digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

From slashdot today: Swiss camera maker Seitz has released a 160 megapixel digital camera. Very high-end scanners, like the Cruse CS 155/450 P, produce 150 megapixels, and the highest, such as the Lumiere JumboScan can produce up to 240 megapixels. 160 megapixels is 10 times more than higher-end prosumer-grade digital cameras' megapixel ratings.

My book Putting Content Online: A Practical Guide for Libraries (Oxford: Chandos, 2006) is finally out. More info is available on the publisher's site and the author's site (with links to Amazon.ca/uk/com).

I don't usually pipe up about how embarrassingly moronic some of the copyright reforms coming out of the True North Strong and Free are, but Michael Geist's posting "Education Ministers' Copyright Proposal Needs a Rewrite" clearly explains another example of how a group of lobbyists, in this case the provincial Ministers of Education, can misrepresent the public good through doublespeak. Their Communiqué makes the Ministry of Truth look like clumsy amateurs.

This posting on the Google Code blog describes the company's Tesseract OCR product and the background leading to its release under an open source license.

There is some activity to integrate DSpace and Sakai, the open-source learning management system. Linked from the wiki cited above is an "integration roadmap" by staff from Cambridge University and some other items relevant to library/repository integration with Sakai.