digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The University of Michigan Library has issued a press release announcing that OAIster has harvested more than 10 million records.

JISC has issued a press release announcing sixteen successful applications, totaling £12m, on the part of "nearly 60 organisations from education and other sectors, including the British Film Institute, The National Archive, the BBC, ITN, the British Library, the National Library of Wales and the Bodleian Library, alongside nearly 30 universities." The funded projects are listed in the press release.

This interesting site is a "database of potential suppliers of ICT and digitisation resources for the cultural and heritage sector" in the UK. It is maintained by the Museums, Libraries and Archives North East (MLA North East), the regional strategic development body for Museums, Libraries and Archives in the North East of England.

There are far too few sites that provide information on hardware, service providers, and other aspects of digitization. Perhaps someone should take MLA's lead and do such a site for other geographic regions.

ARL has published Managing Digitization Activities (SPEC Kit 294), which describes findings from sixty-eight responses to a February 2006 survey on the topic. From the Executive Summary:

As reported on Slashdot today, the TimesOnline has published an article describing Google's plans to make it easy to download digitized books onto mobile devices such as the Blackberry. Quotable quote: Jens Redmer, director of Google Book Search in Europe, is paraphrased as saying that after many years of setbacks the electronic book looked poised to go main-stream.

Fedora version 2.2, described as a "milestone" release, contains a number of bug fixes and new features, as detailed in the release notes. Highlights include better performance, a journaling/versioning system that tracks changes to all objects in a Fedora repository, and support for the PostgreSQL database.

The Library of Congress' Network Development and MARC Standards Office has published a study written by Karen Coyle on how rights information needed for digital preservation activities is handled in the PREMIS data dictionary. From the announcement posted to various email lists: