OCLC Research has released Over, Under, Around, and Through: Getting Around Barriers to EAD Implementation.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This report frames obstacles that archivists have experienced adopting Encoded Archival Description (EAD). It also suggests pathways to help archivists get out of the ruts, around the roadblocks and on the road to success.

Written by Michele Combs from Syracuse University, Mark A. Matienzo from Yale University, Lisa Spiro from Rice University and Merrilee Proffitt from OCLC Research, the objective of the report is to communicate EAD's value as a key element of successful archival information systems and help archivists overcome potential barriers to its implementation. This work is an output of the Barriers to Using EAD project undertaken by OCLC Research and the RLG Partnership.

OCLC has released "Capture and Release": Digital Cameras in the Reading Room.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Digital cameras and other mobile capture devices are revolutionizing special collections reading rooms and the research process, but at the same time are being wrongly framed as a threat or a challenge for some repositories to remain relevant. While some librarians and archivists have resisted digital cameras, others have embraced them—and rightfully so. Researchers, repositories, and collection materials can reap undeniable benefits from using digital cameras. In addition, digital cameras can help librarians and archivists achieve their fundamental goals of improving conditions for their collections materials, facilitating greater research economically and efficiently, and resolving competing demands for resources and maximizing the productivity of their staff.

To synthesize a core of suggested practices for using digital cameras in reading rooms, members of the RLG Partnership Working Group on Streamlining Photography and Scanning surveyed policies, practices and experiences providing surrogates of original research materials, including the current policies of thirty-five repositories comprised of academic libraries, independent research libraries, historical societies, government archives, and public libraries. This report includes the most commonly shared elements for using digital cameras in reading rooms, arranged in categories for administration and handling of collection materials.

The U.S. National Archives have become a member of the Flickr Commons. To join the Commons, members must "claim 'no known copyright restrictions' on the content they share." Here's the National Archives' photostream.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

To mark the opening of its photostream in the Commons today, the National Archives is posting a new photo set containing more than two hundred photographs of the American West by renowned American photographer Ansel Adams. The photographs, taken between 1941 and 1942 as part of a Department of the Interior mural project, feature the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Glacier and Zion national parks, in addition to Death Valley, Saguero, and Canyon de Chelly national monuments.

The Ansel Adams photographs join a larger selection of more than 3,000 National Archives images that are part of the National Archives' Flickr photostream. The photostream contains a variety of images from some of the National Archives most popular collections, including images of the Civil War by Mathew Brady and associates; images from the Environmental Protection Agency's 1970s photo-documentary project DOCUMERICA; images from the Records of the Women's Bureau depicting women in the war labor effort during World War II; and a grouping of favorite photos and documents from the National Archives, featuring among others the 1970 photograph of President Nixon shaking hands with Elvis Presley.

Rose Holley has self-archived Crowdsourcing and Social Engagement: Potential, Power and Freedom for Libraries and Users in E-LIS.

Here's an excerpt:

The definition and purpose of crowdsourcing and social engagement with users is discussed with particular reference to the Australian Newspapers service http://newspapers.nla.gov.au, FamilySearch http://familysearchindexing.org, Wikipedia http://wikipedia.org, the Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net, Galaxy Zoo http://www.galaxyzoo.org and The Guardian MP's Expenses Scandal http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk. These services have harnessed thousands of digital volunteers who transcribe, create, enhance and correct text, images and archives. The successful strategies which motivated users to help, engage, and develop the outcomes will be examined. How can the lessons learnt be applied more broadly across the library and archive sector and what is the future potential? What are useful tips for crowdsourcing? Users no longer expect to be passive receivers of information and want to engage with data, each other and nonprofit making organisations to help achieve what may seem to be impossible goals and targets. If libraries want to stay relevant and valued, offer high quality data and continue to have a significant social impact they must develop active engagement strategies and harness crowdsourcing techniques and partnerships to enhance their services. Can libraries respond to the shift in power and control of information and dare to give users something greater than power—freedom?

Lisa A. Gregory's Master's theses, "The Practice and Perception of Web Archiving in Academic Libraries and Archives," is available from the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Here's an excerpt:

In order to dig deeper into possible reasons behind archivists’ and librarians’ reluctance to archive Web sites, the study described here asks professionals to reveal their Web archiving experiences as well as the information sources they consult regarding archiving Web sites. Specifically, the following two research questions are addressed: Are librarians and archivists at institutions of higher education currently engaged in or considering archiving Web sites? What sources do these professionals consult for information about Web archiving?

The Folger Shakespeare Library has announced the launch of the Shakespeare Quartos Archive.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

For the first time, digitized copies of rare early editions of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet have been compiled into a single online collection. The Shakespeare Quartos Archive (www.quartos.org) makes digitized versions of the play drawn from libraries in the US and the UK freely available to researchers worldwide.

"The Shakespeare Quartos Archive presents new and innovative opportunities that were simply not possible before for scholars, teachers, and students to explore Hamlet," said Folger Director Gail Kern Paster.

"We are confident that the Shakespeare Quartos Archive will become an indispensable online resource for the worldwide community of scholars, teachers, and students with an interest in Shakespeare, enabling them to access and compare these important texts," said Richard Ovenden, Associate Director of the Bodleian Library.

