digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The Digital Preservation Coalition has released a report titled Preserving the Data Explosion: Using PDF. The report is written from a records-management perspective, focusing on "PDF/Archive as an archival file format to preserve an organization's knowledge" combined with comprehensive records management programs and policies.

The Association of Research Libraries has published a report titled Research Library Publishing Services: New Options for University Publishing (PDF). Among the report's findings are the results of a late 2007 survey that "verified that research libraries are rapidly developing publishing services.

Major changes in the PREMIS 2.0 data dictionary include expanded rights metadata, more extensive significant properties and preservation level information, and a mechanism for extensibility for a number of metadata units.

Deadline for comments on the XML schema is April 24. More information is available at the PREMIS schemas website.

The National Library of Sweden has released OAI4J, a Java library (available under the Apache License) that implements a client API for the OAI-PMH standard specification from the Open Archives Initiative. It also has support for the upcoming OAI-ORE specification. More information is available at the project website.

DSpace 1.5 is now available and can be downloaded from SourceForge. This release contains a large number of new features. For more information, visit the DSpace website.

Released just over a week ago, the University Scholarly Knowledge Inventory System (U-SKIS) "tracks .pdf files from start to finish, records communication and provides publisher's archiving policies to determine what may be added to a digital institutional repository." It's available under the GPL and runs on pretty much and platform that supports MySQL and Perl.

The scale of this accomplishment is astounding, despite the criticisms that have been made against UMich and Google in implementing the program. As the story points out, that's one million out of a total book collection of 7.5 million.

This article from the BBC News describes the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive, developed by a community based in Australia's Northern Territory, and the degrees of access people have to parts of the archive based on who they are. Access to particular material is based on culturally-specific norms such as what sex the user is, what community the user is from, and whether an image being viewed is of a person from the user's family (family members cannot view images of deceased relatives).

pdf2djvu is a utility for creating DjVu files from PDF files. It's available under the GPL version 2 and runs on Linux and Mac OS X.

Harvard University and Indiana University have just published a 168-page guide Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation, which was developed with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the U.S. The guide, plus some additional appendices, is available from the Publications section of the Sound Directions website.