digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

Details below.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEContact:               Kelcey Wetzel, event coordinator                                800.397.1552; bcrpress@bcr.orgAnnouncing the WebWise 2010 Conference, March 3-5, Denver, Colorado
AURORA, Colo., February 16, 2010 — The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is partnering with the Denver Art Museum (DAM) and the University of Denver (DU) to bring WebWise 2010: Imagining the Digital Future to the Mile High city.  BCR is a member of the programming committee. 
This will be the 11th annual conference and showcase of the latest technologies being used by libraries and museums to make their collections accessible to the world.
“The University of Denver is pleased to be able to partner with the IMLS, the Denver Art Museum, and BCR to bring the 2010 WebWise to Denver Colorado,” noted Nancy Allen, Dean and Director University of Denver Penrose Library. “For more than a decade, WebWise has provided library and museum professionals the opportunity to share and showcase new and innovative approaches to support learning across the variety of communities they serve.”
Denver’s own Ed Sardella will interview digital pioneers Howard Besser, Professor of Cinema Studies and Director of New York University's Moving Image Archiving & Preservation Program, and Susan Chun, co-founder of the Steve Project, for the opening event at the Denver Art Museum.  Attendees will be greeted by IMLS Director Anne-Imelda M. Radice, Christoph Heinrich, the new director of DAM, and City Librarian of Denver, Shirley Amore, while Chris Batt, former chief executive of Museums, Libraries and Archives Council in the UK, now working as a consultant and frequent speaker on the future of cultural heritage institutions across Europe and the UK, will give the closing keynote address.
“IMLS is pleased to be able to bring WebWise to Denver.  The Denver Art Museum and the University of Denver partnership have brought new and exciting opportunities to the 2010 WebWise.  We know that the more than 400 attendees will enjoy the pre-conference and conference activities,” commented IMLS Director Anne-Imelda M. Radice.
Conference sessions will address the future of digital content with respect to sustainability, engaging users, new tools and services, necessary skills for practitioners and funding while highlighting successes and innovations of the past.  To celebrate this digital past, DU’s Penrose Library is partnering with the DU Library and Information Science Program to launch Digital Pioneers, a series of oral history interviews with key cultural heritage digital initiative figures including Nancy Allen, Liz Bishoff, Sayeed Choudhury, Kaye Howe, Jim Kroll and Thornton Staples.
Additionally, two preconferences will investigate creating enticing learning spaces and managing digital repositories.
Due to its continuing popularity, registration for the event is already closed. IMLS will make WebWise speaker presentations available on its Web site and First Monday will publish the conference papers.
About BCRBCR brings libraries together for greater success by expanding their knowledge, reach and power. They offer a broad range of solutions and their hands-on, personal attention to each member enables them to deliver effective and timely solutions that help libraries keep pace with new developments in technology and services. BCR is the nation’s oldest and most established multistate library cooperative. Since 1935, the BCR team has helped libraries learn new skills, reach patrons, increase productivity and save money. BCR (Bibliographical Center for Research) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit headquartered in Aurora, Colorado. For more information, visit www.BCR.org or email info@BCR.org.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

News from RDA.The Co-Publishers of RDA are pleased to announce that the website at www.rdaonline.org now includes information about the RDA Toolkit, U.S. pricing for the RDA Toolkit, an updated FAQ, and web videos of the RDA Toolkit: A Guided Tour webinars given on February 8 and 9, 2010. For further information and to receive announcements and updates from the Co-Publishers about the RDA Toolkit, please send your email address to rdatoolkit@ala.org. We will add you to the RDA Toolkit email list.

The column Cataloging Horizons by Karen Coyle in the latest American Libraries discusses "Navigating the bibliographic space with linked data".Library catalogs have evolved over time as technology has changed. The last 150 years have seen a progression from book catalogs to cards, and eventually, to online catalogs. Each of these changes has provided new capabilities that can be adopted for improved user services. The next step in this evolution is on the horizon, and it will make possible some new and powerful capabilities for information seekers. Like the hypertextuality of the web, technology is being developed today that can help library catalogs become a rich web of data.

The UK Government’s Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) is inviting responses to a Proposal on the Collection and Preservation of UK Offline and Microform Publications and UK Online Publications (Available free of charge and without access restrictions)

The online document is a republication of the consultation document in commentable form.  As well as supporting comments for each paragraph, it provides a unique URI for each paragraph in the original document, which you may use as reference links in any online discussion you engage in about the consultation.

