Monday, October 06, 2008

Web site for the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative

On Sept. 30, the web site for the U.S. Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative became available to the public. According to the email announcement:
The initiative represents a collaborative effort to establish a common set of guidelines for digitizing historical materials. Under this initiative, two Working Groups have been established.

The Still Image Working Group will focus its efforts on books, manuscripts, maps, and photographic prints and negatives. Its members include the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Gallery of Art, the National Library of Medicine, the National Technical Information Service, the National Transportation Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Government Printing Office.

The Audio-Visual Working Group will address standards and practices for sound, video, and motion picture film. Its members include the Defense Visual Information Directorate of the Department of Defense, the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Library of Medicine, the Smithsonian Institution, the Government Printing Office and the Voice of America.
The web site contains some draft guidelines and information on guidelines that will be developed. This is obviously a work-in-progress and a site to watch in order to see what they do.


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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Jill,
Could you please tell me if there are tools available on the net to digitize documents and suitable for large government institutes, whether open source or product, a tool that read digitized content from a scanner and put the image in a special file system with a certain id and category. it would be a nice thing about is that a DB field could point to that file system and extract the file from there when needed.

Jill Hurst-Wahl said...

I do not know of any open source software that will operate a scanner and create digital images. If you are looking for open source content/asset management software, that does exist (e.g., Greenstone).

If I've misinterpreted your question, please ask it again.