digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

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.

On Friday Microsoft announced that is was canceling Live Book Search and pulling out of the Open Content Alliance. Ars technica and others provide more detail and analysis.

The scale of this accomplishment is astounding, despite the criticisms that have been made against UMich and Google in implementing the program. As the story points out, that's one million out of a total book collection of 7.5 million.

A public meeting will be held on March 3, 2008 at Johns Hopkins University to roll-out the first beta release of the OAI-ORE specifications. The press release for the event is available on the OAI website. You can register for the event here.

Last week's PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference was a success, and a blog devoted to the Conference's sessions is now available. The house band, comprised of the director of the PKP project (guitar), the lead software developer (drums), and an assortment of friends, rocked. See them on YouTube.

DigCCurr2007: An International Symposium on Digital Curation, to be held April 18-20, 2007 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, "will focus on what digital curators do and what they need to know to carry out this important work." The Symposium will be useful to anyone interested in digital preservation and curation, especially those who are building staff capacity in these areas.

A call for papers is now out for the First International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference, to be held July 11-13, 2007 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. From the home page:

The conference will appeal to all segments of the scholarly communications community – software developers and technical support specialists; journal publishers and editors; and librarians and academics.

I just returned from Access 2006 in Ottawa. Another great year for this conference. I didn't blog the event, since I knew it was already going to be hyperblogged -- check out, for example, Loomware, onebiglibrary, Quædam cuiusdam, and Library Webchick.

ETD 2006's final day consisted of parallel sessions and a closing plenary by Jean-Claude Guédon. I attended the parallel session on archiving. The first speaker, Thomas Wollschlaeger from the Deutsche Bibliotek, described the digital archive system being developed by kopal, a collaborative effort between the Deutsche Bibliotek, Goettingen State and University Library, the Gesellschaft fuer wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Goettingen, and IBM Deutschland.

Art Rhyno presented on open source software. This was a broad overview which focused on the benefits of open source and also the general health of open source software in libraries. Although the whole hour was great -- for example, seeing actual photos of executives from major software companies frothing at the mouth while spreading fear uncertainty and doubt about open source always makes me smile -- the highlight for me was Art's story that expresses the essence of open source software.