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There’s a lot of talk about what the future of publishing looks like. Designers and innovators draw up these artistic visualizations of tablets, touchscreens, and interactive multimedia literature mashups to illustrate the possibilities.

But one designer is thinking a lot more about what is lost in the transition from the physical book to the digital. In fact, his visualizations often flip the script by placing digital literature in the physical context.

Read more of "Library Lab/The Podcast 001: Concrete Digital"

Here’s a surprisingly touching video from Jon Voss, touting the power of metadata:

I say “surprisingly touching” because it is about metadata, after all.

Mathew Ingram at Gigaom reports on one of the catches in Amazon’s plan to allow libraries to lend e-books on the Kindle: Who owns the books? Since preserving our heritage is one of the key value of our libraries but not of Amazon, there are troubling consequences of turning libraries into distribution sites for corporate content.

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The Association for Learning Technology has published a detailed and highly practical guide, based on its own experience, for journals moving toward an Open Access model. Indeed, the guide is of even broader utility than that, since it considers the practicalities of moving from an existing contract with publishers for any reason.

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OCLC has posted a page that lets you drill down by geographic area to see stats about libraries. For example, Massachusetts has 3,181 librarians (1,440 of which are in academic libraries) and 81,877,061 volumes in libraries. (Hat tip to Infodocket.)

From the Pinakes page:

Pinakes is a non-commercial tool the aim of which is to offer a renewed historiographic approach to the classification of the scientific heritage. Thanks to the integration of different types of objects, such as instruments, manuscripts, texts, iconography etc. Pinakes aims at transforming the traditional approach to the primary sources of the history of science into a sort of archeology of scientific knowledge. In order to achieve this ambitious project it was necessary to design a model of data-base, Pinakes, able to bring different classes of objects and items into one environment.

…

Pinakes has been thought as a database capable of hosting different levels of data structuring. On the basis of the choiche of the target, the user might be able to manage data form a very specific level to a more general description of the items classified.

Interesting. (h/t Amanda French)

Jean-Claude Bradley at Useful Chemistry has announced (well, a few weeks ago) that the international chemical company Alfa Aesar has agreed to open source its melting point data. This is important not just because Alfa Aesar is one of the most important sources of that information. It also provides a model that could work outside of chemistry and science.

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[Update (March 19)]: Google turned down the Berkman Center application, which included our projects :( ]

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Felix Online, the online news of Imperial College in the UK, reports (in an article by Kadhim Shubber) that Deborah Shorley, Director of the Imperial College London Library, is threatening to end the library’s subscriptions to journals published by Elsevier and Wiley Blackwell, two of the major publishers in the UK. Upset with 6% increases in annual subscription fees (well above inflation, and in the face of a growth in profits at Elsevier from £1B to £1.6B from 2005 to 2009), she is demanding a 15% reduction in fees, as well as other concessions.

Read more of "Imperial College takes on Elsevier and Wiley Blackwell"