digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

Wired Science is carrying a very interesting story in which NASA is soliciting the public's ideas on how they can be make Wernher von Braun's notes available over the web. Von Braun was the fist director of NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and the genius behind the early US space program.

The official Request for Information, which closes August 31, is available here.

Touro College Libraries has developed a PHP front-end to Greenstone called EmeraldView. A demo is available at http://emeraldview-demo.tourolib.org/greenstone-demo. The developers are looking for feedback -- EmeraldView is probably the first publicly available LAMP front-ends to Greenstone, and will be of great value to the Greenstone community.

The WARC format for packaging web content (and other types of content) has been published as ISO 28500. A news release is available from the International Internet Preservation Consortium.

iPres 2009, the Sixth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects, has just issued its call for abstracts. iPres 2009 is the

sixth in the series of annual international conferences that bring together researchers and practitioners from around the world to explore the latest trends, innovations, and practices in preserving our scientific and cultural digital heritage.

The conference will be held October 5-6 in San Francisco.

This article by Alexis Wichowski in the May First Monday

This recommendation "discusses modeling choices involved in designing metadata applications for different types of interoperability. At Level 1, applications use data components with shared natural-language definitions. At Level 2, data is based on the formal-semantic model of the W3C Resource Description Framework (as in Linked Data). At Levels 3 and 4, data also shares syntactic constraints based on the DCMI Abstract Model.

The draft of the revised Guidelines for Best Encoding Practices (version 3.0) are open for public comment from April 22, 2009 to May 6, 2009.

From the blog's "about" page: "This blog was created for Digital Librarians in North Carolina to share experiences, exchange ideas, and develop collaborations."

Like the New Zealand National Library before them, Brooklyn Museum has opened up access to their collections via a Collection API. This is very exciting, as it lays the groundwork for multicollection mashups and other neat content and metadata reuse capabilities.

The February 2009 issue of the Creative Commons Newsletter is available. Other issues can be found at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCNewsletter.