digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The 2nd DSpace Federation User Group meeting has just been announced, to be organized by members of the DSpace development team at Cambridge University. Watch this space (and others) for the forthcoming call for papers and invitation to register.

Roy Tennant's latest Library Journal column critiques Google's digitization initiative and provides links some useful references, such as Stanford staffer Elizabeth Edwards' blog entry on that library's relationship with Google.

This issue features articles about the Tundra Times Newspaper Digitization Project and "Building a Globally Distributed Historical Sheet Map Set of Austro-Hungarian Topographic Maps, 1877-1914".

I can't believe I didn't know about Jill Hurst-Wahl's Digitization 101 blog until now -- it's been going since August 2004! Looks excellent....

LOCKSS is making some sample content available for local sites to test their installations. The goals of this demonstration are to show that content mirrored in LOCKSS remains visible after it disappears from the publisher, that access to the content is transparent (i.e., the URL remains the same), and that LOCKSS is format agnostic. More information is available from the LOCKKS website.

The Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick will offer five workshops exploring issues in scholarly communication, from August 2-13, 2005.

Organizers of DRH 2005: Digital Resources for the Humanities, to be held at University of Lancaster, UK, from 4th - 7th September 2005, have issued a call for papers. This year's focus is on "critical evaluation of the use of digital resources in the arts and humanities."

The Fedora Development Team has announced the release of Fedora 2.0. In addition to bug fixes, this release incorporates a numbe of new features, including ingest and export using arbitrary XML formats, a batch modify utility, and improved documentation.

Peter Suber, editor of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, has assembled a list of techniques aimed at maintainers of open-access scholarly content for facilitating indexing by Google. Many of these techniques will work with databases of digitized content, scholarly or not.

The Library of Congress has added The September 11, 2001, Documentary Project to its American Memory Collection. The Documentary Project includes almost 200 audio and video interviews, 45 graphic items, and 21 written narratives.