Draft Guidelines for Digital Newspaper Preservation Readiness

The Educopia Institute has released Draft Guidelines for Digital Newspaper Preservation Readiness.

Here's an excerpt:

These Guidelines are a first-draft version of our work to distil preservation-readiness steps into an incremental process that an institution of almost any size or type should be able to use to begin maturing its digital newspaper content management practices.

This first draft is being issued for public review and comment here from July 22, 2013-September 20, 2013.

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"Crafting Linked Open Data for Cultural Heritage: Mapping and Curation Tools for the Linked Jazz Project"

M. Cristina Pattuelli, Matt Miller, Leanora Lange, Sean Fitzell, and Carolyn Li-Madeo have published "Crafting Linked Open Data for Cultural Heritage: Mapping and Curation Tools for the Linked Jazz Project" in the latest issue of Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper describes tools and methods developed as part of Linked Jazz, a project that uses Linked Open Data (LOD) to reveal personal and professional relationships among jazz musicians based on interviews from jazz archives. The overarching aim of Linked Jazz is to explore the possibilities offered by LOD to enhance the visibility of cultural heritage materials and enrich the semantics that describe them. While the full Linked Jazz dataset is still under development, this paper presents two applications that have laid the foundation for the creation of this dataset: the Mapping and Curator Tool, and the Transcript Analyzer. These applications have served primarily for data preparation, analysis, and curation and are representative of the types of tools and methods needed to craft linked data from digital content available on the web. This paper discusses these two domain-agnostic tools developed to create LOD from digital textual documents and offers insight into the process behind the creation of LOD in general.

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"Batch Metadata Assignment to Archival Photograph Collections Using Facial Recognition Software"

Kyle Banerjee and Maija Anderson have published "Batch Metadata Assignment to Archival Photograph Collections Using Facial Recognition Software" in the latest issue of Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Useful metadata is essential to giving individual meaning and value within the context of a greater image collection as well as making them more discoverable. However, often little information is available about the photos themselves, so adding consistent metadata to large collections of digital and digitized photographs is a time consuming process requiring highly experienced staff.

By using facial recognition software, staff can identify individuals more quickly and reliably. Knowledge of individuals in photos helps staff determine when and where photos are taken and also improves understanding of the subject matter.

This article demonstrates simple techniques for using facial recognition software and command line tools to assign, modify, and read metadata for large archival photograph collections.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

"Foundations of Data Curation: The Pedagogy and Practice of "Purposeful Work" with Research Data"

Carole L. Palmer, Nicholas M. Weber, Trevor Muñoz, and Allen H. Renear have punlished "Foundations of Data Curation: The Pedagogy and Practice of "Purposeful Work" with Research Data" in the latest issue of Archive Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Increased interest in large-scale, publicly accessible data collections has made data curation critical to the management, preservation, and improvement of research data in the social and natural sciences, as well as the humanities. This paper explicates an approach to data curation education that integrates traditional notions of curation with principles and expertise from library, archival, and computer science. We begin by tracing the emergence of data curation as both a concept and a field of practice related to, but distinct from, both digital curation and data stewardship. This historical account, while far from definitive, considers perspectives from both the sciences and the humanities. Alongside traditional LIS and archival science practices, unique aspects of curation have informed our concept of "purposeful work" with data and, in turn, our pedagogical approach to data curation for the sciences and the humanities.

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Walk This Way: Detailed Steps for Transferring Born-Digital Content from Media You Can Read In-house

OCLC Research has released Walk This Way: Detailed Steps for Transferring Born-Digital Content from Media You Can Read In-house.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The third report, Walk This Way: Detailed Steps for Transferring Born-Digital Content from Media You Can Read In-house, collects the assembled wisdom of experienced practitioners to help those with less experience make appropriate choices in gaining control of born-digital content. It contains discrete steps with objectives, links to available tools and software, references and resources for further research and paths to engagement with the digital archives community.

