digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The MetaArchive Cooperative has just published A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation by K. Skinner and M. Schultz, Eds. (Atlanta, GA: Educopia Institute, 2010), "the first of a series of volumes describing successful collaborative strategies and articulating specific new models that may help cultural memory organizations work together for their mutual benefit."

The Digital Preservation Coalition has added a new report to the DPC Technology Watch Report Series: File Formats for Preservation, written by Malcolm Todd of The National Archives.

This article by Alexis Wichowski in the May First Monday

This recommendation "discusses modeling choices involved in designing metadata applications for different types of interoperability. At Level 1, applications use data components with shared natural-language definitions. At Level 2, data is based on the formal-semantic model of the W3C Resource Description Framework (as in Linked Data). At Levels 3 and 4, data also shares syntactic constraints based on the DCMI Abstract Model.

The February 2009 issue of the Creative Commons Newsletter is available. Other issues can be found at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCNewsletter.

The Library of Congress has just published Understanding PREMIS, a 26-page overview of the preservation metadata standard.

This issue focuses on the BNE (National Library of Spain's) collections and initiatives.

The Library of Congress has just released a report on its use of Flickr to make available over 3,000 images from several collections, including the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, the George Grantham Bain News Service, and selected panoramic photographs.

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.'s Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 3 is now available.

The results of a survey on IR trends conducted in preparation for the 2008 SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting in Baltimore are now available. The authors highlight the following three results:

• In general, respondents on all platforms are thinking very creatively about the role of an IR. Responses indicate that student research, campus business, and research from outside the institution all have a home in the IR.