digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

To quote a press release dated today,

This is the official plug: I am writing a book titled Putting Content Online: A Practical Guide for Libraries for Chandos Publishing. As the Chandos blurb states, the book is supposed to be out one year from now.

As announced on the fedora-users email list, on September 28 at the ETD Conference in Sydney, Australia, VTLS will release VALET, an electronic theses and dissertation product based on Fedora. VALET will be freely available under an open source license.

Jill Hurst-Wahl has posted some interesting thoughts on digitization 101 about how Google's recent activities are promoting digitization. I would add another -- being able to google the full text of these books is useful, but without decent descriptive metadata to aid discovery, Google Print will provide additional examples of the differences between organized collections of documents and undifferentiated, unorganized online content.

The Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, are holding this conference in The Hague, Friday 4 November and Saturday 5 November 2005. From the announcement:

At the conference a range of state of the art examples will be presented from a variety of materials, heritage institutions and cooperation schemes. The aim is to further clarify the above mentioned issues and to formulate recommendations on actions to be taken in the period to come.

This month's D-Lib Magazine contains articles on institutional repositories, an analysis of the holdings to be digitized in the Google Print for Libraries program, Greenstone/DSpace interoperability, and other topics.

This year's MCN conference theme is "Digits Fugit! Preserving Knowledge into the Future". The conference is being held in Boston from Novembre 2-5. Earlybird registration ends September 16.

In addition to the regular program, there will be workshops on "The Nuts and Bolts of Building a Digital Collection for the Whole Museum," "Cataloging Cultural Objects Bootcamp", "Managing a Digitization Project", and "Content Management Strategies and Systems".

I came across this note today on Amazon.ca. To include a book in Amazon's Search Inside program, publishers submit a "physical finished copy" of the book, not a digital copy. Interesting -- Amazon must consider it simpler to scan and OCR books than to proceess the born-digital versions.

I've just come across Apple's OS X Automator, which ships with OS X v10.4 Tiger. The Automator web page claims that you can record tasks once and then reuse them (much like recording an action in Photoshop or a macro in MS Office applications). I haven't upgraded to Tiger yet so I can't comment on Automator in more detail, but it sounds like it might be useful for batch jobs deriving JPEGs from TIFFs, renaming files, copying files recursively, and other tasks that are part of digitization and epublishing production work.

The presentations from the DSpace Federation 2nd User Group meeting, held at University of Cambridge on 7-8 July 2005, are now available. Topics include extending DSpace, digital preservation, metadata implementations, and case studies on various document formats and genres.