This year, NPR Books took an unconventional approach to the traditional year-end best-of list by creating NPR's Book Concierge, an interactive website that lets readers sort more than 200 notable books of 2013 by category.


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The website features 26 clickable categories, including "Love Stories," "Funny Stuff," "Family Matters" and "NPR Staff Picks." When a category is selected, the books that don't fit into that group will disappear from the page. Click on additional categories to further narrow book choices.

Users can select whether to view the titles in a list form or as book covers. Click on a title or cover to read excerpts from NPR reviews and to find more information about a book. (apps.npr.org/best-books-2013/)

The Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project is working to digitize 1.5 million pages of ancient texts held at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (The Vatican Library) and the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford. The project recently launched a website where these ancient texts will be freely accessible to the public.

According to the site, the project will focus on digitizing the libraries' collections of Hebrew manuscripts, Greek manuscripts and incunabula for the next three years. The items to be digitized were selected by "a team of scholars and curators from around the world," according to a post on the site's blog. Researchers looking for a specific manuscript can submit a request for it to be added to the digital collection by clicking on the website's contact tab.

In addition to a clickable index of digitized pages, the site includes videos of scholars talking about texts, blog updates from the project managers and lists of which manuscripts are scheduled to be digitized next. (bav.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/)

Courtney Crowder
http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/books/chi-npr-book-concierge-polonsky-digitization-20131219,0,866769.story
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