digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

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.

People familiar with Abbyy's OCR products tend to agree that they are among the best available. Until now, Abbyy FineReader has supported OCR for pretty much every European language, but version 9 now supports both Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Hebrew.

More information is available in this Abbyy news release.

OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives will be publishing a special issue on digitization projects that are international and collaborative. The editor is looking for innovative digitization projects that feature multiple formats (books, images, maps, 3D visualization, music, art, etc.), and that have multiple partners and collaborators from different countries and nationalities. Projects that are based on international grants are especially encouraged. Articles can be of any length, and figures and screen shots are encouraged.

Horowhenua Library Trust and Katipo Communications in New Zealand are pleased to annouce the release of Kete Version 1.0, a collection-based content management system released under the GPL and developed in Ruby on Rails. Full documentation, contacts and links to the code repository can be found at the project site http://kete.net.nz.

On Friday Microsoft announced that is was canceling Live Book Search and pulling out of the Open Content Alliance. Ars technica and others provide more detail and analysis.

The California Digital Library has released verion 2.1 of their eXtensible Text Framework (XTF), an open source, highly flexible software application that supports the search, browse and display of heterogeneous digital content. Highlights of this release include:

• Extensive interface improvements, including new search forms, built-in faceted browsing, and a new look and feel.
• Increased support for document and information exchange formats.
• XHTML and OAI-PMH output
• NLM article format indexing and output
• Microsoft Word indexing

Results of this JISC-funded study, which includes detailed case studies covering the Universities of Cambridge, King’s College London, Southampton, and the Archaeology Data Service (University of York), are now available at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/keepingresearchdatasafe..... Comments and feedback are welcome at http://blog.beagrie.com/archives/2008/05/14/just-published-research-data....

The Digital Preservation Coalition has released a report titled Preserving the Data Explosion: Using PDF. The report is written from a records-management perspective, focusing on "PDF/Archive as an archival file format to preserve an organization's knowledge" combined with comprehensive records management programs and policies.

The Association of Research Libraries has published a report titled Research Library Publishing Services: New Options for University Publishing (PDF). Among the report's findings are the results of a late 2007 survey that "verified that research libraries are rapidly developing publishing services.

Major changes in the PREMIS 2.0 data dictionary include expanded rights metadata, more extensive significant properties and preservation level information, and a mechanism for extensibility for a number of metadata units.

Deadline for comments on the XML schema is April 24. More information is available at the PREMIS schemas website.