Europeana Photography Launched

Europeana has launched Europeana Photography.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Today, we're proud to launch Europeana Photography, our latest thematic collection. Photography lovers and researchers can explore more than 2 million historical photographs, contributed by over 50 European institutions in 34 countries.

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The ABC Method: A Risk Management Approach to the Preservation of Cultural Heritage

The Canadian Conservation Institute has released The ABC Method: A Risk Management Approach to the Preservation of Cultural Heritage.

Here's an excerpt:

This manual offers a comprehensive understanding of risk management applied to the preservation of heritage assets, whether collections, buildings or sites. It provides a step-by-step procedure and a variety of tools to guide the heritage professional in applying the ABC method to their own context. The method can be applied to a range of situations, from analysis of a single risk to a comprehensive risk assessment of the entire heritage asset.

See also:A Guide to Risk Management of Cultural Heritage.

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"Leveraging Exceptions and Limitations for Digital Curation and Online Collections: The U.S. Case"

Patricia Aufderheide has published "Leveraging Exceptions and Limitations for Digital Curation and Online Collections: The U.S. Case" in Libellarium: Journal for the Research of Writing, Books, and Cultural Heritage Institutions.

Here's an excerpt:

Librarians wanting to use digital affordances for their patron’s and public benefit have increasingly found themselves frustrated by copyright law designed for a pre-digital era. In the U.S., this frustration has driven the nation’s most prestigious library group, the Association of Research Libraries, to explore the utility of the major exception to copyright monopoly rights, fair use, in order to accomplish basic curation and collection goals in a digital era. The ARL's efforts to clarify how libraries can employ fair use has resulted in sometimes-dramatic changes in how work is done, and has permitted innovation at some universities. Its approach demonstrates the power of consensus in a professional field to permit innovation within the law.

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Web Archiving in the United States: A 2016 Survey

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance has released Web Archiving in the United States: A 2016 Survey .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

From January 20 to February 16, 2016, a team representing multiple NDSA member institutions and interest groups conducted a survey of organizations in the United States actively involved in, or planning to start, programs to archive content from the Web. This effort built upon a similar survey undertaken by NDSA in late 2011 and published online in June 2012 and a second survey in late 2013 published online in September 2014.

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"Content-Based Video Retrieval in Historical Collections of the German Broadcasting Archive"

Markus Mühling et al. have self-archived "Content-Based Video Retrieval in Historical Collections of the German Broadcasting Archive."

Here's an excerpt:

The German Broadcasting Archive (DRA) maintains the cultural heritage of radio and television broadcasts of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). The uniqueness and importance of the video material stimulates a large scientific interest in the video content. In this paper, we present an automatic video analysis and retrieval system for searching in historical collections of GDR television recordings. It consists of video analysis algorithms for shot boundary detection, concept classification, person recognition, text recognition and similarity search. The performance of the system is evaluated from a technical and an archival perspective on 2,500 hours of GDR television recordings

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"ArchiveSpark: Efficient Web Archive Access, Extraction and Derivation"

Helge Holzmann, Vinay Goel, and Avishek Anand have self-archived "ArchiveSpark: Efficient Web Archive Access, Extraction and Derivation."

Here's an excerpt:

Web archives are a valuable resource for researchers of various disciplines. However, to use them as a scholarly source, researchers require a tool that provides efficient access to Web archive data for extraction and derivation of smaller datasets. Besides efficient access we identify five other objectives based on practical researcher needs such as ease of use, extensibility and reusability.

Towards these objectives we propose ArchiveSpark, a framework for efficient, distributed Web archive processing that builds a research corpus by working on existing and standardized data formats commonly held by Web archiving institutions. Performance optimizations in ArchiveSpark, facilitated by the use of a widely available metadata index, result in significant speed-ups of data processing. Our benchmarks show that ArchiveSpark is faster than alternative approaches without depending on any additional data stores while improving usability by seamlessly integrating queries and derivations with external tools.

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Omeka Classic 2.5 Released

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has released Omeka Classic 2.5.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The final day of January 2017 brings with it the release of the long awaited version 2.5 of Omeka Classic. While the release includes a long list of minor changes and bug fixes (see the release notes), there are a number of key improvements that were requested by the user community:

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"The Devil’s Shoehorn: A Case Study of EAD to ArchivesSpace Migration at a Large University"

Dave Mayo and Kate Bowers have published "The Devil's Shoehorn: A Case Study of EAD to ArchivesSpace Migration at a Large University" in the Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

A band of archivists and IT professionals at Harvard took on a project to convert nearly two million descriptions of archival collection components from marked-up text into the ArchivesSpace archival metadata management system. Starting in the mid-1990s, Harvard was an alpha implementer of EAD, an SGML (later XML) text markup language for electronic inventories, indexes, and finding aids that archivists use to wend their way through the sometimes quirky filing systems that bureaucracies establish for their records or the utter chaos in which some individuals keep their personal archives. These pathfinder documents, designed to cope with messy reality, can themselves be difficult to classify. Portions of them are rigorously structured, while other parts are narrative. Early documents predate the establishment of the standard; many feature idiosyncratic encoding that had been through several machine conversions, while others were freshly encoded and fairly consistent. In this paper, we will cover the practical and technical challenges involved in preparing a large (900MiB) corpus of XML for ingest into an open-source archival information system (ArchivesSpace). This case study will give an overview of the project, discuss problem discovery and problem solving, and address the technical challenges, analysis, solutions, and decisions and provide information on the tools produced and lessons learned.

