digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The objective of this survey, conducted in July and August 2007 among 18 RLG partner institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom, was to gain a baseline understanding of current descriptive metadata practices and dependencies. The report summarizes the descriptive practices used across a variety of applications, the data structure and data content standards followed, the audiences for the metadata created, and some organization patterns.

RLG Programs' interpretation of the results and the issues we identified to pursue in future projects is available at

[Posted with permission of James Moses]

Primary Research Group has published The International Survey of Institutional Digital Repositories (ISBN # 1-57440- 090-8) and would like to share some of its research results.

Just a few of the study’s many findings are that:

• The average institutional digital repository spent $78,802 (US) in start up costs.

Simon Tanner of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London is leading a team which is to digitise the Dead Sea Scrolls. Further information is available at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/phpnews/wmview.php?ArtID=2164.

I planned to do this next Friday, but I've rolled out the new Digitizationblog a few days early. We're now running on Drupal! Accounts of users who posted comments have been migrated but accounts of users who never posted comment have not been. I've written up the migration over at Drupalib if you're interested.

If you read this site's RSS feeds, please update your reader to point to http://digitizationblog.interoperating.info/rss.xml.

OCLC Programs and Research has published this report inspired by the "Digitization Matters" forum held in August 2007 by Research Libraries Group and the Society of American Archivists. The report presents strategies for bringing the scale of digitization of unique special collections in libraries and archives in line with that of the mass digitization of published material by programs such as Google Books and the Open Content Alliance.

A public meeting will be held on March 3, 2008 at Johns Hopkins University to roll-out the first beta release of the OAI-ORE specifications. The press release for the event is available on the OAI website. You can register for the event here.