Web harvesting through agreements with producers.”

URL : http://hal-bnf.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00769084

Back to the future: authors, publishers and ideas in a copy-friendly environment

How could scholars survive in a copy-friendly environment jeopardizing the established system of scholarly publishing in which scientific publishers seemed to be authors’ best friends? A backward itinerary across three German Enlightenment thinkers who took part to the debate on (unauthorized) reprinting shows us ways – usual and unusual – in which culture can flourish in a copy-friendly environment.

While Fichte endorsed an intellectual property theory, took the function of publishers for granted and neglected the interests of the public, Kant saw authors as speakers and justified publishers’ rights only as long as they work as spokespersons helping writers to reach the public. Eventually Lessing’s project was designed to foster authors’ autonomy by means of a subscription system that could have worked only on the basis of a free information flow and of direct relationships with and within the public itself.

Such a condition can be compared with the situation of ancient auctores, with one difference: while the ancient communities of knowledge were educated minorities, because of the limitations of orality and manuscript media system, we have now the opportunity to take Enlightenment seriously.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15445

Open access press vs traditional university presses on Amazon

This study is a comparison AU Press with three other traditional (non-open access) Canadian university presses. The analysis is based on actual physical book sales on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca. Statistical methods include the sampling of the sales ranking of randomly selected books from each press. Results suggest that there is no significant difference in the ranking of printed books sold by AU Press in comparison with traditional university presses.

However, AU Press, can demonstrate a significantly larger readership for its books as evidenced by thousands of downloads of the open electronic versions.

URL : http://openaccess.uoc.edu/webapps/o2/handle/10609/5082