digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

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.

The objective of this survey, conducted in July and August 2007 among 18 RLG partner institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom, was to gain a baseline understanding of current descriptive metadata practices and dependencies. The report summarizes the descriptive practices used across a variety of applications, the data structure and data content standards followed, the audiences for the metadata created, and some organization patterns.

RLG Programs' interpretation of the results and the issues we identified to pursue in future projects is available at

The Visual Resources Association has moved VRA Core out of beta. Details at the VRA Core website.

The Library of Congress' Network Development and MARC Standards Office has published a study written by Karen Coyle on how rights information needed for digital preservation activities is handled in the PREMIS data dictionary. From the announcement posted to various email lists:

This 70-page report, published by the Consortium of European Research Libraries and the European Commission on Preservation and Access, describes a number of persistent identifier schemes in detail, including Handles, Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), Archival Resource Keys (ARKs), Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs), Uniform Resource Names (URNs), National Bibliography Numbers (NBNs), and the OpenURL. Its final chapter contains a set of guidelines and recommendations.

The draft version of MIX 1.0 (NISO Metadata for Images in XML Schema) is now ready for review. The review period will run from November 29 to December 20, 2006. Comments should be sent to the MIX email list (instructions for joining the email list are on the MIX website).

Caliph & Emir are complimentary tools that allow the creation of MPEG-7 metadata for images and search and retrieval using that metadata. This set of screen captures and these Flash demos of Caliph and Emir illustrate what they do.

This article by Duncan Burbidge in the latest Ariadne (Issue 47, April 2006) describes the workflow used by the FP6 PrestoSpace Project to digitize and process video media. Specifically, it discusses:

• Tracking the process of digitisation from tape to fully indexed archive;
• The encoding technology behind the system;
• Storage of the archive;
• Encoding formats that are available; and
• A conclusion on the whole process.

Originally posted on the Metadata Librarians mailing list. Posted here with permission of Ellen Caplan (caplane a t oclc.org):