digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

This article describes a patent Google filed in August 2008 to automate splitting up articles printed across several pages in magazines, papers, etc. I thought Olive already did that but apparently what they do is either different enough from Google's patent, or prior art doesn't count any more.

Wired Science is carrying a very interesting story in which NASA is soliciting the public's ideas on how they can be make Wernher von Braun's notes available over the web. Von Braun was the fist director of NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and the genius behind the early US space program.

The official Request for Information, which closes August 31, is available here.

This article by Alexis Wichowski in the May First Monday

From the blog's "about" page: "This blog was created for Digital Librarians in North Carolina to share experiences, exchange ideas, and develop collaborations."

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.

Ocean State Librarian is providing this video of Brewster Kahle's talk at the EG2007 Conference, in which Kahle describes the Internet Archive's activities to a non-librarian (but very tech savy) audience. This video is also available at the Internet Archive.

The Inside PDF blog is reporting that PDF version 1.7 has passed the ballot for approval to become ISO 32000 by a vote of 13 to 1. This is the first general version of PDF to become an ISO standard, joining PDF/Archive (PDF/A) and PDF/Exchange (PDF/X).

Well, it's new to me, but it's been around since April: Alastair Dunning, Programme Manager for the JISC Digitisation Programme, has started a blog called "Available Online," which will undoubtedly be of interest to readers of Digitizationblog.

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.