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"Bridging Technologies to Efficiently Arrange and Describe Digital Archives: The Bentley Historical Library’s ArchivesSpace-Archivematica-DSpace Workflow Integration Project"

Max Eckard, Dallas Pillen and Mike Shallcross have published "Bridging Technologies to Efficiently Arrange and Describe Digital Archives: The Bentley Historical Library's ArchivesSpace-Archivematica-DSpace Workflow Integration Project" in the Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

In recent years, ArchivesSpace and Archivematica have emerged as two of the most exciting open source platforms for working with digital archives. The former manages accessions and collections and provides a framework for entering descriptive, administrative, rights, and other metadata. The latter ingests digital content and prepares information packages for long-term preservation and access. In October 2016, the Bentley Historical Library wrapped up a two-year, $355,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to partner with the University of Michigan Library on the integration of these two systems in an end-to-end workflow that will include the automated deposit of content into a DSpace repository. This article provides context of the project and offers an in-depth exploration of the project’s key development tasks, all of which were provided by Artefactual Systems, the developers of Archivematica (code available at https://github.com/artefactual-labs/appraisal-tab).

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A Cookbook of Methods for Using CONTENTdm APIs

Andrew Bullen has released A Cookbook of Methods for Using CONTENTdm APIs.

Here's an excerpt:

CONTENTdm has a number of useful APIs for directly accessing information contained in its indexes and files. This site is intended as a practical reference guide to using many—though not all—of these APIs.

See also: "Using CONTENTdm's APIs to Customize Your Site and Access Your Data."

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"Happy Beta Release Day, Omeka S!!"

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University has released "Happy Beta Release Day, Omeka S!!."

Here's an excerpt:

Omeka S is the next-generation, open source web-publishing platform that is fully integrated into the scholarly communications ecosystem and designed to serve the needs of medium to large institutional users who wish to launch, monitor, and upgrade many sites from a single installation.

Though Omeka S is a completely new software package, it shares the same goals and principles of Omeka Classic that users have come to love: a commitment to cost-effective deployment and design, an intuitive user interface, open access to data and resources, and interoperability through standardized data.

Created with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Omeka S is engineered to ease the burdens of administrators who want to make it possible for their end-user communities to easily build their own sites that showcase digital cultural heritage materials.

See also: Omeka S Beta Technical Specs.

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"Omeka Curator Dashboard"

Jess Waggoner has published "Omeka Curator Dashboard" in the Omeka blog.

Here's an excerpt:

The Omeka Curator Dashboard (or "the OCD" as we endearingly refer to it) is a suite of fifteen plugins (though a bonus sixteenth will be coming soon!) designed to facilitate object import and export, manage metadata, and curate collections. Several of our plugins are already available on the official list of Omeka plugins. The others are still undergoing testing, but can be downloaded from the UCSC Library GitHub in the meanwhile. We are actively soliciting feedback on these plugins from the Omeka user community so we can continue to improve their features and interfaces.

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"Development of a Scale for Measuring Perceptions of Trustworthiness for Digitized Archival Documents"

Devan Rays Donaldson has self-archived "Development of a Scale for Measuring Perceptions of Trustworthiness for Digitized Archival Documents."

Here's an excerpt:

This dissertation advances scholarship on trustworthiness in three ways. First, it revises an existing conceptual model for trustworthiness perception. Second, it creates an original measurement model for digitized archival document trustworthiness perception-the Digitized Archival Document Trustworthiness Scale (DADTS). Third, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the concept of trustworthiness by providing measurement of the concept in a way that is sensitive to its nuances.

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Measuring Up: Assessing Use of Digital Repositories and the Resulting Impact Project Gets IMLS Grant

The Measuring Up: Assessing Use of Digital Repositories and the Resulting Impact Project has received an IMLS Grant.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a $500,000, three-year National Leadership Grant to four partner organizations-the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Montana State University, OCLC Research, and the University of New Mexico-to perform research and recommend best practices that will improve data collection and information sharing for institutional repositories and digitized collections.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Toolkit: Equipment for Image Digitisation Projects

JISC has released Toolkit: Equipment for Image Digitisation Projects.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This Jisc Digital Media toolkit sets out to look at each of these technologies in detail, outlining both the theory behind the technology, along with more practical insights. It looks at cameras and scanners in depth and provide the stakeholder with the knowledge required to make informed decisions when purchasing, what can be, very expensive items of equipment.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Guidelines for Planning the Digitization of Rare Book and Manuscript Collections

IFLA has released Guidelines for Planning the Digitization of Rare Book and Manuscript Collections.