In the absence of surviving manuscripts, the quartos—Shakespeare's earliest printed editions—offer the closest known evidence to what Shakespeare might actually have written, and what appeared on the early modern English stage. Print copies of the Hamlet quartos are of immense interest to scholars, editors, educators, and theater directors, yet due to their rarity and fragility, are not readily available for study. The Shakespeare Quartos Archive offers freely-accessible, high-resolution digital editions of quarto editions of Hamlet, enabling users to compare texts side-by-side, search full-text transcriptions of each quarto, and annotate and tag passages for future reference. Users can also create personal collections of page images and annotations and share these collections with other researchers. . . .

The Shakespeare Quartos Archive contains texts drawn from holdings at the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, the Huntington Library, and the National Library of Scotland, in addition to the Folger. These six institutions worked in conjunction with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland and the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham University to digitize and transcribe 32 copies of Hamlet. The British Library's companion project, "Shakespeare in Quarto," is the first online collection to provide access to at least one copy of every pre-1642 Shakespeare play that was printed in a quarto edition and can be accessed at www.bl.uk.

The Shakespeare Quartos Archive was one of the first projects awarded funding through JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants in 2008. The grants support the innovative use of digitization technology to advance the humanities and are administered through joint collaboration between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the United States and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the United Kingdom.

JISC has released DiSCmap: Digitisation in Special Collections: Mapping, Assessment, Prioritisation. Final Report..

Here's an excerpt:

In its widest sense the project contributes towards preliminary evidence on user-driven priorities which could help in the process of allocation of funding for digitisation projects. It also can help to define the purpose, value and impact of digitisation not on institutional basis but on UK HE scale. By development of a framework of user-driven prioritisation criteria, DiSCmap contributes towards the longer-term goal of developing a quantifiable and adjustable system of metrics in the digitisation life cycle especially addressing the selection phase.

The amount of collections nominated to the long list [of 945 collections nominated for digitisation] reached beyond the expectations of the project team. This list itself is a valuable outcome which should be enriched further in order to provide a broad and trustworthy basis for the future digitisation decisions. DiSCmap surveyed over 1000 intermediaries and end users; this report presents in a very condensed form only a small proportion of the total evidence on user demand gathered by the project team. Yet in analysing and representing fully the range of end user priorities, DiSCmap has made a considerable advance in identifying the actual digitisation needs of end users. It has done so with the aim of removing the element of guesswork and assumption hitherto inherent in our understanding of user requirements in this area. The combination of intermediary' and end user' studies provides a richness of view points which highlight the many important different aspects related to the user dimension in digitisation.

Version 1.1 of Omeka has been released. Omeka is a "free and open source collections based web-based publishing platform for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, educators, and cultural enthusiasts."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In 1.1., users will have more control over their installation through the admin interface, such as:

• Toggling more easily between the public site and the item and collection pages by clicking on a new "View on Public Site" link;
• Browsing through more than 10 collections;
• Managing and upgrading plugins;
• Displaying only item fields containing metadata on the public site with a new setting in the theme panel (without needing to edit on the server).

Read more about it at "Release Notes for 1.1."

The Archivists Toolkit version 2.0 has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

New features added to AT 2.0 include:

1. Revised Digital Object module, so that Digital Object records can be created and managed independent of Resource records.
2. Tab-delimited Digital Object import
3. Batch export of Digital Objects
4. Assessment module
5. New reports for Digital Object and Assessment modules
6. Revision of all other reports (Names, Subjects, Accessions, Resources)
7. Improved stylesheets for EAD to PDF and EAD to HTML outputs
8. Bug fixes as noted in release notes

Read more about it at "New/Updated Features for AT Release 2.0."

The Harvard College Library and the National Library of China will collaborate to digitize and make freely available the 51,500-volume Chinese rare book collection of Harvard-Yenching Library.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Among the largest cooperative projects of its kind ever undertaken between China and US libraries, the project will digitize Harvard-Yenching Library's entire 51,500-volume Chinese rare book collection. One of the libraries which make up the Harvard College Library system, Harvard-Yenching is the largest university library for East Asian research in the Western world. When completed, the project will have a transformative affect on scholarship involving rare Chinese texts, Harvard-Yenching Librarian James Cheng predicted. . . .

The six-year project will be done in two three-year phases. The first phase, beginning in January 2010, will digitize books from the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties, which date from about 960 AD to 1644. The second phase, starting in January 2013, will digitize books from the Qing Dynasty, which date from 1644 until 1795. The collection includes materials which cover an extensive range of subjects, including history, philosophy, drama, belles letters and classics.

All of the rare books will have to be examined carefully to identify those that are fragile, damaged, or are sewn in a way that hides text along the binding margin. To determine which volumes may need conservation treatment, project manager Sharon Li-Shiuan Yang, head of access services at Harvard-Yenching Library, and her team will receive training in basic condition assessment from the Weissman Preservation Center, which treats Harvard's rare library materials. Items needing repair will be sent to the Weissman for treatment by conservators before being digitized.

The digitization work will be performed by HCL Imaging Services group in its state-of-the-art lab in Widener Library, where staff members have been working to design new equipment and workflows in preparation for the huge project, said Imaging Services head Bill Comstock.

The scale of the project will present HCL and the National Library of China with many organizational and technical challenges," Comstock said. "We look forward to partnering with NLC staff, led by Dr. Zhi-geng Wang, the Director of the NLC's Department for Digital Resources and Services, to build innovative new tools and procedures that will make our work on this and other projects more robust and efficient."