digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

Bernie Sloan (on the Web4Lib and liblicense email lists) points out this December 15 announcement from the Internet Archives. According to the announcement,

Over one million books have been committed to the Text Archive. Currently over twenty-seven thousand are available and an additional fifty thousand are expected in the first quarter of 2005.

Libraries from the US, Canada, India, Egypt, China, and the Netherlands are listed as current participants.

An interesting lesson for anyone: The Sherlock Holmes Society of London published MP3 versions of some early Holmes radio plays but had to take them down temporarily "[d]ue to the exceptionally high volume of hits and downloading of MP3s ", according to a Dec. 16 news item on their home page. No further info is available on the site, but presumably the demand for the files outpaced the available bandwidth.

I'm sure everyone hopes they can resolve whatever reason forced them to withdraw these files.

This issue contains a number of items relevant to digitization, particulary "Resource Harvesting within the OAI-PMH Framework" and "A Repository of Metadata Crosswalks".

This issue contains articles on "The Role of Geographic Location in Metadata Schemas and Digital Collections," "PREMIS - Preservation Metadata Implementation Strategies Update 2: Core Elements for Metadata to Support Digital Preservation," and other topics.

Today's press release is obviously huge news, but the fact that Google is presenting this material in a sensible way is what is most amazing.

Word from the Fedora users email list is that release of version 2 is planned for January 21, 2005. This is a bit later than the original release date of Dec. 15/04.

OSIC is an open-source application for "storing large numbers of image files with associated metadata," written in PHP. This application looks pretty good: it supports mutliple collections, it has hierarchical cateogry browsing, and the search results list is clean and intuitive (although it appears the only feature the advanced search adds is to allow the user to limit by date). OSIC also includes a nice Java file upload applet that is much more functional than standard HTML-based file upload tools.

DigiCULT Thematic Issue 7 - The Future Digital Heritage Space. An Expedition Report is now available. The Report's purpose is to provide "an overview of innovative information and communication technologies (ICT), systems and applications that may be achieved in the next ten years or so." However, the Report covers not just technical topics but also how the emerging technologies play roles in a larger "Ambient Intelligence" landscape.

The program is now available for Museums and the Web 2005, to be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, April 13-16.

Of possible interest to digitizationblog readers from yesterday's Freshmeat Newsletter: rtfx, a simple but functional RTF-to-XML converter, and an application called Document Archive, a document-centered content management system with some neat features such as multiuser/group document management functions, hierarchical document classification, metadata and fulltext searching, and optional integration with Mozilla/Firefox using XUL.