digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has published two Working Drafts of note, Guidelines for Dublin Core Applicaton Profiles and Interoperability Levels for Dublin Core Metadata. The public is invited to issue reposes to these working drafts by December 1, 2008. Information on doing so is available on the DCMI website.

The popular JHOVE application, which performs format-specific identification, validation, and characterization of digital objects, is evolving into a second generation, thanks to funding from the Library of Congress, under its National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) initiative. Detailed information is available at the JHOVE2 website.

JISC has published a Digital Preservation Policies Study that "aims to provide an outline model for digital preservation policies and to analyse the role that digital preservation can play in supporting and delivering key strategies for Higher and Further Education Institutions." The full report and appendices are available.

The Xiph.Org Foundation has announced the release of Theora 1.0, "a video codec with a small CPU footprint that offers easy portability and requires no patent royalties." The maintainers of Firefox and Opera have already pledged native support for the format.

The dispute over Google's ability to scan copyrighted books that started in 2005 is over. Google and bodies representing publishers have come to an agreement. Details about the specific outcomes of the settlement are also available.

The "production" version of the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) specification is now available. See the press release for more information.

This article by Kalev Leetaru (First Monday, Volume 13 Number 10 - 6 October 2008) compares these two flagship mass digitization efforts. From the abstract:

Will Sexton, Metadata Analyst / Programmer at Duke University Libraries has posted an interesting item on his blog that identifies some "Digitization and Description use cases". People evaluating or developing tools for digitization and digital assets managment will find Will's list very useful.

Ocean State Librarian is providing this video of Brewster Kahle's talk at the EG2007 Conference, in which Kahle describes the Internet Archive's activities to a non-librarian (but very tech savy) audience. This video is also available at the Internet Archive.

DRIVER, the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research, has just released D-NET v.1.0, open source software for deploying a customizable distributed system featuring tools for harvesting and aggregating heterogeneous data sources.