Each month I try and sort out some of the more accessible and interesting entries on the SEPW to share with readers interested in issues such as library digitization, open access, and electronic journals. You can check out my previous entries here.

This month I’ve got just a few quick items to share. First, I’ll draw attention to “Creating the Mark Twain Project Online” by Lisa Schiff. The MTPO is a neat little project I had never before heard of. Its aim is to make free to the public a wealth of the great author’s personal documents and correspondence by “providing access to more than 2,300 complete texts, over 28,000 records of other known items, and almost 100 facsimile images.”

The case study linked to above isn’t about Mark Twain itself, though it will provide an interesting bit of reading for those interested in digital archiving and techie site creation stuff. Readers interested in getting into the Twain papers made available by this ambitious project should check out the Mark Twain Project directly.

“E-Books or Print Books, ‘Big Deals’ or Local Selections: What Gets More Use?” by Robert Slater provides a nice comparison of the changing ways in which people access books. Researchers at Oakland University tracked several hundred books and compared the usage of ebooks versus that of their deadtree counterparts.

Right off the bat, it is interesting to note that

Similar comparisons of print and electronic book usage have shown that overall electronic book usage is comparable to print book circulations. However, some specific subject areas do tend to be used more in one format than the other. Over time, there has been a trend towards e-books receiving more use than their print counterparts.

It probably won’t come as a surprise that humanities subjects such as linguistics and history tend to get more paper usage while the math and science see higher ebook numbers. The researchers also determined that locally selected ebook collections (by, say, librarians or a department) see much more popularity than those that were offered through “consortially selected collections.” The best news of all, however, is that scholarly ebook usage remains on the rise, and is perhaps accelerating.

Finally, interested in seeing just how important and far-reaching systems such as Google Book Search have become? Check out this Google Book Search Bibliography.

And here are a few quick links that aren’t free to access but may be of interest to some readers:

• “Unless Otherwise Indicated: A Survey of Copyright Statements on Digital Library Collections” by Melanie Schlosser
• “Describing Digital Objects: A Tale of Compromise” by Jessica Branco Colati, Robin Dean, & Keith Maull
• “The National E-Books Observatory Project: Examining Student Behaviors and Usage” by Lorraine Estelle & Hazel Woodward