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News
2006-12-29: Public Records and Genealogy Sites DjVu is used by quite a few genealogy web sites to display scanned images of various official records. An example of genealogy site is FindMyPast.com. A good example of official record web site is the Canadian Directories web site put together by the Library and Archives of Canada. 2006-12-22: DjVu Viewer for Symbian Cell Phones Novosoft is offering a (non-free) DjVu viewer for cell phones that run the Symbian operation system. The viewer is called Handy DjVu 1.0, and can be downloaded from Softpedia.com. 2006-10-15: One Laptop Per Child includes DjVu The $100 laptop designed by the One Laptop per Child project includes DjVu support within the Evince document viewer. DjVu is used for E-book distribution. Since the OLPC has no hard-drive, the small size of DjVu files is key. 2006-10-10: MediaWiki supports DjVu Version 1.8 of MediaWiki, the wiki software used by Wikipedia and many others, now supports DjVu. From the release notes: Render thumbnails for DJVU images, support multipage DJVU display on image pages. Added new 'page=' thumbnail option to select a page from a multipage djvu for thumbnail generation. 2006-03-21: Opera Libretti Another nice Italian website from Alessandro Amodio: the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense hosts this large collection of opera librettos (or should I say libretti) in DjVu. 2006-03-20: Emeroteca Digitale Alessandro Amodio from opendoc.it points us to the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Emeroteca Digitale in Italy. It contains an extensive collection of digitized Italian newspapers and serials published in Milan and Lombardy in the 19th and 20th Centuries. The collection contains more than 1,500,000 pages from about 600 publications, fully indexed. The documents are scanned in bitonal and greyscale with a resolution ranging from 150 to 400 DPI, and then optimized for web delivery in DjVu in the "indirect" form, 2006-03-17: Anywhere Books Bookmobile We want to re-iterate our kudos to the folks at Anywhere Books, a spin off of our old friends the Internet Archive. Back in 2004, they traveled from village to village in Uganda in their Digital Bookmobile, printing book on demand for local school children. Many of those books are in DjVu. There is a nice story about it at O'Reilly.net. 2006-03-16: DjVu on the Sony Librie E-Book Reader The Makezine Blog (of the magazine "Make") tells us about a new app for reading DjVu documents on the Sony Librie E-book reader.. Cool. 2006-03-15: DjVuLibre on NewsForge NewsForge has a nice article on DjVu and DjVuLibre, with pointers and screenshots 2006-03-14: More Mathematics Archives in DjVu The archive of the Indiana University Mathematics Journal are provided in DjVu and PDF. Click on the link, type in a year (say 1956) and get all the papers. This site at University of Rennes in France has mathematics books and papers by Galois, Gauss, Klein, Lagrange, and Riemann in DjVu. They were converted by Prof. Antoine Chambert-Loir from original scans at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France). Other demonstrations that DjVu is ideal for mathematical publications: Vladimir Lotov's page at the Sobolev Institute, Ken Brown's page at Cornell University, and Alberto Candel's page at California State University, Northridge. When Scientific books go out of print, some publishers return the copyright to the author. Frank Kelly kindly made his book Reversibility and Stochastic Networks available in DjVu. The Grodno State University in Belarus has several math and biology books in DjVu, but you need to register to see them. 2006-03-13: New DjVu Content Here is a harvest of new websites with DjVu content. The University of Nevada at Reno has a nice site with DjVu map: the Nevada History in Maps. The Ulster Convenant web site provides DjVu scans of hundreds of thousands of signatories of the 1912 document. The archives of linguist George Dumezil. Want to look up the datasheet of old Russian vacuum tubes? search no more: here they are in DjVu. The old 1971-vintage ICL 1900 mainframe computer taking up space in your basement came without a manual? here it is. The University of Paris-Sorbonne has a site with a few ancient documents in DjVu. The Kevin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve University has the proceedings of their annual symposium in DjVu. When your document contains high-resolution maps, there is nothing like DjVu, as demonstrated by the New Mexico State University's report on Trans-International Boundary Aquifers. The North Carolina Archives has a collection of documents with signatures from every US president. 2006-03-12: University of Bologna Digital Library Universita di Bologna has a digital library with lots of old scanned books in DjVu format (here is an example. It's too bad they sliced up the documents into individual files (like a Bologna saussage ;-) instead of providing multipage documents. 2006-03-11: SmartDjVu viewer for PDAs Inscenic has a PocketPC app for viewing DjVu documents on small PDA screens called SmartDjVu 2006-03-10: Orchesographie now available in DjVu Thanks to the Internet Archive, one of my favorite books is now available in DjVu: Orchesographie, the definitive treatise on Renaissance Dances, published in 1584 by Thoinot Arbeau (a French monk). No need to go to a Library microfilm room, or to the Bibliotheque Nationale de France to read it anymore. 