digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

Yesterday's Deutsche Welle published this article announcing that nineteen European national libraries are funding a project to counterbalance Google's anglocentric digitization of research library material. The European project aims to digitize 4.5 billion pages of text.

I tried to post this as a comment but found out I couldn't include images....

I just did a quick test of imgSeek based on some cartoons from a collection hosted at the library where I work. Based on this simple test, I'd say imgSeek is pretty accurate:

Query 1 (by example -- I have an image and I want to find others similar to it):

Results:

imgSeek is a photo collection manager and viewer that features content-based searching. You can query the database of images by drawing a rough sketch of what you want, or by selecting an existing image and asking imgSeek to find visually similar images. imgSeek is a desktop application that runs on many linux distributions and is made available under the GNU Public License.

As reported on the imagelib email list, the Colorado Digitization Program is holding a workshop on Digitizing Historic Newspapers: A Practical Approach, July 18 2005 in Denver. Sessions will include panels of speakers from a variety of libraries and museums on planning, technical issues, funding, copyright, and project impact.

I only attended one session today, the one on "User Content". Elisam Magara from the East African School of Library and Information Science in Kampala, Uganda spoke about his gap analysis on how indiginous knowledge (IK) is recorded, organized, and preserved in Uganda.

Today is the "Interactions" day: all sessions are workshops of one form or another, and the ones I attended were not specific to museums but all of them did use museum web sites as examples/case studies. The first session I attended was on website usability testing. I have done some usability testing but enjoyed seeing someone else doing it in front of an audience. The presenters began by describing the purpose and methods of observational usability testing and then asked for volunteers from the audience to test some sites.

This month's RLG DigiNews contains articles on "A Comparison Between Migration and Emulation in Terms of Costs", "Automating Preservation: New Developments in the PRONOM," and on "Adopting 'Orphan Works'".

I'm at Museums and the Web 2005 in Vancouver (actually, that's where I live). As a librarian I generally find non-library conferences refreshing because they remind me that libraries are not the centre of the universe, and that some "library" issues extend across silos. This is a brief end-of-day report from the conference (they have wireless but only in the foyer, not in the session rooms!). All of the conference papers are/will be online.

Avi2Mpeg is a Perl script that converts avi files to mpeg. Supported mpeg formats are VCD, SVCD and DVD, all in NTSC or PAL format.

April 14 marks digitizationblog's sixth month. Some statistics (caveat lector) from my web host's AWStats summary: from April 1 - 12, the digitizationblog home page was viewed 392 times (or about 33 times/day) excluding robots/indexers/etc., and the RSS feed was viewed (eaten?) 3561 times (that's about 300 times/day).

Also, Bloglines reports that 72 of its users subscribe to digitizationblog.