digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The first release candidate of EPrints 3.0 was announced yesterday, which means that the developers have frozen the features in EPrints 3.0 and future releases will be bug fixes only. A demonstration site is available.

DigCCurr2007: An International Symposium on Digital Curation, to be held April 18-20, 2007 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, "will focus on what digital curators do and what they need to know to carry out this important work." The Symposium will be useful to anyone interested in digital preservation and curation, especially those who are building staff capacity in these areas.

A few days old now, but this blog posting entry goes into considerable detail about the "archival" qualities of various types of optical media. As of today, the entry has spawned almost 70 comments...

A call for papers is now out for the First International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference, to be held July 11-13, 2007 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. From the home page:

The conference will appeal to all segments of the scholarly communications community – software developers and technical support specialists; journal publishers and editors; and librarians and academics.

From the journal's home page: "The IJDC is a new peer-reviewed journal entirely devoted to papers, articles and news items on curation of digital objects and related issues. The journal is published in electronic form, twice a year." The IJDC is published by UKOLN at the University of Bath and is a publication of the Digital Curation Centre.

This report deals with three broad sets of copyright issues relevant to digitization (orphan works, out of print works and digital preservation) and recommends specific actions be taken allow the development of the European Digital Library to proceed.

The draft version of MIX 1.0 (NISO Metadata for Images in XML Schema) is now ready for review. The review period will run from November 29 to December 20, 2006. Comments should be sent to the MIX email list (instructions for joining the email list are on the MIX website).

XML Copy Editor is a "fast, free, validating XML editor" for Linux and Windows, available under the GNU Public License. The rich feature set and clean user interface allow this application to compete with commercial products such as oxygen and XML Spy.

Articles in this issue include "Creative Commons Licences in Higher and Further Education: Do We Care?", "e-Books for the Future: Here but Hiding?", two articles on Institutional Repositories (one case study and one on marketing), and a report on the DC 2006 conference.

Using Digital Images in Teaching and Learning: Perspectives from Liberal Arts Institutions reports on over 400 survey responses and 300 interviews from faculty at 33 US colleges and universities, and covers topics such as "the quality of image resources, image functionality, management, deployment and the skills required for optimum use." The report was commissioned by Wesleyan University in collaboration with the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE).