digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The Open Archive Initiative's Object Reuse and Exchange working group has released Compound Information Objects: An OAI-ORE Perspective, which describes their "interoperability layer that is a standardized means for publishing [...] repository-specific and application-specific implementations of compound objects to the web." This is the first major technical document from the OAI-ORE group.

The European Library has released its Handbook to the general public. This publication "is a help guide that allows national libraries to input their collections into The European Library portal" but it contains useful information for others who are creating similar guidelines.

The Visual Resources Association has moved VRA Core out of beta. Details at the VRA Core website.

As noted on Slashdot today, Network World has an article on the work of a Carnegie Mellon researcher who is developing an anti-spam technology that requires humans to enter hard-to-OCR text on web forms to demonstrate they are not spambots. reCAPTCHA provides plugins for WordPress, MediaWiki, and phpBB and also a web service. The Internet Archive is already benefiting from the output created by reCAPTCHA.

You've got to see this video, mashed up from Disney film clips. Quotable quote: "The public domain is a disgrace to the forces of evil" (time index: 5:00).

The Florida Center for Library Automation is pleased to announce that the DAITSS preservation repository application is now available under the GPL license. DAITSS implements the preservation strategies of normalization and forward migration for about 10 currently-supported formats, including JFIF (JPEG), JEG2000, TIFF, WAVE, XML, Quicktime, AVI and PDF, and was designed to conform closely to the OAIS reference model.

The May 11 "Talk of the Nation" featured Brewster Kahle (archive.org), Michael Hart (Project Gttenberg), and Michael Keller (Stanford University Librarian and Publisher of HighWire and Stanford University Press). The program is available on the NPR website.

Highlights from this issue of RLGDigiNews include "Digital Imaging - How Far Have We Come and What Still Needs to be Done?", "A Digital Decade: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going in Digital Preservation?", and "Copyright Keeps Open Archives and Digital Preservation Separate".

VCS *NIX is a shell script "meant to create video contact sheets (previews) of videos" by calling standard utilities such as Image Magick. Although the author indicates that the script is still in its early stages, it looks impressive. Check out the website for some examples. This script should make it easy to generate Internet Archive-style use of video thumbnails for preview.

As reported on Slashdot, Google is sponsoring development of OCRopus, an "open source document analysis and OCR system" for Linux that will be made available under an Apache License 2.0. OCRopus will incorporate the company's Tesseract OCR engine but will be able to handle irregular page layouts better, and provide dictionary capabilities such as those found in other OCR packages.