digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

As part of an effort to integrate the metadata created for their digitized collections, the Library of Congress has published two specifications under the general rubric of Metadata for Digital Content (MDC), a master metadata element list and a set of profiles of this list for specific projects.

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 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.

Metadata Matters is a new blog by Diane Hillmann and Jon Phipps. Definately worth subscribing to if you work with metadata for networked resources.

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 "production" version of the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) specification is now available. See the press release for more information.

Will Sexton, Metadata Analyst / Programmer at Duke University Libraries has posted an interesting item on his blog that identifies some "Digitization and Description use cases". People evaluating or developing tools for digitization and digital assets managment will find Will's list very useful.

Major changes in the PREMIS 2.0 data dictionary include expanded rights metadata, more extensive significant properties and preservation level information, and a mechanism for extensibility for a number of metadata units.

Deadline for comments on the XML schema is April 24. More information is available at the PREMIS schemas website.

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.