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"The .txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Archives, and the Future Literary"

Matthew Kirschenbaum has published "The .txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Archives, and the Future Literary" in a preview issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

Here then are some specifics I have considered as to how digital humanities might usefully collaborate with those archivists even now working on born-digital collections:

  • Digital archivists need digital humanities researchers and subject experts to use born-digital collections. Nothing is more important. If humanities researchers don't demand access to born-digital materials then it will be harder to get those materials processed in a timely fashion, and we know that with the born-digital every day counts.
  • Digital humanists need the long-term perspective on data that archivists have. Today's digital humanities projects are, after all, the repository objects of tomorrow's born-digital archives. Funders are increasingly (and rightfully) insistent about the need to have a robust data management and sustainability plan built into project proposals from the outset. Therefore, there is much opportunity for collaboration and team-building around not only archiving and preservation, but the complete data curation cycle. This extends to the need to jointly plan around storage and institutional infrastructure.
  • Digital archivists and digital humanists need common and interoperable digital tools. Open source community-driven development at the intersection of the needs of digital archivists, humanities scholars, and even collections' donors should become an urgent priority.

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Archives and Copyright: Risk and Reform

CREATe has released Archives and Copyright: Risk and Reform.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper considers the place of the archive sector within the copyright regime, and how copyright impacts upon the preservation, access to, and use of archival holdings. It will begin with a critical assessment of the current parameters of the UK copyright regime as it applies to the work of archivists, including recommendations for reform that have followed in the wake of the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property (2006-2010), the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth (2010-2011), the recent Consultation on Copyright (2011-12), as well as the government's response thereto: Modernising Copyright (2012). It considers the various problems the copyright regime presents for archives undertaking mass digitisation projects as well as recent European and UK initiatives in this domain.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap |

Omeka 2.0 Released

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has released Omeka 2.0.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The most important improvement is a completely revamped admin interface, which includes many features to improve workflow and make it easier to build your sites. The search functionality is also dramatically improved, and covers much more of the content in the sites. . . .

Omeka users will notice improvements right away with an upgrade to 2.0 or the launch a new installation. For example, site administrators have much better tools to build custom site navigation without having to hack around in the code (Check for "Navigation" under the Appearance settings.) Also, you'll notice major improvements in file handling. Now you can reorder item files, and the system produces derivatives (thumbnails, etc.) from a much wider array of file types, not just image files.

| Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 2 | Digital Scholarship |

Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories

The MediaCommons Press has released a draft for comment of Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement :

Co-authored by a team of ten archivists and curators from the Beinecke, the Bodleian, the British Library, the Harry Ransom Center, Emory's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, and the Rubenstein Library at Duke, the report is the outcome of a series of conversations about how born-digital materials are acquired and transferred to archival repositories.

The main body of the report surveys the primary issues and concerns related to born-digital acquisitions and is intended for a broad audience with varying levels of interest and expertise, including donors, dealers, and archival repositories, as well as scholars, students, and researchers. Appendices provide information about how to prepare for the unexpected and possible staffing costs, as well as ready-to-use checklists that incorporate recommendations from throughout the report.

| Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications | Digital Scholarship |

Scholars’ Lab Releases BagIt and SolrSearch Plugins for Omeka

The Scholars' Lab has Released BagIt and SolrSearch Plugins for Omeka.

Here's an excerpt from the BagIt announcement:

BagIt is a specification by the Library of Congress for creating containers of files with metadata. . . .

The first part of this release is the BagIt PHP library. This is a generic PHP library for working with BagIt files. . . .

The second part is the BagIt Omeka plugin. This is built upon the BagIt library and provides an easy-to-use user interface for it.

Here's an excerpt from the SolrSearch announcement:

SolrSearch allows you to replace Omeka's default search with Solr. Solr is a standard, popular, open source, fast text search engine server. It handles hit highlighting, date math, numeric aggregation functions (mean, max, etc.), indexing for 33 languages, replication, and many, many more things.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog | Digital Scholarship |

Managing Born-Digital Special Collections and Archival Materials, SPEC Kit 329

ARL has released Managing Born-Digital Special Collections and Archival Materials, SPEC Kit 329.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This SPEC Kit explores the tools, workflow, and policies special collections and archives staff use to process, manage, and provide access to born-digital materials they collect. It also looks at which staff process and manage born-digital materials and how they acquire the skills they need for these activities, and how libraries have responded to the challenges that managing born-digital materials present.

| Digital Curation Resource Guide | Digital Scholarship |

"Copyright Risk Management: Principles and Strategies for Large-Scale Digitization Projects in Special Collections"

The Association of Research Libraries has released a pre-publication version of "Copyright Risk Management: Principles and Strategies for Large-Scale Digitization Projects in Special Collections."

Here's an excerpt:

Copyright law often seems unmanageably complex, leading librarians to focus too much on a single aspect of a project and, when that aspect proves inapplicable, to give up the proposed digitization. But the multifaceted nature of the law, especially its variety of limitations and exceptions, should really be seen as an invitation to a holistic evaluation that focuses on risk and considers how each facet can contribute to a risk reduction strategy. If this is done consistently as digitization projects are undertaken, the risk of infringement litigation will usually be seen to be much more manageable, and a great deal of unnecessary self-censorship will be avoided.

See also the pre-publication version of "Digitization of Special Collections and Archives: Legal and Contractual Issues."

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grants

The National Endowment for the Humanities is accepting grant proposals for its Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program.

Here's an excerpt from the program guidelines:

Applications may be submitted for projects that address one or more of the following activities:

  • arranging and describing archival and manuscript collections;
  • cataloging collections of printed works, photographs, recorded sound, moving images, art, and material culture;
  • providing conservation treatment (including deacidification) for collections, leading to enhanced access;
  • digitizing collections;
  • preserving and improving access to born-digital sources;
  • developing databases, virtual collections, or other electronic resources to codify information on a subject or to provide integrated access to selected humanities materials; . . . .
  • developing tools for spatial analysis and representation of humanities data, such as atlases and geographic information systems (GIS); and
  • designing digital tools to facilitate use of humanities resources.

| Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship

The AIMS Project has released AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship.

Here's an excerpt:

The AIMS project evolved around a common need among the project partners — and most libraries and archives — to identify a methodology or continuous framework for stewarding born-digital archival materials. These materials have been slowly accumulating in archival backlogs for years but are rapidly growing as more contemporary collections are accessioned. . . .

Into this climate, the AIMS partners proposed an inter-institutional framework for stewarding born-digital content. The AIMS partners realized that they could not solve all problems associated with born-digital materials but decided to focus their attention on professional practice defined by archival principles and by the current state of collections at the partner institutions.

In developing the AIMS Framework, the project would apply a practitioner-based research approach by developing a model based on real case studies of collections at each institution. Applying our theories would confirm or challenge the initial framework which could then be used as a model around which to build individual workflows and processes within each partner's organization.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, Version 80 | Digital Scholarship |

Scan and Deliver Webinar Recordings and Documents Released

OCLC Research has released digital recordings and documents from its Scan and Deliver: Creative User-initiated Digitization in Special Collections and Archives Webinar.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Changes in technology and the increased visibility of special collections have resulted in a deluge of requests for digital copies of special collections materials. A steady stream of digitization requests for one item here, two pages there can be labor-intensive, and policies for user requests vary widely across institutions.

To address these issues, OCLC Research and the OCLC Research Library Partnership's Working Group on Streamlining Photography and Scanning sought methods for reducing cumbersome digitization-on-demand workflows and policy obstacles. The result—a flexible, tiered approach to delivering digitized materials that acknowledges differences in user needs, collections, institutions, and resources—is detailed in the report, Scan and Deliver: Managing User-initiated Digitization in Special Collections and Archives.