2006-03-09: US National Park Service The US National Park Service has all its public documents on its web site, many of which are in DjVu. DjVu is particularly convenient for those big maps of the national parks (Gettysburg, Kings Canyon) 2006-03-07: US Geological Survey The US Geological Survey (USGS) web site has several publications in DjVu, including this report on Lewis and Clark's observations and measurements of geomorphology and hydrology, and changes with time 2006-03-06: Digitized Books at the University of Georgia Bob Kobres, armed with his ingenious Flying Scanner at the University of Georgia offers lots of digitized books and manuscripts in DjVu. The books can be displayed with the normal DjVu viewer, as well as with JavaDjVu (which does not require the plug-in). Personally, I like H.G. Wells's The world set free, which talks about the promises of nuclear energy. The book was published in 1914.... 2006-03-05: Historical Newspaper of the State of Washington The web site of the Secretary of State for the state of Washington has a historical archive of scanned newspapers in DjVu. Tons of pages of going back to the mid 19th century as Washington became a US territory. 2006-03-04: New Jersey Legal Library The New Jersey Legal Library at Rutgers University provides reams of legal documents, decisions of the supreme court, opinions of the attorney general.... If you are a legal scholar, an NJ historian, or if you have trouble falling asleep, have a look. 2006-03-03: Stepping Stones Stepping Stones is a UK company that sells historical census information on CDs or online. It's all in DjVu, but it's not free. 2006-03-02: China-America Digital Academic Library The China-America Digital Academic Library (CADAL), a collaboration between several Chinese universities, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Chinese and US governments, is slated to scan one million chinese books. Some of them are already available in DjVu at Zhejiang University's CADAL web site. Our friends Raj Reddy (from the Million Book Project at CMU), Brewster Kahle (from the Internet Archive) and Michael Lesk (from NSF, now at Rutgers University) are advisors to the project. 2006-03-01: Mark Twain at Montclair University Montclair University has a collection of works by Mark Twain. 2005-10-31: Printed Heritage of Iceland, Faroe Islands, and Greenland Project VESTNORD gives access to the printed heritage preserved in the newspapers and periodical of the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Iceland. The website currently has over 730,000 pages from magazines and newspaper covering the years 1773 to 2001. Browsing is possible through the list of all available publications. 2005-10-30: NOAA Daily Weather maps NOAA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, provides DjVu scans of daily US weather maps since January 1st 1871. Here is a map of the weather in US on the first day of the 20th century at 8:00AM EST. Kudos to the NOAA Central Library Data Imaging Project. 2005-10-29: Over 3,000,000 Google hits for djvu Searching for "djvu" on Google returns over 3 million hits, from less than 1.5 million hits only 9 months ago. Are we seeing an explosive progression of DjVu usage? 2005-10-28: Zinio uses DjVu? Zinio is a Web service that provides digital subscriptions to many maintstream magazines, such as Business Week, PC World, Elle, and (yes) Playboy. This article at Publish.com tells us that Zinio's reader uses DjVu inside. Looks like they dumped PDF in favor of DjVu for the internal format of their proprietary viewer. 2005-09-20: The Complete New Yorker in DjVu The Complete New Yorker DVD Collection became available today. 80 years of TNY, 4100 issues, 500,000 pages, all nicely squeezed on 8 DVDs thanks to DjVu. The DVD set uses a customized version of the DjVu viewer with integrated search and many other features. The announcement is getting the attention of the press, 2005-09-19: Texts at the Internet Archive The text collection at the Internet Archive provides free access to about 12,000 books and documents in DjVu. The documents are grouped in five collections of diverse origins, including the Million Book project, the Canadian Libraries project, and the Children's Library. The Internet Archive's moto is "Universal access to human knowledge". This is exactly what the creators of DjVu had in mind. 2005-05-08: DjVu Indexing for Google Desktop The Google DjVu Search Plug-in by Vilen Kamalov, and the DjVu Indexer Plug-in by Andrew Zhezherun allow users of Google Desktop Search to index and search DjVu files on their hard drives. 2005-03-13: NUMDAM, the Digitized Math Archive The NUMDAM project (NUMerisation de Documents Anciens Mathematiques), run by the CNRS in France, is digitizing ancient mathematics documents published in France. It contains DjVu archives of nine mathemtical periodicals, such as the Annales de l'Institute Fourier since 1949. You can browse through the Bulletin de la Societe Mathematique de France since 1872, with original articles by famous mathematicians such as Jordan, Laguerre, Poincare, Cartan, Hadamard, Lebesgue, Borel. Or have a look at early issues of Annales de l'Institute Henri Poincare, with articles by Einstein, Fermi, Schrodinger, Dirac, Brillouin, Max Born, De Broglie, Millikan, Read the Annales Scientifiques de l'Ecole Normale Superieure, with papers by Louis Pasteur, Sadi Carnot, Hermite, Minkowski, etc. 2005-03-09: WinDjView: open source Windows Viewer Andrew Zhezherun offers WinDjView, a nice, open source DjVu viewer for Windows. It has continuous scrolling (with the mouse wheel), and lots of other features. There is also a Mac version, MacDjView, on the download page, and on the Sourceforge Project Page. 2005-02-27: Maps at U. of Nevada, Reno The University of Nevada at Reno Library hosts a site entitled Nevada History in Maps. It contains lots of old maps in high resolution DjVu, JPEG, and TIFF. The DjVus are 500K to a few MB, the JPEGs are 10-30MB, and the TIFF 100-200MB. 2005-02-20: Princeton University E-Reserve Princeton University uses DjVu for their Electronic Course Reserve service. Professors use the service to distribute course material to their students. 2005-02-05: Antique Maps of Iceland The National and University Library of Iceland and National Library of Norway put together this repository of Antique Maps of Iceland. Most of the maps are available in high-resolution DjVu. 2005-02-04: Digital Memory of the Canary Islands The library of the University of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands is hosting the Memoria Digital de Canarias. Thousands of documents and pictures on the history of the Canary Islands in DjVu. 2005-02-02: 1.45 Millon Google hits for DjVu Type "djvu" on Google, and you get 1,450,000 hits. Type jpeg2000, and you get 230,000 hits. Hmm, interesting. 2005-01-27: Searchable Ornithological Research Archive at UNM The University of New Mexico has rolled out the Searchable Ornithological Research Archive, which provides access to several ornithological journal archives in DjVu. The scanning and indexing was done by our good friends at the Princeton Imaging. This scanning bureau has been building DjVu-based document libraries since day one. We owe them the Century Dictionnary, and NIPS Online archive and many others. 2005-01-25: Jewish National and University Library uses DjVu The Jewish National and University Library (the Israeli equivalent of the US Library of Congress) has two magnificent web sites that use DjVu. The first one contains the writings of Maimonides (manuscripts and early prints from the 12th to the 17th century), Have a look at those nice high-resolution color plates, like this nice illuminated Torah from the early 1300's. The second site is the Digitized Book Repository. Some books are in Latin, some in Hebrew. The people at JNUL have done an excellent job with the scanning and the compression. We, at DjVuZone, would love to see the Einstein Archives digitized and distributed the same way. 2005-01-09: DjVu Viewer for PalmOS InDev Software is announcing the availability of a DjVu viewer for PalmOS, as part of their GrxView Pro image viewing software. The Pro version, which includes DjVu support is available for $24.95. 2004-12-26: JavaDjVu released in open source The Internet Archive, LizardTech, and the DjVuLibre team are announcing the open-source release of JavaDjVu, a Java implementation of the DjVu viewer. The Internet Archive, is one of the largest and most prominent providers of DjVu content. Thousands of books are being scanned, indexed, and offered for free download in DjVu format on the Archive website. While the DjVu plug-in is freely available and easy to install, some users may prefer to view DjVu content without having to install a plug-in. JavaDjVu is the solution. By releasing JavaDjVu under the GNU GPL license, LizardTech and the Internet Archive hope to gather good-will and energy from the DjVu community to develop and enhance this platform-independent open source viewer. Please visit the JavaDjVu Website, try the viewer, and see if you can contribute code, documentation, suggestions,.... 2003-12-04: A new Beginning for DjVu and DjVuZone After a 2 year hiatus, DjVuZone is coming back to life. DjVuZone is maintained by the original developers of DjVu Yann LeCun and Leon Bottou. Until recently, we had major disagrements with LizardTech's DjVu strategy. Seeing our creation go to waste because of corporate greed and incompetence was too much to bear. Rather than wasting our time trying to help LizardTech with their failed strategy, we decided to concentrate our efforts on maintaining DjVuLibre, the open source implementation of DjVu, and Any2DjVu, the free conversion server. Were it not for DjVuLibre, Any2DjVu, and a few dedicated fans of the technology (such as Jim Rile at PlanetDjVu), DjVu would have disappeared by now. Over the last few months, everything has changed for the better: LizardTech was acquired by Celartem. Celartem brought in a new management team with a bright young CEO, Carlos Domingo. Unlike his predecessors, Carlos understands what DjVu is all about, and understands how to promote it (what a change!). LizardTech is now working with the DjVuLibre team instead of against it. They are licensing the technology to third parties. They are planning to open source more software. They have lowered the prices of the commercial products, and they are making donation of DjVu licenses to non-profit and educational institutions (including the Internet Archive). If you are asking yourself why DjVu hasn't had more users and exposure in the past, it's because the previous LizardTech managers never understood that their "niche market" approach was doomed. We told them again and again that DjVu had to be open and become ubiquitous, or die, but they never got it. They did allow us to distribute DjVuLibre, but only because their contract with AT&T forced them to do it. Everything is different now. The DjVu Summit that took place on December 3rd at Rutgers University marks a new beginning for DjVu. LizardTech's new strategy is already paying off, and many new high-profile DjVu content providers are popping up (many of them in the Far East, such as Samsung which provides all its products manuals in DjVu). DjVuZone will provide up-to-date news about DjVu and about new sites that use DjVu.