Chapter 1 provides general information about legal deposit and the legal deposit advisory panel (LDAP) proposals while Chapter 2 describes the consultation process.  Annexes A-F set out the main themes and questions:

Annex A: Proposals for Offline and Microform Publications
Annex B: Proposals for Online Publications
Annex C: Online Content to be Published
Annex D: Impact Assessments – Intervention and options, analysis and evidence
Annex E: Further Details on Territoriality
Annex F: Further Details on Harvesting Process

Finally, Annex G provides a summary of the consultation questions.

Closing date for responses is Monday 1 March 2010.

Received in email.

Save the Date for Digital Preservation for Digital Collaboratives
BCR, LYRASIS and OCLC are proud to present this new workshop, partially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Philadelphia:  April 28-29, 2010San Jose:  August 3-4, 2010Chicago:  November 16-17, 2010
Digital Preservation for Digital Collaboratives is a workshop designed to help digital collaboratives with existing digital collections develop and implement a long-term preservation option.  The workshop, designed for multiple representatives from a collaborative, will provide the information and tools the collaborative needs to develop a long-term preservation plan that will work for the collaborative’s unique collections and organizations. Each workshop includes an initial day of online instruction followed by 2 days of in-person instruction.  Additional support after the workshop will be provided to ensure that all participants are able to complete their preservation plans.
All workshops will be taught by a faculty of digital preservation experts:
Liz Bishoff, Director of Digital & Preservation Services, BCR Priscilla Caplan, Assistant Director for Digital Library Services, Florida Center for Library Automation Tom Clareson, Senior Consultant, LYRASIS Robin Dale, Director of Digital Services, LYRASIS Katherine Skinner, Executive Director, Educopia Institute and Program Manager, MetaArchive Cooperative
For more information, visit http://www.bcr.org/dps/training/neh-dpdc.html

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

At the closing session of Electronic Resources and Libraries 2010 I had the chance to ask Ross Singer and John Blyberg about the place of microformats and COinS in information organization. Ross had just finished speaking about the importance of linked data. As I recall John said that microformats, COinS and other semantic markup is important even if it lacks links. Providing a machine readable understanding of a text string is good, it can lead to links. Ross said, without links markup is useful today but not a way to move forward. It is a tool for today but not the future. RDFa is the way forward.

The talk was the end of an excellent conference. Well worth attending.

This morning DCMI tweeted about the Bibliographic Ontology Specification. New to me.The Bibliographic Ontology describe bibliographic things on the semantic Web in RDF. This ontology can be used as a citation ontology, as a document classification ontology, or simply as a way to describe any kind of document in RDF. It has been inspired by many existing document description metadata formats, and can be used as a common ground for converting other bibliographic data sources.

Received via email.

CALL FOR PAPERS
7th­­ International Conference on
 Preservation of Digital Objects (IPRES 2010)
           
 September 19 -- 24, 2010
Vienna, Austria

http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp/ipres2010

The Austrian National Library and the Vienna University of Technology are pleased to host the International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES2010) in Vienna in September 2010. iPRES2010 will be the seventh 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 digital heritage.

Digital Preservation and Curation is evolving from a niche activity to an established practice and research field that involves various disciplines and communities. iPRES2010 will re-emphasise that preserving our scientific and cultural digital heritage requires integration of activities and research across institutional and disciplinary boundaries to adequately address the challenges in digital preservation. iPRES2010 will further strengthen the link between digital preservation research and practitioners in memory institutions and scientific data centres.

SUBMISSIONS

iPRES2010 will adopt a two-track scheme, focussing on research papers reporting on novel, previously unpublished work, as well as case studies and best practice reports. The conference programme will be designed to encourage interaction between these areas, rather than seeing them as separated fields. Furthermore, iPRES2010 will offer a set of tutorials on the Sunday preceding the conference, as well as focused workshops following the main conference.
Submissions are invited for full and short papers, demos/posters, panels, workshops, and tutorials. All contributions will be reviewed by members of the Programme Committee. More information, including instructions for submission, is available at the iPRES2010 homepage.