In this webinar, members of the working group shared their creative experiments aimed at scanning and delivering user-requested digital copies of special collections materials. San Diego State University offers self-serve scanning in their reading room. At the University of Chicago, special collections and interlibrary loan (ILL) colleagues are working together to use existing infrastructure and expertise. The Getty Research Institute developed a tiered approach to capture and post digital files created by fulfilling user requests. The presenters discussed workflows-in-progress, lessons learned, and how they learned to stop worrying and love digital copy requests.

| New: Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives, and Museums, Part 1: Site Reviews

OCLC Research has released Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives, and Museums, Part 1: Site Reviews.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Traditionally, staff at libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) create metadata for the content they manage. However, social metadata—content contributed by users—is evolving as a way to both augment and recontextualize the content and metadata created by LAMs. Many cultural heritage institutions are interested in gaining a better understanding of social metadata and also learning how to best utilize their users' expertise to enrich their descriptive metadata and improve their users' experiences.

In order to facilitate this, a 21-member RLG Partners Social Metadata Working Group reviewed 76 sites relevant to libraries, archives, and museums that supported such social media features as tagging, comments, reviews, images, videos, ratings, recommendations, lists, links to related articles, etc. In addition, working group members surveyed site managers, analyzed the survey results and discussed the factors that contribute to successful—and not so successful—use of social metadata. They also considered issues related to assessment, content, policies, technology, and vocabularies.

This report includes an environmental scan of 76 social metadata sites and a detailed review of 24 representative sites.

| New: Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

Yale Adopts Open Access Policy for Digitized Images

Yale University has adopted an open access policy for digitized images from its museums, archives, and libraries. Yale has also launched the Discover Yale Digital Commons, which has over 250,000 images.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The goal of the new policy is to make high quality digital images of Yale's vast cultural heritage collections in the public domain openly and freely available.

As works in these collections become digitized, the museums and libraries will make those images that are in the public domain freely accessible. In a departure from established convention, no license will be required for the transmission of the images and no limitations will be imposed on their use. The result is that scholars, artists, students, and citizens the world over will be able to use these collections for study, publication, teaching and inspiration.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

Library of Congress and Sony Music Entertainment Launch National Jukebox

The Library of Congress and Sony Music Entertainment have launched the National Jukebox.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Library of Congress and Sony Music Entertainment today unveiled a new website of over 10,000 rare historic sound recordings available to the public for the first time digitally. The site is called the "National Jukebox" (www.loc.gov/jukebox/).

Developed by the Library of Congress, with assets provided by Sony Music Entertainment, the National Jukebox offers free online access to a vast selection of music and spoken-word recordings produced in the U.S. between the years 1901 and 1925. . . .

The agreement for the National Jukebox grants the Library of Congress usage rights to Sony Music’s entire pre-1925 catalog—comprising thousands of recordings produced by Columbia Records, OKeh, and Victor Talking Machine Co. among others – and represents the largest collection of such historical recordings ever made publicly available for study and appreciation online. . . .

Visitors to the National Jukebox will be able to listen to available recordings on a streaming-only basis, as well as view thousands of label images, record-catalog illustrations, and artist and performer bios. In addition, users can further explore the catalog by accessing special interactive features, listening to playlists curated by Library staff, and creating and sharing their own playlists. . . .

The website will showcase special interactive features as well, including a digital facsimile of the 1919 edition of the famous opera guide "Victrola Book of the Opera," which describes more than 110 operas, including illustrations, plot synopses and lists of recordings offered in that year. Features include the book’s original text, a comparison of the different interpretations of the most popular arias of the period, and streamed recordings of nearly every opera referenced in the book.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

Text-Image Linking Environment (TILE) 0.9 Released

the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and Indiana University have released the Text-Image Linking Environment (TILE) 0.9.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

We’re excited to announce the redesigned website for and public release of The Text-Image Linking Environment (TILE), a web-based tool for creating and editing image-based electronic editions and digital archives of humanities texts. This initial release of TILE 0.9 features tools for importing and exporting transcript lines and images of text, an image markup tool, a semi-automated line recognizer that tags regions of text within an image, and plugin architecture to extend the functionality of the software.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |

Library of Congress Funds Omeka + Neatline Project

The Library of Congress has awarded $665,248 in funding to the Omeka + Neatline project.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia Library and the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University are pleased to announce a collaborative "Omeka + Neatline" initiative, supported by $665,248 in funding from the Library of Congress.

