digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

I'm a member of a software development team that has recently started using a wiki to document our project. So far, we're finding it a very natural and efficient way to collaborate and to get material up on the web for ourselves and for our users.

I've added two new categories. The first is "Publications". Since many of my posts are simply announcements of journal and newsletter issues, this is a natural. The second is "Views," a category that encourages posts of a more personal nature than the factoid-oriented items that have dominated digitizationblog thus far.

This article in the Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (109.5: September-October 2004), titled "Stability Comparison of Recordable Optical Discs—A Study of Error Rates in Harsh Conditions", "describes an initial stability study of commercially available recordable DVD and CD
media" and the effects of high temperature, humidity, and exposure to direct light.

This issue contains articles on "Building Educational Portals atop Digital Libraries", "Trend Analysis of the Digital Library Community", "Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories", and more.

An update of the September 2003 guidelines is now available.

The MCN 2005 BOSTON / Digits Fugit! / Preserving Knowledge into the Future conference had put out a call for proposals.

As reported on the IMAGELIB list, the Western States Digital Standards Group - Metadata Working Group has released version 2 of its Western States Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices.

Peter Murray on the web4lib email list and others has announced JPEG 2000 in Archives and Libraries, a website that allows "users to register and post their own information on articles, projects, and products that use the standard."

This isn't directly related to digitization, but ObjectGraph Dictionary illustrates an implementation of Google's predictive-input "Suggest" feature. It would be nice to see this in all sorts of library applications (as Jenny Levine suggests in her blog entry), including search systems used to deliver digitized content.

OpenReader is a "cooperative project to create a universal, open standards digital publication distribution format which will be platform-independent and capable of high typographic presentation quality." Although not affilitated with the Open eBook Forum , OpenReader's initial implementation will comply with that organization's OEBPS 1.2 framework. CSS-styled XML documents will also be supported.