TOPICS (include but not limited to):

 - Theoretical, Formal and Conceptual Models of Information and Preservation
 - Trusted Repositories: Risk Analysis, Planning, Audit and Certification
 - Scalability and Automation
 - Metadata Issues for Preservation Processes
 - Business Models and Cost Estimation
 - Personal Archiving
 - Innovation in Digital Preservation: Novel Approaches and Scenarios
 - Training and Education
 - Domain-specific Challenges: Web, GIS, Primary/Scientific/Sensor Data,
   Governmental & Medical Records
 - Case Studies and Best Practice Reports: Systems, Workflows, Use Cases

IMPORTANT DATES

Workshop Submission:                              March 18, 2010
Workshop Notification of Acceptance:              April 9, 2010
Paper/Tutorial/Panel Submission:                  May 5, 2010
Paper/Tutorial/Panel Notification of Acceptance:  June 18, 2010
Submission of final versions:                     July 11, 2010

Conference:                                       September 19-24, 2010

CONFERENCE ORGANISATION

GENERAL CHAIRS:
 - Andreas Rauber, VUT, Austria
 - Max Kaiser, ONB, Austria

PROGRAMME CHAIRS:
 - Rebecca Guenther, Library of Congress, US
 - Panos Constantopoulos, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece; Digital Curation Unit, Greece

PANEL CHAIR:
 - Heike Neuroth, Göttingen State and University Library, Germany

TUTORIAL CHAIR:
 - Shigeo Sugimoto, University of Tsukuba, Japan

WORKSHOP CHAIRS:
 - Perry Willett, California Digital Library, US
 - John Kunze, University of California, US

PUBLICITY CHAIRS:
 - Priscilla Caplan, Florida Center for Library Automation, US
 - Joy Davidson, University of Glasgow, Scotland

LOCAL ORGANISING CHAIR:
 - Johann Stockinger, Austrian Computer Society, Austria


For further details please check http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp/ipres2010 regularly.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Join Troy Linker from ALA Publishing for an introductory guided tour of the RDA Toolkit website. If you were at ALA Midwinter in Boston, you may already have taken this tour at the RDA Update Forum, the CC:DA meeting, or on the exhibit floor--but please feel free to join us again.

The webinar will be recorded and posted for anyone that is unable to participate live. Details for accessing the recorded webinar video will be emailed to registries and posted widely.

The tour includes:

• Description of the RDA Toolkit
• Overview of the RDA Toolkit contents at launch and beyond
• Tour of the RDA Toolkit interface including Search, Browse, Bookmarks, Workflows, Maps, and more
• Launch timeline
• Details of the Complimentary Open Access period
• RDA Toolkit pricing for the US
• Linking from external products to the RDA Toolkit

Join us on February 8, - 21:00-22:00 GMT | 4:00pm-5pm EST | 3:00pm-4pm CST | 1:00pm-2pm PST

OR

Join us on February 9, - 16:00-17:00 GMT | 11:00am-12pm EST | 10:00am-11am CST | 8:00am-9am PST

Adapted from a e-mail widely distributed.

A few weeks ago, I heard Tom Kelley, author and general manager of IDEO, speak about innovation.  In his book, The Ten Faces of Innovation, Kelley talks about several roles we can have in our organizations that will promote innovation and one of them is the anthropologist.  As I have continued to think about the roles, this role sticks out as being one that we all say we should do, but don't.

The anthropologist seeks out ah-ha moments through several techniques including seeing what is happening around them with fresh eyes.  The anthropologist is continually engaged in fieldwork.  The person is always looking at the situation, picking up clues, and then trying to make sense of them all.  The anthropologist -- much like those forensic crime scene investigators on CSI -- lets the clues and information speak.  The person doesn't begin with assumptions.

Last week, one of the professors in the iSchool sent his class to the library to gather information, to learn by being there, and to observe and ask questions.  One of the students remarked afterward that it was interesting (and fun) to learn about user needs that way. While this was a short exercise, she could see the benefits.

Kelley wrote (p. 25):
Picking up on the smallest nuances of your customer can offer tremendous opportunities.
With that in mind, when was the last time you:

• Observed users in your reading room (or exhibit space) to see how they used your organization's materials?
• Watched researchers as they studied items in your collection?
• Asked people what they were looking for and why?  And that not the "why" that they first say, but the real reason why.  (Sometimes those are different.)
• Studied what lead users from one piece of material to another?  Why is the person who looked at this now suddenly interested in that?
• Noticed what people used (or wanted to use) while looking at your collection?
• Asked -- without judgment -- what people needed or desired?
• Looked at the foot traffic and thought about what that could tell you?

Yes, those are all things that you can do in a physical space.  However, think about what the information could tell you and how that might help with your virtual space.

• How might this information influence how you select items to be digitized?
• What online tools might you develop that you mirrors tools people need (or want) when they use the physical items?
• How could you make relationships between the items online that will help people move from one to the other in a similar way to what they do in the reading room?
• How might you design your homepage differently if you knew better what people wanted?

