digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

This article from SciTeDaily points out similarities between technology described in Google's patent for its book scanning process and one devised by University of Tokyo researchers, and claims to shed light on how Google's technology works in practice because of the similarities between the two technologies. [Scraped from Slashdot].

Wired is running a story about a home-made book scanner that costs about $300. Its creator has even started a forum where others can share their similar designs.

Touro College Libraries has developed a PHP front-end to Greenstone called EmeraldView. A demo is available at http://emeraldview-demo.tourolib.org/greenstone-demo. The developers are looking for feedback -- EmeraldView is probably the first publicly available LAMP front-ends to Greenstone, and will be of great value to the Greenstone community.

The draft of the revised Guidelines for Best Encoding Practices (version 3.0) are open for public comment from April 22, 2009 to May 6, 2009.

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.

There is a new (since November) Google Group on digital curation, "Intended to be a collaborative space for people involved in the work of digital curation and repository development to share ideas, practices, technology, software, standards, jokes, etc." Ed Summers provides some backgound on the group.

A group of Australian universities have developed a set of open-source tools that provide specialized repository services for raw data sets. The tools, collectively known as ARCHER, are available under the GPL3 license.

The popular JHOVE application, which performs format-specific identification, validation, and characterization of digital objects, is evolving into a second generation, thanks to funding from the Library of Congress, under its National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) initiative. Detailed information is available at the JHOVE2 website.

The Xiph.Org Foundation has announced the release of Theora 1.0, "a video codec with a small CPU footprint that offers easy portability and requires no patent royalties." The maintainers of Firefox and Opera have already pledged native support for the format.

DRIVER, the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research, has just released D-NET v.1.0, open source software for deploying a customizable distributed system featuring tools for harvesting and aggregating heterogeneous data sources.