2005 was a wonderful year full of interesting projects, challenging ideas, exciting people, and fun conversations. Thank you for being a part of my 2005! May 2006 bring you joy and prosperity.Search engines fit the information consumerÂ’s lifestyle better than physical or online libraries. The majority of U.S. respondents, age 14 to 64, see search engines as a perfect fit.You can find links to the previous OCLC reports on the left side of this page or here.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library has released the aDORe Archive Solution, a “write-once/read-many” framework for archiving files, assigning persistent identifers, and disseminating metadata about the file via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. adoreArchive is made available under the GNU Lesser General Public License.The Digital Archive at McGill University recently mentioned software developed there that:
...was developed by a Ph.D student here at McGill, that captures dynamically-generated webpages such as the McGill University website.
The Digital Knowledge Center (DKC), working with the University of Virginia (UVA), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and an extensive network of collaborators, will conduct an architecture and technology evaluation of repository software and services such as e-learning, e-publishing, and digital preservation. The result will be a set of best practices and recommendations that will inform the development of repositories, services, and appropriate interfaces. This project is funded by the Mellon Foundation.The repository systems currently listed on the site are:
TAPE [Training for Audiovisual Preservation in Europe] will organize an annual 5 days’ European training course on preservation and digitization of audiovisual collections. The programme has been developed by experts from different countries with training expertise, among them the TAPE partners, some of whom have extensive experience with training in this specific area.The workshop will be from April 19 - 25, 2006 at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam. Complete details are available at: http://www.tape-online.net/courses.html
Search Committee: Metadata Librarian, Attention: Alberta Walker, Associate Director, Libraries of The Claremont Colleges, 800 Dartmouth Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711, Email: search.committee@libraries.claremont.edu, Applications received by January 10, 2006 will receive first consideration.Located at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains in the city of Claremont, California (population 36,500), 35 miles east of Los Angeles, the Claremont Colleges are a geographically contiguous set of five top-ranked liberal arts undergraduate colleges and two graduate institutions, uniquely configured to support and encourage interdisciplinary study. The Libraries, a part of The Colleges' supporting organization, the Claremont University Consortium, support all seven colleges across a wide spectrum of disciplines. Comprising four buildings, three of which are located on individual campuses, the Libraries hold more than 2 million volumes and subscribe to a vast array of electronic resources.
In 2004-05 the National Library continued to support research into library and information studies through commissioning the School of Information Management at Victoria University of Wellington to investigate the needs of end users of digitised cultural heritage collections. The report is presented here in its final version.The full report and an eight-page summary are available. Included in the full report are the survey questions used with the end-users.
Results from the surveys and interviews indicate that digital access is indispensable to cultural heritage research. However, participants also identified a number of barriers to digital access, some that are more generic, and others that are more relevant to scholarly historical research. The importance of New Zealand primary documents for cultural heritage research is repeatedly mentioned by participants, with particular emphasis on image sources (i.e. maps, photographs), newspapers, and all Māori cultural materials.
"Qualified Dublin Core"Â’ employs additional qualifiers to further refine the meaning of a resource. One use for such qualifiers are to indicate if a metadata value is a compound or structured value, rather than just a string.
Qualifiers allow applications to increase the specificity or precision of the metadata. They may also introduce complexity that could impair the metadata's compatibility with other Dublin Core software applications. With this in mind, designers should only select from the set of approved Dublin Core qualifiers that were developed by the Dublin Core community process.
Unfortunately, qualifiers often introduce additional complexity that can make metadata less interoperable unless approved DC Qualifiers developed within the DCMI are used with such interoperability considerations in mind.
Full preservation includes bit-level preservation of the originally submitted files, as well as services intended to ensure that the information content of the files will remain usable into the indefinite future. These services vary according to the file type but may include the creation of normalized forms of the file and/or the reformatting of obsolete formats to reasonably comparable successor formats. It is not guaranteed, however, that normalized or migrated versions of any file will be identical in functionality or in “look and feel” to the original file. Note also that if a logical object is comprised of individual files in both supported and unsupported formats, there is no guarantee that the logical object will remain usable as intended.The assumption is, of course, that you have defined what file types you want to do full preservation on and why, and that those decisions match your organization's needs.
...is trying to find ways to get more small cultural institutions involved in digitization efforts. We have several instances where local public libraries have formed partnerships with small historical societies to get their items online. We have another library that brought together a group of 4 smaller local museums to digitize some of their materials as well.Wow! These efforts are wonderful to hear. Anyone else have a success story about working with smaller institutions to get them involved in digitization?
We even offer a digitization lab with hands on help and training free to participants. There is a very small fee to participate but most times the library or a donor will step in to cover that cost.
Currently we are focused in northern Illinois, but are willing to form partnerships with others.
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin announced today that Google is the first private-sector company to contribute to the Library's initiative to develop a plan to begin building a World Digital Library (WDL) for use by other libraries around the globe. The effort would be supported by funds from nonexclusive, public and private partnerships, of which Google is the first.
The concept for the WDL came from a speech that Billington delivered to the newly established U.S. National Commission for UNESCO on June 6, 2005, at Georgetown University. The full text is available at www.loc.gov/about/welcome/speeches.
In his speech, Billington proposed that public research institutions and libraries work with private funders to begin digitizing significant primary materials of different cultures from institutions across the globe. Billington said that the World Digital Library would bring together online "“rare and unique cultural materials held in U.S. and Western repositories with those of other great cultures such as those that lie beyond Europe and involve more than 1 billion people: Chinese East Asia, Indian South Asia and the worlds of Islam stretching from Indonesia through Central and West Asia to Africa."
Google Inc. has agreed to donate $3 million as the first partner in this public-private initiative.
To lay the groundwork for the WDL, the Library will develop a plan for identifying technology issues related to digitization and organization of WDL collections. These might include presentation, maintenance, standards and metadata schemas that support both access and preservation. The plan will also identify resources, such as equipment, staffing and funding, required to digitize and launch an online presentation of a WDL collection.In their commentary on this, Danny Sullivan and Gary Price note:
Over the past year, Google has digitized about 5,000 public domain books from the Library of Congress, material that may ultimately end up in Google Book Search, though it's not currently listed there yet. Google will continue scanning public domain books from the Library of Congress Law Library. Google said it's too early to tell if any of the scanning work it has already done will end up in the WDL.Now we have several big projects underway. It will be interesting to see how they all fair.
The Learning About Digital Institutional Repositories Seminars programme (LEADIRS) aims to describe and illustrate how to build an online institutional repository.
The LEADIRS series of seminars present specialists from the UK and abroad sharing their expertise and experiences in building institutional repositories. This workbook book supplements the seminar presentations and offers practical advice as well as work sheets you can use to get started with your own repository programme. Where possible, we point you to real-world examples of planning aids or presentations used by university library teams in the UK and around the world.
The information in this book is as complete as possible at the time of writing. Because each institutional repository service will be unique to the institution where it is built, this information is meant to be helpful and to provoke discussion and exploration. It is not meant to be prescriptive. We cannot account for or anticipate the unique challenges and resources of your institution.
The UK National Archives has released PRONOM 4, the latest version of its web-based technical registry to support long-term digital preservation. Adrian Brown, Head of Digital Preservation, at The National Archives said: ‘PRONOM 4 incorporates a number of significant enhancements, including an automatic file format identification tool.’
PRONOM 4:
