digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

"An Update on Digital Libraries" with David Millman, Director of R&D, Academic Information Systems, Columbia University will take place November 30, 2004 1:00 p.m. EST.

The UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC) was launched on November 5. Hosted at the University of Edinburgh, and with an annual budget of over £1m, the DCC's mandate is "continuing quality improvement in data curation & digital preservation". Partners include the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, UKOLN, and the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils.

CBC News reports that "Researchers at Dartmouth College have developed a new mathematical process of authenticating art that they claim equals that of human authenticators." The process uses "high-resolution digital photos and complex computer analyses to map out the idiosyncrasies of an artist's style."

King's College London Digital Consultancy Services (KDCS) has published their Mellon-funded report on American art museum policy and practice regarding the market for digital resources. The report is based on a survey of 100 US art museums, 20 of whom were interviewed in depth.

November's D-Lib Magazine contains Assessing the Durability of Formats in a Digital Preservation Environment: The INFORM Methodology, by Andreas Stanescu. INFORM stands for "INvestigation of FOrmats based on Risk Management",

Another preservation-related item on the DSpace wiki: the DSpace@Cambridge Project Digital Preservation Workplan "aims to make some concrete steps towards improving the digital preservation functionality of the current DSpace software, and to engage on more open ended research that will be of benefit to the wider preservation community." Major sections of the workplan include "Automating Ingest for Preservation Support", "Preservation Planning", "Representation Information Infrastructure" (type registries, persistent I

Robert Tansley has added an entry to the DSpace wiki on backing up and restoring a DSpace assetstore.

Brian Cassidy has released the first version of the MARC::Crosswalk::DublinCore Perl module.

Echo (from the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University) offers "free consultation services to assist other historical practitioners in launching their own websites" and a set of tools that includes a scrapbook (billed as a "clipping file for the Internet") and something called Scribe, ("the next step in the evolution of traditional 3x5 note cards").

The Library of Congress has just announced a new collection calleed "Freedom’s Fortress: The Library of Congress, 1939-1953," available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/freedoms_fortress/. The collection is comprised of 209 letters, memoranda, photographs, and Library of Congress publications (1,176 images total) and documents the history of LC during what is described as a period of great transition for the institution.