Historically, many digitization programs have made assumptions about what their users want and need.  Often times that rushing is due to funding constraints.  They have received funding to "do" and not to gather information through observing and asking questions.  Programs hope that they have made the correct assumptions or that they can learn from what they have done, and then do it better the next time.  Unfortunately, some programs don't stop to do the information gathering that they need.  Instead -- if funding allows -- they rush from project to project and hope that they are delivering what users wants.

Yes, being an anthropologist takes time.  Kelley notes that people at IDEO are trained to do this work, but that anyone can be an amateur anthropologist.  His book and talk provide examples of people who used this technique without a lot of formal training and were still able to learn valuable information about their users.

Does this sound like something that would benefit you?  Go ahead -- give it a try!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I am pleased to announce that the findings from the Keeping Research Data Safe 2 (“KRDS2) survey of digital preservation cost information are now available on the KRDS2 project webpage.

One of the core aims of the KRDS2 project was to identify potential sources of cost information for preservation of digital research data and to conduct a survey of them. Between September and November 2009 we made an open invitation via email lists and the project blog and project webpage for others to contact us and contribute to the data survey if they had research datasets and associated cost information that they believe may be of interest to the study.

13 survey responses were received: 11 of these were from UK-based collections, and 2 were from mainland Europe. Two further potential contributions from the USA were unfortunately not available in time to be included.

The responses covered a broad area of research including the arts and humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences and research data archives or cultural heritage collections. Each survey response is approximately 6-8 pages in length.

A summary analysis plus individual completed responses to the data survey that provide  more detail, are available.

We have also made the revised versions of the KRDS2 activity model available to download.

We aim to release the KRDS2 report via JISC in March following peer review and final editing. Further supplementary materials from KRDS2 will also be placed on the project webpage in March.

You will also notice that we have recently undertaken a major website re-design and made additions, should you wish to browse other information on the web site.

The Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) is one of the major public funders of teaching and research in UK Universities. It is also the major funder of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) providing around 75% of the recurrent core budget and the majority of its capital funding. So its announcements on funding are hugely important for the UK university sector.

HEFCE have recently released Circular letter number 02/2010 Funding for universities and colleges in 2010-11 setting out the implications of government cuts to its budget from August 2010.

The majority of press coverage following the release of the circular, has focussed on the implications for teaching and the reduction to the number of funded student places for the next academic year.

However the circular also sets out a number of key decisions and cuts in other areas of HEFCE support namely:

“£294 million in special funding for national programmes and initiatives, such as the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the development fund for employer engagement. This compares with £316 million in 2009-10.” [approximately 7.5% reduction]

And under Capital funding it notes:

“reprioritising and rephasing of the funding for JISC, including the open and educational resource programme, will release a further £27 million”

Note “The decisions taken by the Board do not take account of the £600 million reduction in the higher education and science and research budgets by 2012-13 announced in the pre-Budget report on 9 December 2009”.

The JISC annual budget is around £82 million recurrent core and £33 million capital.

JISC is hugely influential in many areas of UK HE and FE including open access, digital preservation, e-learning and digital libraries amongst others. Any reduction to its core funding and capital programmes will be significant for many in the sector and beyond.  In January, JISC postponed all current capital funded calls and invitations to tender (ITTs), pending the HEFCE board decision.

I'll be at the Electronic Resources and Libraries Conference early next week. #ERL10 Looking forward to this, looks like a lot of good content and presenters. I may post summaries of the talks I hear, if I have the time and energy at the end of the day.

Earlier this month, marketing guru Seth Godin wrote a blog post that was not well received by many librarians including me.  Given his words then, I was very to hear these words spoken during a December 2009 podcast that I just listened to:
The things that are most valuable in our lives have always been free.  You know when...you go to the library and read something.
And that is in the middle of a longer discussion on the positive value of free!

So which does he believe - that libraries are of value or that they deliver services that no one wants?

Also of interest to me was hearing in that Seth Godin is from Buffalo, NY.  Maybe the libraries of Buffalo should invite him back for a discussion about his view on what they do.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Cataloging Exhibition Publications: Best Practices by the Art Libraries Society of North America provides useful guidance for these materials.

The codes listed below have been recently approved for use in MARC 21 records. The codes will be added to MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions.

The codes should not be used in exchange records until after March 26, 2010. This 60-day waiting period is required to provide MARC 21 implementers time to include newly-defined codes in any validation tables they may apply to the MARC fields where the codes are used.

Other Sources

Field 034 (Coded Cartographic Mathematical Data) The following code is for use in subfield $2 in field 034 (Coded Cartographic Mathematical Data) in the Authority and Bibliographic formats.

