digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

Highlights from this issue of RLGDigiNews include "Digital Imaging - How Far Have We Come and What Still Needs to be Done?", "A Digital Decade: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going in Digital Preservation?", and "Copyright Keeps Open Archives and Digital Preservation Separate".

VCS *NIX is a shell script "meant to create video contact sheets (previews) of videos" by calling standard utilities such as Image Magick. Although the author indicates that the script is still in its early stages, it looks impressive. Check out the website for some examples. This script should make it easy to generate Internet Archive-style use of video thumbnails for preview.

As reported on Slashdot, Google is sponsoring development of OCRopus, an "open source document analysis and OCR system" for Linux that will be made available under an Apache License 2.0. OCRopus will incorporate the company's Tesseract OCR engine but will be able to handle irregular page layouts better, and provide dictionary capabilities such as those found in other OCR packages.

This article from Linux.com describes Scribe, the open-source technology developed by the Internet Archive (who is collaborating with LoC) to digitize and process books for searching. The newest versions will run on the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu instead of MS Windows. The article contains a description of the workflow used with Scribe.