digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The Ohio Preservation Council is presenting a symposium titled Basic Considerations for Digitization: Providing Access to Special Collections, to be held September 16, 2005 at the Medical Heritage Center, The Ohio State University. The Symposium is intended to "to serve as a basic introduction to evaluating whether to undertake a digitization project, and if so, how to begin. The importance of preservation and access are the focus."

With the goal of creating "a public voice on the issues raised by the relentless expansion of what are considered to be patentable products, processes, discoveries, inventions and appropriated goods, or what is commonly referred to as intellectual property", the Forum on Privatization and the Public Domain provides news, resources, an email list and other services for advocating for the public domain. The site opened July 1 of this year.

Copyright is a new online journal dedicated to "all aspects of copyright in the Internet age". This journal is going to be significant: it is edited by Michael Geist and Lawrence Lessig. I am proud to say that Copyright has chosen Open Journal Systems as its publication platform (and they also use other fine open source software such as Drupal).

Highlights include "Border Crossings: Reflections on a Decade of Metadata Consensus Building" by Stuart L. Weibel and "Where Do We Go From Here? The Next Decade for Digital Libraries" by Clifford Lynch.

As announced on the DSpace-tech email list today, Grace Carpenter (MIT), Jim Downing (University of Cambridge), and Nathan Sarr (University of Rochester) have released the DSpace Checksum Checker, which monitors changes in digital objects in DSpace by comparing initial and recent checksums and reporting the results via email. Excellent -- I was wondering on this very blog a few days ago if anyone was doing any work on checksums.

Steven Harnad has announced the launch of Open Access Archivangelism: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Research Access.

As posted on Digitization 101, the lastest Neal-Schuman catalogue lists several books of possible interest: Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives: A How-To-Do-It Manual, Building Digital Archives: Descriptions & Displays: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Archivists and Librarians, Digital Imaging: A Practical Handbook, and XML in Libraries.

The University of Toronto is recruiting an Executive Director, Project Open Source|Open Access. Closing date is August 12, 2005.

Charles W. Bailey, Jr. has posted an extensive bibliography on electronic theses and dissertations on his DigitalKoans blog.

I've upgraded to the latest version of WordPress and have kept the default skin until I have time to restore some of the customizations I made in the older version (especially the all archives view). Everything appears to be working the same as before, but please let me know if you experience any problems.

Mark