digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The image is of Washington Senators baseball player Herman A. "Germany" Schaefer using a camera during a visit to play the New York Highlanders in April 1911.

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) has founded the Open Canada Digitization Initiative, a "coordinated and sustained program to digitize Canada’s information and knowledge resources." According to the press release, one of the first priorities of the Initiative will be to identify “charter” digitization projects.

Google Inc. has agreed to donate $3 million toward the Library of Congress' World Digital Library initiative. Details are available in this press release and this article by James H. Billington in the Washington Post.

Greenstone 3 was released yesterday. This version is a complete redesign and reimplementation of the current Greenstone digital library software (Greenstone 2), and is intended to increase the modularity, flexiblity, and extensibility of the application. Version 3 supports collections created in Version 2.

Warning from the website: "Please note, Greenstone 3 is our research version of Greenstone, and is still incomplete, and not stable. For a production digital library we recommend using Greenstone 2.")

Google Base allows people to upload content so that it gets indexed faster. According to the FAQ, "Google Base enables you to add attributes that better describe your content so that users can easily find it. The more popular specific attributes become, the more often we'll suggest them when others post the same items."

This article from the Nov. 9 WSJ introduces readers of that publication to the Open Content Alliance, and also provides some photos of the custom book scanners being used at the U of T and some details of their scanning operation.

Ha ha. While using the Million Book Project's page at the Internet Archive today, I noticed that the "Most Downloaded Items" sidebar supplies the following numbers:

1. Ethics Of Sex Acts: 9,177 downloads
2. Advanced English Grammar: 2,680 downloads
3. Brief History Of Mathematics: 2,355 downloads
4. Early Jazz: 2,157 downloads
5. The handbook of soap manufacture: 2,045 downloads

A book on sex is 300% more popular than Advanced English Grammar and Brief History Of Mathematics? Who'd have predicted that?

The New York Public Library and Wired Magazine are cosponsoring an event titled "The Battle Over Books: The Google Print Library Project", to be held November 17 at the Library. Speakers include reps from the Association of American Publishers, Google, NYPL, The Authors Guild, and Wired. Copyright icon Lawrence Lessig is also on the speakers list. Tickets can be purchased here (I wonder what they'll fetch on eBay... the 17th isn't that far off).

The Center for History & New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University and the Center for New Designs in Learning &
Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown University are presenting a forum on Massive Digitization Programs and Their Long-Term Implications: Google Print, the Open Content Alliance, and Related Developments on Monday November 28, 2005 on George Mason University's Arlington, Virginia Campus. Speakers are Clifford Lynch and Jonathan Band.

The University of Queensland Library has released version 1.0 beta of Fez, "an open source project to produce and maintain a highly flexible web interface to FEDORA for any Library or Insituition to configure and publish or archive documents of any type sustainably." Fez can be run on any server that supports PHP and features advanced searching, title and author browsing, configurable document workflow and document lifecycle management, LDAP and Active Directory authentication, and community and collection architecture, similar to DS