Here's an excerpt:

These guidelines attempt to complement this body of knowledge by addressing the specific needs related to planning digitization projects for rare and special collections. They are written from the point-of-view of special collection managers, rare book librarians, curators, and researchers who study the physical object as an artefact bearing intrinsic historical evidence as much as for the intellectual content that it contains.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Omeka Everywhere Development Funded by IMLS

The Institute of Museum and Library Sciences has funded the development of Omeka Everywhere.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, in partnership with Ideum and the University of Connecticut's Digital Media Center, is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a National Leadership Grant for Museums from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences to create Omeka Everywhere. Dramatically increasing the possibilities for visitor access to collections, Omeka Everywhere will offer a simple, cost-effective solution for connecting onsite web content and in-gallery multi-sensory experiences, affordable to museums of all sizes and missions, by capitalizing on the strengths of two successful collections-based open-source software projects: Omeka and Open Exhibits.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Digital Collections Assessment and Outreach, SPEC Kit 341

ARL has released Digital Collections Assessment and Outreach, SPEC Kit 341.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

ARL has released Digital Collections Assessment and Outreach, SPEC Kit 341, which investigates what methods ARL member libraries use to maintain the relevancy of their locally curated digital library collections, and to continue to sustain, grow, capture return on investment, and enhance existing resources through outreach and assessment. The publication also explores current practices for integrating digital resources into the research, teaching, and learning environment.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Linked Archival Metadata: A Guidebook (Version 0.99)

Eric Lease Morgan and LiAM have released Linked Archival Metadata: A Guidebook (Version 0.99).

Here's an excerpt:

Linked data is a process for embedding the descriptive information of archives into the very fabric of the Web. By transforming archival description into linked data, an archivist will enable other people as well as computers to read and use their archival description, even if the others are not a part of the archival community. The process goes both ways. Linked data also empowers archivists to use and incorporate the information of other linked data providers into their local description. This enables archivists to make their descriptions more thorough, more complete, and more value-added. For example, archival collections could be automatically supplemented with geographic coordinates in order to make maps, images of people or additional biographic descriptions to make collections come alive, or bibliographies for further reading.

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The Benefits and Risks of the PDF/A-3 File Format for Archival Institutions

The NDSA has released The Benefits and Risks of the PDF/A-3 File Format for Archival Institutions.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The report takes a measured look at the costs and benefits of the widespread use of the PDF/A-3 format, especially as it effects content arriving in collecting institutions. It provides background on the technical development of the specification, identifies specific scenarios under which the format might be used and suggests policy prescriptions for collecting institutions to consider.

For example, the report suggests that for memory institutions, the acceptance of embedded files in PDF/A documents would depend on very specific protocols between depositors and archival repositories that clarify acceptable embedded formats and define workflows that guarantee that the relationship between the PDF document and any embedded files is fully understood by the archival institution.

Additionally, the report notes that the complexity of the PDF format and the wide variance in PDF rendering implementations and creating applications suggests that PDF/A-3 may be appropriate for use in controlled workflows, but may not be an appropriate choice as a general-purpose bundling format.

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Omeka 2.1.4 Released

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has released Omeka 2.1.4.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This maintenance release includes some style additions and corrections in the admin theme, as well as a fix to how records are sorted for newer versions of MySQL. . .

Updated versions of the COinS and Exhibit Builder plugins are also bundled with this release, fixing an error in COinS for PHP 5.2. The updated Exhibit Builder plugin improves many parts of the styling, especially across interaction with many plugins, and expands the data returned by the API.

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

The Council on Library and Information Resources has released Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This report offers recommendations to help ensure the physical and intellectual well-being of born-digital materials transferred from donors to archival repositories. 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 repository staff.

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"The Confluence of Collections at Johns Hopkins’s Sheridan Libraries"

Liz Mengel has published "The Confluence of Collections at Johns Hopkins's Sheridan Libraries" in a special issue of Research Library Issues on mainstreaming special collections.

Here's an excerpt:

Since the creation of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library in 1964, Special Collections at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) has been housed in the main library and has been a part of the daily flow of overall library operations. As with many other special collections departments, this department was securely sheltered behind doors where the staff performed similar activities to other library departments such as collection development, reference, and instruction. Over the past four years, the Sheridan Libraries have been making deliberate efforts to remove the metaphorical silos that separate Special Collections and other library departments. In particular, the libraries have done this by looking at how collection funds are used and by blending positions to work in both Special Collections and the Academic Liaison Department.

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Best of Both Worlds: Museums, Libraries, and Archives in a Digital Age

The Smithsonian has released the Best of Both Worlds: Museums, Libraries, and Archives in a Digital Age by G. Wayne Clough.

Here's an excerpt:

The review in this document illustrates how many cultural institutions have already found innovative applications for digital technology, but it is more than just a matter of "using." Digital technology will also change the basics of how these institutions work as we move forward. Collections will be shared across institutions through the linked data cloud; the public will participate in the creative activities of cultural institutions through engagement platforms; and informal education will merge with formal education. Cultural change is never easy, and while an institution might be able to avoid it for a while, this time it will be so big that no one will escape in the long run.

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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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