digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

This article describes a patent Google filed in August 2008 to automate splitting up articles printed across several pages in magazines, papers, etc. I thought Olive already did that but apparently what they do is either different enough from Google's patent, or prior art doesn't count any more.

The MetaArchive Cooperative has just published A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation by K. Skinner and M. Schultz, Eds. (Atlanta, GA: Educopia Institute, 2010), "the first of a series of volumes describing successful collaborative strategies and articulating specific new models that may help cultural memory organizations work together for their mutual benefit."

This article from SciTeDaily points out similarities between technology described in Google's patent for its book scanning process and one devised by University of Tokyo researchers, and claims to shed light on how Google's technology works in practice because of the similarities between the two technologies. [Scraped from Slashdot].

This story from Technologizer points out how a glitch on Microsoft's part locked users out of Office 2003 files that had been secured using Microsoft's Righs Management Service. Microsoft has issued a fix that requires installing Office 2003 Service Pack 3 update.

Wired is running a story about a home-made book scanner that costs about $300. Its creator has even started a forum where others can share their similar designs.

The German government has announced the creation of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB) (German Digital Library), Germany's contribution to Europeana. The DDB will include material from 30,000 cultural and scientific institutions, including publishers.

The Digital Preservation Coalition has added a new report to the DPC Technology Watch Report Series: File Formats for Preservation, written by Malcolm Todd of The National Archives.

As part of an effort to integrate the metadata created for their digitized collections, the Library of Congress has published two specifications under the general rubric of Metadata for Digital Content (MDC), a master metadata element list and a set of profiles of this list for specific projects.

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.