Textual Geographies uses named entity recognition and geolocation to extract place names from multilingual (English, German, Spanish, and Chinese) printed volumes held by the HathiTrust digital library and to associate those names with detailed geographic information. The project corpus currently includes about 10 million volumes published between 1700 and the present day.

How might we use advanced networked technologies in museums? How might they be used to improve the experience for visitors to the museum? We are investigating these questions through a careful analysis of what currently happens in museums and how we might want to build on or change that. We think that much can be learned from studying the kind of things that docents do when they give a guided…

This project examines writers who represent education as an embodied experience, with learning and literacy grounded in what they called “object learning” or “the education of things.” Denouncing rote-learning in favor of an induction method, object lessons promised to coordinate the development of body and mind by using the pupil’s senses as a catalyst for higher cognitive thought. Children…

Business intelligence, broadly conceived, has always been an ingredient of economic life. However, the planned and systematic collection, organization and dissemination of information for commercial purposes did not appear until the abrupt escalation of trade and the massive extension of imperial reach in the nineteenth century. In Britain, investment in sources and systems of commercial…

In response to the perceived (by some) onset of an information society, historians have begun to study its roots and antecedents. The past is replete with the rise, fall, and transformation of systems of information, which are not to be confused with the narrower computer-mediated world of information systems. The history of systems of information—which for digestibility can…

Corporate libraries of the kind we would recognize today began to appear around the turn of the twentieth century. They were a response to a rapidly changing corporate and commercial environment, acting as adjuncts to both the rise of systematic industrial research and the office management revolution that accompanied the implementation of scientific management. As nurseries of what today we…

Vast quantities of electronic information provide a unique opportunity for scientists to identify candidate solutions for grand challenges as scientists, policy makers, and students have never had access to more electronic…

Despite the ubiquity of search in many people’s daily lives, a lack of search literacy can make it difficult to find solutions to technical problems, such as completing software-based tasks like troubleshooting program installations. iSchool Professor Michael Twidale and Assistant Professor Max Wilson of the University of Nottingham have received funding from Google for a project that aims to…

Jon Gant directs a canvassing operation and research team to assess and evaluate the implementation, progress and overall adoption success of the UC2B project. Researchers hope to deepen the understanding of the barriers to broadband adoption among residents of underserved communities. Gant's team has been integral to identifying households that are eligible for free installation, and then…

Visits by British librarians to the United States is an overlooked aspect of trans-atlantic cultural exchange. After outlining the early history of international conferences at which British and American librarians would have met, examples are selected from the formative era of professional librarianship of visits by British librarians and library promoters to study the institutions and…