digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

Using Digital Images in Teaching and Learning: Perspectives from Liberal Arts Institutions reports on over 400 survey responses and 300 interviews from faculty at 33 US colleges and universities, and covers topics such as "the quality of image resources, image functionality, management, deployment and the skills required for optimum use." The report was commissioned by Wesleyan University in collaboration with the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE).

gscan2pdf is a Perl script that provides a graphical user interface for scanning to PDF files on Linux/BSD platforms. Still under development (current version is 0.8.0), but with reasonable goals: "At maturity, the GUI will have similar features to that of the Windows Imaging program, but with the express objective of writing a PDF, including metadata."

This issue contains articles "Fedora and the Preservation of University Records Project" and "Digging Up Bits of the Past: Hands-on With Obsolescence," and an FAQ on "Five Tools for Managing Formats."

This Cornell press release describes the partnership between the university, Microsoft, and Kirtas Technologies to digitize and make accessible through Microsoft's Live Book Search selected public domain materials in agriculture, American history, English literature, astronomy, food and wine, general engineering, the history of science, home economics, hospitality and travel, human sexuality, labor relations, Native American materials, ornithology, veterinary medicine, and women's studies.

I'm working on a prototype digital library content management system based on Drupal. Longtime readers of Digitizationblog may remember that I've mentioned dabbling in this topic before (1, 2). I demoed this prototype briefly at the Access 2006 conference last week.

Comments and feedback are welcome.

I just returned from Access 2006 in Ottawa. Another great year for this conference. I didn't blog the event, since I knew it was already going to be hyperblogged -- check out, for example, Loomware, onebiglibrary, Quædam cuiusdam, and Library Webchick.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research has released its policy on OA for publications reporting on research it funds. Finally, an OA mandate from a federal research funder. See Steven Harnad's commentary.