digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

This article from Linux.com describes Scribe, the open-source technology developed by the Internet Archive (who is collaborating with LoC) to digitize and process books for searching. The newest versions will run on the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu instead of MS Windows. The article contains a description of the workflow used with Scribe.

Tom Blake, Digital Imaging Production Manager at Boston Public Library, offers this humorous but realistic formula for calculating the cost of digitizing a given quantity of print materials:


{[(linear feet) x (administrative imperative)2] x [1/(item level records)]/(distinct material formats)/metadata staff hours] x [public domain items/(orphaned works - copyrighted materials]/(risk assessment)2] x [(unbound flat items < 11x17)/4) + (bound pages/2) + (tightly bound pages) + (3 dimensional items x 4)]} x net value of donor/300 dpi


Posted with Tom's permission.

The AlouetteCanada initiative of the Canadian Association of Reserach Libraries has received a federal grant to develop Metadata Toolkit (details described in the announcement). A year from now, this software will be available for general use. [Disclosure statement: I am the Project Manager for the Toolkit.]

Containing articles on website usage analysis, "Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Installation of DSpace" [this article is generating quite a bit of discussion], and OpenURL linking into open access repositories.

University of Oxford's Technology-Assisted lifelong Learning (TALL) group has published results of a survey investigiating use of Web 2.0 services among Oxford students (1400 students responded). The report shows what sites the respondents use and contribute to, but doesn't address how students use them.

Many of you may have heard of Distributed Proofreaders (DP) already, which I just came across on the O'Reilly Radar blog. DP is a network of volunteers who perform what is the proofreading equivalent of the double-keying method:

DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) is conducting a survey on international competence centres for digital curation and
preservation activity and expertise. The survey closes March 23rd, 2007.

CC version 3 is now available. This announcement describes the changes in the new license nicely.

Ebook readers continue to evolve: CRAVE is reporting that a company called Polymer Vision has created the Readius, which is about the size of large mobile phone. The device has a roll-out E Ink display about the width of a paperback book, has a 10-day battery life, 4 GB of memory, a USB port, and wireless networking.

Springer has just published Henry Gladney's Preserving Digital Information (2007, ISBN 978-3-540-37886-0 ). A synopsis of the book is available.