digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

CDS Invenio v0.90.0 (formerly called CDSWare) is a comprehensive open-source digital library/repository platform developed by CERN (see their implementation) for the CDS Software Consortium. This new version has been renamed Invenio and is anticipated to be the last beta version prior to release of version 1.0 of the software. See the website and brochure for more information.

The “Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS)” standard was approved as CCSDS 650.0-B-1 in January 2002 and was approved as ISO standard 14721 in 2003. In accordance with normal procedure, the first five-year review of the standard is now underway. Comments may be submitted by 30 October, 2006 to OAIS-support@delight.gsfc.nasa.gov, and should be identifed as either updates needed for clarification, updates to add missing concepts or strengthen weak concepts, or identification of any outdated material.

From the press release: "OCLC joins LOCKSS in support of its collaborative effort to explore new uses of the LOCKSS technology to benefit the community and to build new capabilities for digital preservation. OCLC will work collaboratively with LOCKSS to explore the expansion of the LOCKSS technology to operate with different types of digital content."

Métamorphose File -n- Folder Renamer is an open-source, cross-platform utility that has both a command line and graphical user interface. The feature list is extensive, and includes recursive subdirectory/file renaming, the ability to save job configuration settings, preview and undo capabilities, prefix/suffix/positional/pattern/incrementing renaming operations, and a lot more.

AlouetteCanada is an initiative of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries and its partners whose goal is "to create, disseminate, preserve and sustain the knowledge base of Canadian memory organizations in digital form, for the purpose of benefiting all Canadians." The official launch was on June 21.

[Disclosure statement: I am a member of the Technical Committee.]

The goal of this report, funded by JISC, is "to find out what creators, curators, and others with responsibility for managing and preserving digital audiovisual materials were doing, what their challenges were, and what they perceived as the greatest needs when pursuing the preservation" of digital video and sound. The report also provides a comprehensive and readable introduction to the technical issues in preserving digital media.

Comments and feedback are invited until July 31, 2006.

This report disseminates the results of a survey of 170 libraries, resource centres, archives, historical societies, museums, art galleries, and arts/culture organizations in Saskatchewan, performed during the summer of 2005.

For the second time in three days I've had to restore the database that drives this website. My webhost provider has had ongoing hardware problems. I apologize for the disruption of service.

The National Archives of Australia as released version 3.0 of Xena (XML Electronic Normalising of Archives). Xena works in conjuction with two other open source applications, DPR (Digital Preservation Recorder), a preservation metadatat management tool, and QUEST (QUery Electronic STorage), a tool for retriveving Archival Information Packages managed with the other two tools.

ETD 2006's final day consisted of parallel sessions and a closing plenary by Jean-Claude Guédon. I attended the parallel session on archiving. The first speaker, Thomas Wollschlaeger from the Deutsche Bibliotek, described the digital archive system being developed by kopal, a collaborative effort between the Deutsche Bibliotek, Goettingen State and University Library, the Gesellschaft fuer wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Goettingen, and IBM Deutschland.