digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The Library of Congress has established a PREMIS preservation metadata Implementation Registry. Charter projects in the registry include the National Archives of Scotland's Digital Data Archive (DDA) Project, the National Snow and Ice Data Center Repository, and Stanford University Libraries' Digital Repository.

The Digital Preservation Coalition has released a Decision Tree for Selection of Digital Materials for Long-term Retention that "may be used as a tool to construct or test such a policy for your organisation."

The U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) and the University of Michigan are making available the webcase of their upcoming Symposium Scholarship and Libraries in Transition: A Dialogue about the Impacts of Mass Digitization Projects, to be held March 10-11, 2006. Instructions for viewing the webcast are available.

TEL-ME-MOR (The European Library Modular Extensions for Mediating Online Resources) is holding a conference in Tallinn, Estonia, 18-20 October 2006, to gather together representatives of the European Commission, Ministries of Culture and Education, Research Bodies, directors of libraries, museums and archives as well as from prominent International organisations and institutions involved in digital library initiatives.

The MW2006 papers are now available. The conference takes place March 22-25, 2006 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Originally posted on the Metadata Librarians mailing list. Posted here with permission of Ellen Caplan (caplane a t oclc.org):

This press release, dated March 2, announced that the "European Commission steps up efforts to put Europe’s memory on the Web via a 'European Digital Library'." The first public version of the Library, which will contain at least six million documents, is now available.

Digital Preservation Management: Short-Term Solutions to Long-Term Problems will be held May 14-19, 2006 at Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY.

Chris Rusbridge, Director of the Digital Curation Centre, offers a "jaundiced" look at the following digital preservation truisms:

1. Digital preservation is very expensive [because]
2. File formats become obsolete very rapidly [which means that]
3. Interventions must occur frequently, ensuring that continuing costs remain high.
4. Digital preservation repositories should have very long timescale aspirations,