digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The German government has announced the creation of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB) (German Digital Library), Germany's contribution to Europeana. The DDB will include material from 30,000 cultural and scientific institutions, including publishers.

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.

Like the New Zealand National Library before them, Brooklyn Museum has opened up access to their collections via a Collection API. This is very exciting, as it lays the groundwork for multicollection mashups and other neat content and metadata reuse capabilities.

Simon Tanner of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London is leading a team which is to digitise the Dead Sea Scrolls. Further information is available at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/phpnews/wmview.php?ArtID=2164.

This Cornell press release describes the partnership between the university, Microsoft, and Kirtas Technologies to digitize and make accessible through Microsoft's Live Book Search selected public domain materials in agriculture, American history, English literature, astronomy, food and wine, general engineering, the history of science, home economics, hospitality and travel, human sexuality, labor relations, Native American materials, ornithology, veterinary medicine, and women's studies.

This press release, dated March 2, announced that the "European Commission steps up efforts to put Europe’s memory on the Web via a 'European Digital Library'." The first public version of the Library, which will contain at least six million documents, is now available.

On the Google blog today there is an annoucement that Google will be implementing a pilot project to digitize US National Archives' video footage, to be included in Google Video.

PictureAustralia is the NLA's virtual collection of images from a number of libraries, archives, and museums in that country. NLA has partnered with Flickr (more info here) to provide the opportunity for individuals to contribute to the national collection the fun and easy way.

(Scraped from Lorcan Dempsey's weblog)

The image is of Washington Senators baseball player Herman A. "Germany" Schaefer using a camera during a visit to play the New York Highlanders in April 1911.

Google Inc. has agreed to donate $3 million toward the Library of Congress' World Digital Library initiative. Details are available in this press release and this article by James H. Billington in the Washington Post.