digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The National Library of Sweden has released OAI4J, a Java library (available under the Apache License) that implements a client API for the OAI-PMH standard specification from the Open Archives Initiative. It also has support for the upcoming OAI-ORE specification. More information is available at the project website.

DSpace 1.5 is now available and can be downloaded from SourceForge. This release contains a large number of new features. For more information, visit the DSpace website.

Released just over a week ago, the University Scholarly Knowledge Inventory System (U-SKIS) "tracks .pdf files from start to finish, records communication and provides publisher's archiving policies to determine what may be added to a digital institutional repository." It's available under the GPL and runs on pretty much and platform that supports MySQL and Perl.

The scale of this accomplishment is astounding, despite the criticisms that have been made against UMich and Google in implementing the program. As the story points out, that's one million out of a total book collection of 7.5 million.

This article from the BBC News describes the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive, developed by a community based in Australia's Northern Territory, and the degrees of access people have to parts of the archive based on who they are. Access to particular material is based on culturally-specific norms such as what sex the user is, what community the user is from, and whether an image being viewed is of a person from the user's family (family members cannot view images of deceased relatives).

pdf2djvu is a utility for creating DjVu files from PDF files. It's available under the GPL version 2 and runs on Linux and Mac OS X.

Harvard University and Indiana University have just published a 168-page guide Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation, which was developed with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the U.S. The guide, plus some additional appendices, is available from the Publications section of the Sound Directions website.

This story from the New York Times of Dec. 23 explains that preserving the digital byproducts of making movies is considerably more expensive than preserving their analogue counterparts. Of particular interest to Digitizationblog readers is that the article supplies specific dollar figures.

The public alpha versions of the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) User Guide and Specification documents are now available.

The University of Michigan Libraries has released their MIT-licensed OAI toolkit. The toolkit contains both harvester and data provider, both written in Perl.