digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

This 70-page report, published by the Consortium of European Research Libraries and the European Commission on Preservation and Access, describes a number of persistent identifier schemes in detail, including Handles, Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), Archival Resource Keys (ARKs), Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs), Uniform Resource Names (URNs), National Bibliography Numbers (NBNs), and the OpenURL. Its final chapter contains a set of guidelines and recommendations.

This issue contains articles on managing digital assets in US museums and at the National Gallery of Art, a case study titled "Why Digital Asset Management?", and other digital asset management topics.

This article by Lisa Atkinson of the University of Calgary Archives describes their decision to abandon DSpace for their ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) platform. Richard Jones of Imperial College London has prepared a rebuttal to Lisa's criticisms.

Update (2006-12-19): The University of Calgary has reevaluated DSpace and is intending to use it as an ETD platform.

The first release candidate of EPrints 3.0 was announced yesterday, which means that the developers have frozen the features in EPrints 3.0 and future releases will be bug fixes only. A demonstration site is available.

DigCCurr2007: An International Symposium on Digital Curation, to be held April 18-20, 2007 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, "will focus on what digital curators do and what they need to know to carry out this important work." The Symposium will be useful to anyone interested in digital preservation and curation, especially those who are building staff capacity in these areas.

A few days old now, but this blog posting entry goes into considerable detail about the "archival" qualities of various types of optical media. As of today, the entry has spawned almost 70 comments...