DigitalKoans

Long-term Cornell employee Dean Krafft has been named as the Cornell University Library's Chief Technology Strategist.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Dean Krafft brings a wealth of experience to this position, as well as a profound respect for the role research libraries play in the academy," said Anne R. Kenney, Cornell’s Carl A. Kroch University Librarian. "This is a brand new position for the library world, and I can't think of a better person to help us understand its full potential. . . ."

As the chief technology strategist, Krafft will serve on the Library’s senior management team, focusing his efforts on the development of a long-term vision for CUL’s technology future and assessing the IT trends and innovations that impact the Library. He will also serve as an ambassador for collaborative technology initiatives across the University and in national and international efforts.

"The very rapid changes in the information landscape and the needs and workflows of Cornell's faculty, staff and students make these challenging times," Krafft said. "I am very much looking forward to working with the Library staff and the Cornell community to help ensure that the Library remains at the intellectual heart of university life and scholarship."

Before his appointment, Krafft served as the senior research associate and director of information technology and in several positions in the Computer Science Department since 1981. He also received his Master’s and PhD degrees in computer science from Cornell.

The Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) has updated a number of digitization advice documents.

The Emory University Libraries have published Strategies for Sustaining Digital Libraries. A PDF version of the book is freely available, and a print version is available from Amazon for $15. The book is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

Here's an excerpt from the book's home page:

The articles of this monograph provide resources for digital library stakeholders who seek to better understand how to effectively evolve such efforts from short-term projects to long-term sustainable programs. The monograph includes contributions from leaders in major digital libraries that have made such transitions or which are systematically considering the question of programmatic sustainability, including representatives from the National Digital Infrastructure and Information Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and the National Science Digital Library (NSDL).

Presentations and project briefings from the CNI Spring 2008 Task Force Meeting are available. Podcast interviews with a few attendees are also available.

Here's a selection of project briefings:

• Assessing Research Cyberinfrastructure Needs at the University of Minnesota
  Ann Hill Duin, University of Minnesota
  Eric F. Celeste, University of Minnesota
  John T. Butler, University of Minnesota
  Kemal Badur, University of Minnesota
• NIH Public Access Policy: Campus Implementation Strategies
  Joan Giesecke, University of Nebraska at Lincoln
  Wendy Pradt Lougee, University of Minnesota
  Karla Hahn, Association of Research Libraries
• An OAI-ORE Aggregation for the National Virtual Observatory
  David Reynolds, Johns Hopkins University
• Starting an Institutional Repository Program in Two Months or Less:
  The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
  Abby Clobridge, Bucknell University
• Streaming from the Institutional Repository
  Geneva Henry, Rice University
  Diane C. Butler, Rice University

The Library of Congress and the California Digital Library have established a new format called BagIt for transferring large data collections between cultural institutions.

Read more about it at "The BagIt File Package Format (V0.94)" and "Library Develops Format for Transferring Digital Content."

The Digital Library Federation has released DLF ILS Discovery Interface Task Group (ILS-DI) Technical Recommendation: An API for Effective Interoperation between Integrated Library Systems and External Discovery Applications.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This document recommends standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System (ILS) with new applications supporting user discovery. Such standard interfaces will allow libraries to deploy new discovery services to meet ever-growing user expectations in the Web 2.0 era, take full advantage of advanced ILS data management and services, and encourage a strong, innovative community and marketplace in next-generation library management and discovery applications.

A group of eight professionals from major North American research libraries prepared the recommendation during late 2007 and early 2008. Members of the group surveyed the library community about their needs, made presentations, and held open discussions face to face and online with librarians, developers, and vendors. The group made multiple recommendation drafts and other background information publicly available on the task group's Wiki, and invited comments and suggestions from interested parties.

In March, the DLF convened a meeting that brought together Task Group members and representatives of library system vendors and developers, and produced the "Berkeley Accord", an agreement about the most essential and feasible interfaces to include in an initial set of interfaces. This set of interfaces, called the "Basic Discovery Interfaces", is described in detail in the new ILS-DI recommendation. The recommendation also describes and recommends a variety of other functions to support higher levels of interoperability.

The Digital Library Federation has released presentations from its Spring Forum 2008.

Here's a selection of the presentations:

• Building a Large-Scale Preservation Repository Based on aDORe
• The Challenges of Applying Traditional Cataloging Standards to Non-Traditional, User-Created Descriptive Metadata in Digital Library Projects
• DLF Environmental Scan: Issues and Solutions for Archives in a Digital World
• DSpace Foundation: Charting a Course to Support the DSpace Community and Advance the DSpace Open Source Software Platform
• Introducing BibApp 1.0
• The NEW IUScholarWorks at Indiana University: Repositories, Journals, and Scholarly Publishing
• An OAI-ORE Aggregation for the National Virtual Observatory

A digitized page from the mid-13th century by William de Brailes has become the 100,000th item in the Iowa Digital Library.

Read more about it at "Iowa Digital Library Hits 100,000 Items."