digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

Harvard University and Indiana University have just published a 168-page guide Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation, which was developed with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the U.S. The guide, plus some additional appendices, is available from the Publications section of the Sound Directions website.

This story from the New York Times of Dec. 23 explains that preserving the digital byproducts of making movies is considerably more expensive than preserving their analogue counterparts. Of particular interest to Digitizationblog readers is that the article supplies specific dollar figures.

The public alpha versions of the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) User Guide and Specification documents are now available.

The University of Michigan Libraries has released their MIT-licensed OAI toolkit. The toolkit contains both harvester and data provider, both written in Perl.

OpenCollection, an open source collection management system tailored for museums, has received a $100,000 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration (MATC). OpenCollection has been available under GPL since March 2007.

[Posted with permission of Daniel Alemneh, University of North Texas]

I would like to invite you to participate in a research study whose main goal is to identify and understand factors affecting adoption of PREservation Metadata Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) in cultural heritage institutions. The online survey questionnaire contains 18 questions and would take about 15 minutes to complete.

The Inside PDF blog is reporting that PDF version 1.7 has passed the ballot for approval to become ISO 32000 by a vote of 13 to 1. This is the first general version of PDF to become an ISO standard, joining PDF/Archive (PDF/A) and PDF/Exchange (PDF/X).