Addition:

wikiped

Wikipedia

(http://www.wikipedia.org/) [use only after March 26, 2010]

Term, Name, Title Sources

The following codes are for use in subfield $2 in fields 600-657 (Subject Added Entries/Index Terms) in Bibliographic and Community Information records; subfield 662 (Subject Added Entry) in Bibliographic records; subfield $2 in fields 700-754 (Added Entry Fields) in Bibliographic records; subfield $2 in fields 700-754 (Index Terms) in Classification records; subfield $2 in fields 700-788 (Heading Linking Entries) in Authority records; and subfield $f in field 040 (Cataloging Source) in Authority records.

Additions:

bjornson

Bjornson: emneord for Bjornsonbibliografien

(http://www.nb.no/baser/bjornson/Bjornsonemneord-LC.html) [use only after March 26, 2010]

hamsun

Hamsun: emneord for Hamsunbibliografien

(http://www.nb.no/baser/hamsun/emneord.html) [use only after March 26, 2010]

netc

National Emergency Training Center Thesaurus (NETC)

(http://www.lrc.fema.gov/lrcinfo.html) [use only after March 26, 2010]

stw

Standard-Thesaurus Wirtschaft = STW Thesaurus for Economics (Kiel: ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek fur Wirtschaftswissenschaften)

(http://zbw.eu/stw) [use only after March 26, 2010]

The following code was previously defined for usage in subfield $2 in fields 600-651 (Subject Added Entries/Index Terms) in Bibliographic records and and in subfield $f in field 040 (Cataloging Source) in Authority records.

Usage has been expanded. It may now be used in subfield $2 in fields 600-657 (Subject Added Entries/Index Terms) in Bibliographic and Community Information records; subfield $2 in field 662 (Subject Added Entry) in Bibliographic records; records; subfield $2 in fields 700-754 (Added Entry Fields) in Bibliographic records; subfield $2 in fields 700-754 (Index Terms) in Classification records; and subfield $2 in fields 700-788 (Heading Linking Entries) in Authority records.

rasuqam

Repertoire d'autorites-sujet de l'UQAM [use in expanded fields only after March 26, 2010]

LibraryThing has announced a low-cost mobile app for the catalog, Library Anywhere.

The MODS Editorial Committee have revised the transformation from MARCXML to MODS 3.3.

Changes in the transformation reflect changes made in the MARC to MODS 3.3 mapping.

For those of you that are working with sound recordings of any kind, this might be an association that you'll want to to investigate.  According to the web site,
Founded in 1966, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Inc. is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and study of sound recordings—in all genres of music and speech, in all formats, and from all periods.
Among the topics of interest to members of ARSC are digitization and copyright.

Technorati tag: Digitization

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

An announcement from December 2009 from DPC.
The DPC is pleased to announce the addition of a new report to the DPC Technology Watch Report Series: File Formats for Preservation, written by Malcolm Todd of The National Archives: http://www.dpconline.org/technology-watch-reports/download-document/375-file-formats-for-preservation.html [URL corrected, 1/24/2010]

The selection and manipulation of file formats has long been seen as an important element within digital preservation strategies, especially data migration. However there are different and to some extent competing grounds for selection of file formats. The proliferation of formats, the need to provide long term access to data embedded within files and the role of the file as a container for encoded information create subtle tensions for preservation managers.

This new report provides an extensive account of the challenges that format management creates for long term access and it provides concrete recommendations which can inform preservation strategies. Rather than making generalisations about the merits of common formats, it presents repository managers with the tools they will need to develop nuanced advice specific to their own requirements. It goes on to contribute the implications on file format selection of archival science viewpoint arising from recent research in the UK and North America into a wider digital preservation discourse.

Author, Malcolm Todd explained 'There have been many pronouncements on file formats either from research projects or preservation services. There is broad consensus on criteria such as the transparency of a format or extent of its use, but not on how such criteria can be compared. In my view, these criteria can only be assessed by considering the drivers for preservation. So, asking 'which format is most effective for preservation?' leads us back to asking 'what is it that we want to achieve through preservation?', in terms of informational characteristics, user needs and expected useful life'

'The question of file formats is central to preservation planning and relevant to everyone who is interested in the long term management of data.' Commented William Kilbride, Executive Director of the DPC. 'Experience shows that poor choices can lead to expensive complications for access and effective or actual data loss'.

'Malcolm has presented us with a thoughtful analysis of the field, leading to concise and practical conclusions. I'm grateful to him for producing this report and I expect that it will be influential.'


Technorati tag: Digitization

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.