digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The Archivists' Toolkit Specification Team is pleased to announce the public release of the functional specification for the Archivists' Toolkit system. Quoting from this morning's posting to oss4lib email list,

mp3cleanup is a UNIX shell script used to tidy up various aspects of MP3 files, including filenames, ID3 tags, path, m3u playlists, and bitrate. It can operate on single files or on all the files contained in a directory.

Cornell University Library is developing an open source system for publishing scholarly research on the Web. Funded by a $670,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, DPubS will support peer review, have extensive administrative functionality, and will provide interoperability with other open source repository systems such as Fedora and DSpace. The DPubS beta version will be available in 2005, with final release scheduled for 2006.

The U.S. National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) has awarded a grant to the Digital Collections and Archives of Tufts University and the Manuscripts and Archives of Yale University Library "to synthesize electronic records preservation research with digital library repository research in an effort to develop systems capable of preserving university electronic records at both institutions," using Fedora as the test plarform.

This version of Greenstone addresses a number of bug fixes and also includes improved metadata editing tools, enhanced PDF, PPT and Word plugins, a new RealMedia plugin, a new GenericList classifier for unicode metadata, extended formatting options for collection format statements, z39.50 client support extended to Windows and Mac OS X, and a new z39.50 server.