digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The Visual Resources Association has moved VRA Core out of beta. Details at the VRA Core website.

As noted on Slashdot today, Network World has an article on the work of a Carnegie Mellon researcher who is developing an anti-spam technology that requires humans to enter hard-to-OCR text on web forms to demonstrate they are not spambots. reCAPTCHA provides plugins for WordPress, MediaWiki, and phpBB and also a web service. The Internet Archive is already benefiting from the output created by reCAPTCHA.

You've got to see this video, mashed up from Disney film clips. Quotable quote: "The public domain is a disgrace to the forces of evil" (time index: 5:00).

The Florida Center for Library Automation is pleased to announce that the DAITSS preservation repository application is now available under the GPL license. DAITSS implements the preservation strategies of normalization and forward migration for about 10 currently-supported formats, including JFIF (JPEG), JEG2000, TIFF, WAVE, XML, Quicktime, AVI and PDF, and was designed to conform closely to the OAIS reference model.

The May 11 "Talk of the Nation" featured Brewster Kahle (archive.org), Michael Hart (Project Gttenberg), and Michael Keller (Stanford University Librarian and Publisher of HighWire and Stanford University Press). The program is available on the NPR website.