Ben Brumfield on Crowdsourcing:

http://manuscripttranscription.blogspot.ca/2013/07/the-collaborative-future-of-amateur.html

http://www.newappsblog.com/2013/07/more-on-ergo-the-new-open-access-philosophy-journal.html

In recent years, it has become more and more obvious that the business model of commercial academic publishers is a form of extortion, on many levels, especially of public money in places where research is largely or partially publicly funded. It’s the usual story: we work for them for free, both by writing papers and by doing most of the work involved in publishing a journal (editing, refereeing etc.), and then the irony is that we (or our institutions) then need to pay to have access to the results, through outrageous library subscriptions.

http://italianrenaissanceresources.com/

"A freely available resource, this site features eight units, each of which explores a different theme in Italian Renaissance art. Researchers and students can explore thematic essays, more than 340 images, 300 glossary items and 42 primary source texts. "

http://www.mesa-medieval.org

"The Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA) is a federated
international community of scholars, projects, institutions, and
organizations engaged in digital scholarship within the field of medieval
studies. MESA seeks both to provide a community for those engaged in
digital medieval studies and to meet emerging needs of this community,
including making recommendations on technological and scholarly standards
for electronic scholarship, the aggregation of data, and the ability to
discover and repurpose this data."

Please sign the Manifesto:

http://dhdhi.hypotheses.org/1855

Lara Unger wrote me:

In fact, we frequently digitize materials for scholars in Europe, particularly music scores. We do have a limit per month per requestor, and how long it takes is dependent on what other projects are being worked on, vacations, etc. We can only digitize materials in the Public Domain and in OUR (University of Michigan Library) collection. If something is a rare book or manuscript or something else from one of the special collections on campus, whether we can digitize it is predicated by their approval (and mine).

It can take anywhere from a week to 4 or more weeks.

I have not seen any other programs like this, but then I am not generally searching for them either. :}
The University has plans to digitize the majority of the materials in its collections. This is why we can agree to not charge for the service, we are going to digitize it anyway, its just a question of when it gets in the queue. A patron request moves an volume up to the front of the line.

See also
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/434207182/

Update:
http://www.juniusinstitute.org/blog/ask-and-it-shall-be-given/

http://www.digitalvictorianist.com/2013/06/open-access-book-revie/

"A few months ago I reviewed Leah Price’s latest monograph for the European Review of History. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain explores nineteenth-century representations and perceptions of books and other printed objects such as newspapers and religious pamphlets. It’s an interesting study and well worth a look for anybody who works on Victorian print culture. A hardback copy with 350 pages will set you back £15.56 on Amazon – not dirt cheap, but more reasonable than a lot of academic monographs. Still, if you’d prefer to read my review before handing over your hard earned cash then you’ll soon be able to find it on the Taylor and Francis website. If your institution already has a subscription to the European Review of History then you’ll be able to digest my wise words for free, but if not then please don’t despair – you’ll have the option to buy a copy of my review for the perfectly reasonable price of £23.50. It’s 1,114 words long – that’s about four sides of A4 paper – and will be sent to you in the form of a handsomely presented PDF. How could you resist?

It’s moments like this – when a 4 page pdf of a book review costs more than the 350 page hard-back book that it’s reviewing – that should remind us that academic publishing is broken. The numbers just don’t add up. Open access initially seemed to provide a solution to this problem, but the ‘Gold’ model currently supported by the UK government replaces one set of skewed numbers with another. If you haven’t been following this debate – or, like me, you keep forgetting which colour of open access is which – then all you need to know is that the ‘Gold’ model requires authors (or their institutions) to pay for the costs of publication. At first glance, this seems like it could be viable, until you realise that the ‘costs’ of publishing are massively inflated. This week I received an email from Taylor and Francis informing me that I had the option to publish my book review as Open Access for the modest fee of $2,950. "

How To Attribute Creative Commons Photos by Foter

"The re3data.org registry allows the easy identification of appropriate research data repositories, both for data producers and users. The registry covers research data repositories from all academic disciplines. Information icons display the principal attributes of a repository, allowing users to identify the functionalities and qualities of a data repository. These attributes can be used for multi-faceted searches, for instance to find a repository for geoscience data using a Creative Commons licence.

By April 2013, 338 research data repositories were indexed in re3data.org. 171 of these are described by a comprehensive vocabulary, which was developed by involving the data repository community (http://doi.org/kv3).

The re3data.org search at can be found at: http://www.re3data.org
The information icons are explained at: http://www.re3data.org/faq" (IP-OA-Forum)