Welsh Journals Online

An exemplary effort from the National Library of Wales, to get all their small and local journals freely available online at Welsh Journals Online. Added to the JURN Directory, and also to the JURN Search…

Flintshire Historical Society Journal (1977-2003)

Flintshire Historical Society Journal (1911-1976)

Gwent Local History (1976-2006)

Gower (1948-2005) (local history of this remote Welsh peninsula)

Journal of the Pembrokeshire Hist. Society (1985-2005)

Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society (1910-1984)

Journal of Welsh Ecclesiastical History (1984-1992)

Journal of Welsh Religious History (1993-2004)

Y Llyfr yng Nghymru / Welsh Book Studies (1998-2006)

Morgannwg (1957-2004) (Glamorgan local history and archaeology)

Montgomeryshire Collections (1944-2002)

National Library of Wales journal (1939-2006)

Nature in Wales (1955-1987) (included for its book reviews of literary nature writing)

Pembrokeshire Historian (1959-1981)

Radnorshire Society Transactions (1931-2004)

Reports … Cardiff Naturalists’ Society (1900-1981) (later issues also have regular articles on local history and archaeology)

Transactions … Cardiganshire Antiquarian Society (1911-1938)

Wales (1937-1959) (literary journal with reviews)

Welsh History Review (1960-2001)

Welsh Music History (1996-2004)

The future of ebooks

Publishers Weekly has a perceptive new article on the future of ebooks, A Soft Landing on Normandy…

“Almost every single startup that is delivering authoring tools — either for designing and producing content, maintaining a full-bore content management system, or simply supporting an interim level of annotations or fragmentation — is building their own proprietary web-based layer that is largely HTML5-based yet also capable of linking to software development kits and libraries needed to support the export of rich app experiences. In other words, everything is baroque, and nothing in the standards space works well enough across the range of possible uses to be a default rendering environment. It is very much as if we are back in the Middle Ages scribbling on parchment, whittling our own quills from feathers we have on hand, drawing up whatever ink we have available. Our 21st Century parchment is a world-wide digital canvas, but our quills are hand-crafted.”

That can potentially make sense for presenting high quality specialist non-fiction/textbooks with complex layouts, which I’d suggest is where these startups may be going with these tools. If they can create a system easy enough for small and mid-sized publishers to use, but which can produce faithful / easy-to-update / app-friendly expensive non-fiction in iPad editions, then they stand a chance of a buyout by a major publisher — who might then polish and sell the system to smaller publishers, along with a rights lock-in.

New titles added

Ilha do Desterro (journal of English literature and occasionally of linguistics, mostly in English)

Odisea (journal of English studies, about half the articles in English)

Shakespeare Institute Review (first issue due summer 2012 — and hopefully also scans of the Mason Croft Review which it replaces?).

Stanislavski Studies

JURN Search checked and updated

JURN Search has been fully checked for the continuing presence of indexed articles on the Google Search results, via the use of adapted software meant for checking SEO backlinks. The last such in-depth ‘linkrot’ check and repair was undertaken in January 2012. Both the Directory and the search-engine are now as sparkly clean as they can be.

Two new JISC reports

A new JISC report released this month, “Benefits of Open Access to Scholarly Research to the Public Sector“, claims that the UK public sector saves £28.6 million through using open access content, although they still spend £135m a year accessing paywalled information.

The voluntary and charitable sectors were also surveyed, in another JISC report called “Benefits of Open Access to Scholarly Research for Voluntary and Charitable Sector Organisations“.

17,900 new images from the Walters Art Museum

The Waters Art Museum has added 17,900 new images to the Wikimedia Commons. Google’s indexed them all, and so they can now be searched via Google Images thus…

site:http://commons.wikimedia.org/ “Walters Art Museum”

Filtering by 2 megapixel size shows that the Walters Art Museum now has 14,400 decently-sized images accessible via Google Images, and they’re without watermarks. The test download image I tried was found to be at 300dpi. The licence is Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike — somewhat questionable, since the works that are in the public domain might more usefully be CC Attribution.

Vimeo Creative Commons Search page

A new Creative Commons search page on Vimeo, the hipsters’ video hosting service.

Getty Research Portal for art history texts

The Getty Research Institute has announced the Getty Research Portal…

“a free online search gateway that aggregates descriptive metadata of digitized art history texts, with links to fully digitized copies that are free to download.”

Launch date is the 31st of May 2012.

JURN results now re-sortable by date

I’m pleased to say that the JURN search results are now re-sortable by date…

WikiPaintings

WikiPaintings is a new online encyclopedia of painting. It’s pretty well stocked, as well as having a nice clean interface. It mixes public domain works with copyright works, and sadly there’s no way to filter to get “just the public domain works, above 1800px in size” in search results.

Although you can go in via Google Images, with the following search:

site:http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/ “artwork is in the public domain”

This gets about 90,000 results. You can then refine by size in pixels.