digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

This issue focuses on the BNE (National Library of Spain's) collections and initiatives.

Neil Beagrie has written a blog entry pointing out that Google has decided to cancel their research data hosting service, before even launching it. Wired posted the original story on December 18.

A group of Australian universities have developed a set of open-source tools that provide specialized repository services for raw data sets. The tools, collectively known as ARCHER, are available under the GPL3 license.

This article by Dianne Dietrich, Jennifer Doty, Jen Green and Nicole Scholtz is available in Issue 5 of the Code4Lib Journal:

What do you do when you are in charge of assessing and reviving an abandoned digital project you had no part in creating or implementing? This article will talk about the unique challenges and issues involved in such a project, drawing from a specific example at the University of Michigan Library. We contended with unfamiliar software, limited technical documentation, proprietary file formats and platform migration, and will discuss how we approached each of these specific technical issues. After reviving our project and reflecting on our process, we put together a list of guidelines that we feel will help assist others who may find themselves in similar situations.

The Library of Congress has just released a report on its use of Flickr to make available over 3,000 images from several collections, including the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, the George Grantham Bain News Service, and selected panoramic photographs.

This item, courtesy of Slashdot, documents how researchers have used emulation to run a copy of William Gibson's Aggrippa, which ran on a Mac System 7 diskette that encrypted itself after the first time it ran. A neat instance of how a work that was considered "dead" (and intended to die by its author) has been revived using digital preservation technology.

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.'s Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 3 is now available.

The results of a survey on IR trends conducted in preparation for the 2008 SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting in Baltimore are now available. The authors highlight the following three results:

• In general, respondents on all platforms are thinking very creatively about the role of an IR. Responses indicate that student research, campus business, and research from outside the institution all have a home in the IR.

The latest issue of the NISO Newsline reports that the venerable Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections is open to community contributions: "With the third edition of the Framework, we open the document up for ongoing contributions from the community of librarians, archivists, curators, and other information professionals.

The Research Information Network in the UK have published Discovering objects: Meeting researchers’ needs, which "investigates how researchers discover and gain access to physical objects and artefacts using four varied subject disciplines as examples of the process: archaeology, art history, earth sciences, and social and economic history." The report provides ten recommendations on how to "enhance quality online catalogues and encourage collaboration between researchers and museum staff."