The Omeka + Neatline project's goal is to enable scholars, students, and library and museum professionals to create geospatial and temporal visualizations of archival collections using a Neatline toolset within CHNM's popular, open source Omeka exhibition platform. Neatline, a "contribution to interpretive humanities scholarship in the visual vernacular," is a project of the UVa Library Scholars' Lab, originally bolstered by a Start-Up Grant from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Omeka is an award-winning web-publishing platform for the display of cultural heritage and scholarly collections and exhibits, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

This two-year initiative will allow CHNM and the Scholars' Lab to expand and regularize a partnership that developed informally between the two centers over the course of the past year. Collaboration has already resulted in improvements to the core functionality of Omeka by CHNM and has led the Scholars' Lab to produce a number of prototype plugins making Omeka a more attractive and viable option for scholarly partnerships with larger libraries and cultural heritage institutions. These include: improved data import (including EAD, a common archival standard); Solr-powered searching and browsing; and Fedora-based repository services. Further development will improve existing plugins, add preservation workflows, and refine the Neatline toolset for integration and sophisticated editing and scholarly annotation of historical maps, GIS layers, and timelines. Enhancements to Omeka's core APIs, improved documentation, regular "point" releases, and a new Exhibit Builder will strengthen Omeka's already large and robust user and developer communities.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |

Open Access Principles for Australian Collecting Institutions, Version 1

Opening Australia's Archives has released Open Access Principles for Australian Collecting Institutions, Version 1.

Here's an excerpt:

The internet, digital recording devices and the ready availability of content production software have together drastically changed the creative landscape. As a result, linear models of knowledge and cultural production are rapidly being supplanted by more distributed, collaborative, user-generated and open networking models. Yet Australians wishing to participate in this new digital culture have great difficulty gaining access to quality content from their own culture and history that can be legally and safely reused. This limits our ability to access the full benefits that could be provided by new technologies to fields such as education, the creative industries and business innovation.

The Opening Australia's Archives project aims to address this problem by working with Australia's collecting institutions to increase the public's ability to access and reuse our national collections. Run by the Innovation Law program of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology the project encourages the adoption of open access approaches through coordinated policy, implementation and advocacy initiatives across the collecting sector.

Opening Australia's Archives: Open Access Principles for Australian Collecting Institutions were prepared in consultation with representatives of the Australian collecting sector commencing with a series of meetings held nationally during 2009. For more information on the meetings, principles and project see the Opening Australia's Archives website.

| Digital Scholarship |

ARL and Ithaka S+R Get $464,286 IMLS Grant for Digitized Special Collections Research

ARL and Ithaka S+R have received a $464,286 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grants Program “to study how libraries, archives, and museums are sustaining digitized special collections.”

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Our examination of digital resources through our case studies work showed us that project leaders need practical tools to help them ensure their project's long-term sustainability," says Laura Brown, Managing Director, Ithaka S+R. "This collaborative study will respond to that need by providing actionable recommendations, best practices, and planning tools to help project leaders in higher education, public libraries, museums, historical societies, and other organizations plan for sustaining their own special collections digitization projects."

Project activities under this cooperative agreement will include a survey of digitized special collections and focused interviews with leaders and project staff in selected cultural heritage organizations who manage those collections. The study’s final report of lessons learned, recommendations, and case studies will be freely shared through the partners’ websites, through a webcast, and conference presentations.