digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The California Digital Library has released verion 2.1 of their eXtensible Text Framework (XTF), an open source, highly flexible software application that supports the search, browse and display of heterogeneous digital content. Highlights of this release include:

• Extensive interface improvements, including new search forms, built-in faceted browsing, and a new look and feel.
• Increased support for document and information exchange formats.
• XHTML and OAI-PMH output
• NLM article format indexing and output
• Microsoft Word indexing

The National Library of Sweden has released OAI4J, a Java library (available under the Apache License) that implements a client API for the OAI-PMH standard specification from the Open Archives Initiative. It also has support for the upcoming OAI-ORE specification. More information is available at the project website.

DSpace 1.5 is now available and can be downloaded from SourceForge. This release contains a large number of new features. For more information, visit the DSpace website.

Released just over a week ago, the University Scholarly Knowledge Inventory System (U-SKIS) "tracks .pdf files from start to finish, records communication and provides publisher's archiving policies to determine what may be added to a digital institutional repository." It's available under the GPL and runs on pretty much and platform that supports MySQL and Perl.

pdf2djvu is a utility for creating DjVu files from PDF files. It's available under the GPL version 2 and runs on Linux and Mac OS X.

The University of Michigan Libraries has released their MIT-licensed OAI toolkit. The toolkit contains both harvester and data provider, both written in Perl.

OpenCollection, an open source collection management system tailored for museums, has received a $100,000 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration (MATC). OpenCollection has been available under GPL since March 2007.

That's a lot of money. This announcement provides the details.

The koLibRI digital preservation tool, developed by German National Library, the Goettingen State and University Library, the Gesellschaft fuer wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Goettingen, and IBM Deutschland GmbH, is now available for download. From the web page:

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.