According to an article in the Guardian, Lulu is cranking out 4,000 new print-on-demand titles every week, and it now offers about 232,000 POD books.
Read more about it at "Lulu Publishes 4,000 Titles per Week" and "Self-Publish Boom Challenging Old Order."
Version 0.9.0 of Omeka has been released.
Here's an excerpt from the About page that describes Omeka:
Omeka is a web platform for publishing collections and exhibitions online. Designed for cultural institutions, enthusiasts, and educators, Omeka is easy to install and modify and facilitates community-building around collections and exhibits. It is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content rather than programming.
Omeka will come loaded with the following features:
- Dublin Core metadata structure and standards-based design that is fully accessible and interoperable
- Professional-looking exhibit sites that showcase collections without hiring outside designers
- Theme-switching for changing the look and feel of an exhibit in a few clicks
- Plug-ins for geolocation, bi-lingual sites, and a host of other possibilities
- Web 2.0 Technologies, including:
- Tagging: Allow users to add keywords to items in a collection or exhibit
- Blogging: Keep in touch with users through timely postings about collections and events
- Syndicating: Update your users about your content with RSS feeds
Read more about it at "Introducing Omeka" and "New Tool for Online Collections."
Adobe has incorporated DRM access controls in the latest versions of Flash Player and Flash Media Server.
Read more about it at "Adobe Pushes DRM for Flash."
The Digital Preservation Coalition has published JPEG 2000—A Practical Digital Preservation Standard?.
Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":
With JPEG 2000, an application can access and decode only as much of the compressed image as needed to perform the task at hand. This means a viewer, for example, can open a gigapixel image almost instantly by retrieving and decompressing a low resolution, display-sized image from the JPEG 2000 codestream.
JPEG 2000 also improves a user’s ability to interact with an image. The zoom, pan, and rotate operations that users increasingly expect in networked image systems are performed dynamically by accessing and decompressing just those parts of the JPEG 2000 codestream containing the compressed image data for the region of interest. The JPEG 2000 data can be either converted to JPEG and delivered for viewing with a standard image browser or delivered to a native JPEG 2000 viewer using the JPIP client-server protocol, developed to support the JPEG 2000 feature set.
Using a single JPEG 2000 master to satisfy user requests for dynamic viewing reduces storage costs and management overhead by eliminating the need to maintain multiple derivatives in a repository.
Beyond image access and distribution, JPEG 2000 is being used increasingly as a repository and archival image format. What is remarkable is that many repositories are storing “visually lossless” JPEG 2000 files: the compression is lossy and irreversible but the artefacts are not noticeable and do not interfere with the performance of applications. Compared to uncompressed TIFF, visually lossless JPEG 2000 compression can reduce the amount of storage by an order of magnitude or more.
TRLN (Triangle Research Libraries Network) has announced that its member libraries (Duke University, North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University, and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) have joined the Open Content Alliance.
Here's an excerpt from "TRLN Member Libraries Join Open Content Alliance":
In the first year, UNC Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University will each convert 2,700 public domain books into high-resolution, downloadable, reusable digital files that can be indexed locally and by any web search engine. UNC Chapel Hill and NCSU will start by each hosting one state-of-the-art Scribe machine provided by the Internet Archive to scan the materials at a cost of just 10 cents per page. Each university library will focus on historic collection strengths, such as plant and animal sciences, engineering and physical science at NCSU and social sciences and humanities at UNC-Chapel Hill. Duke University will also contribute select content for digitization during the first year of the collaborative project.
DRM nemesis DVD Jon (Jon Lech Johansen) has released doubleTwist, a user-friendly application that strips DRM from digital music files.
Read more about it at "doubleTwist Makes DRM-Stripping, Sharing Easy as Pie," "'DVD Jon' Frees Your Media with DoubleTwist," and "Free Your Media With DoubleTwist, a DRM Stripping App Anyone Can Use."
The Sunday Telegraph reports that publishing giant Reed Elsevier may cut as many as 1,000 positions from its 37,000 person workforce.
Read more about it at "Reed Elsevier Cost Cuts to Claim 1,000 Jobs."
The RAD Lab (Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory) is working to "enable one person to invent and run the next revolutionary IT service, operationally expressing a new business idea as a multi-million-user service over the course of a long weekend."
Read more about it at "RAD Lab Technical Vision" and "Trying to Figure Out How to Put a Google in Every Data Center."
CETIS (Centre for Educational Technology & Interoperability Standards) has released presentations from its Metadata and Digital Repository Special Interest Group's February 12, 2008 meeting, which featured talks about selected projects in the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme. SlideShare presentations and MP3 files are available.
The projects covered were Becta Vocabulary Management Services, DC-Education application profile, EnTag (Enhanced Tagging for Discovery), FeedForward, OAI-ORE, and SWORD.