digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

The MetaArchive Cooperative has just published A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation by K. Skinner and M. Schultz, Eds. (Atlanta, GA: Educopia Institute, 2010), "the first of a series of volumes describing successful collaborative strategies and articulating specific new models that may help cultural memory organizations work together for their mutual benefit."

This story from Technologizer points out how a glitch on Microsoft's part locked users out of Office 2003 files that had been secured using Microsoft's Righs Management Service. Microsoft has issued a fix that requires installing Office 2003 Service Pack 3 update.

The Digital Preservation Coalition has added a new report to the DPC Technology Watch Report Series: File Formats for Preservation, written by Malcolm Todd of The National Archives.

The WARC format for packaging web content (and other types of content) has been published as ISO 28500. A news release is available from the International Internet Preservation Consortium.

iPres 2009, the Sixth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects, has just issued its call for abstracts. iPres 2009 is the

sixth in the series of annual international conferences that bring together researchers and practitioners from around the world to explore the latest trends, innovations, and practices in preserving our scientific and cultural digital heritage.

The conference will be held October 5-6 in San Francisco.

The Library of Congress has just published Understanding PREMIS, a 26-page overview of the preservation metadata standard.

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.

Neil Beagrie has written a blog entry pointing out that Google has decided to cancel their research data hosting service, before even launching it. Wired posted the original story on December 18.

This item, courtesy of Slashdot, documents how researchers have used emulation to run a copy of William Gibson's Aggrippa, which ran on a Mac System 7 diskette that encrypted itself after the first time it ran. A neat instance of how a work that was considered "dead" (and intended to die by its author) has been revived using digital preservation technology.

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.