Scribd has announced a limited-time offer to digitize paper documents at no cost, converting them to the iPaper format and making them available on the Internet. Ads will be added to scanned documents.
Read more about it at "Convert Your Paper to iPaper."
The Ball State Libraries have nurtured an ambitious digital initatives program that has established an institutional repository, a CONTENTdm system for managing digital assets, a Digital Media Repository with over 102,000 digital objects, a Digitization Center and Mobile Digitization Unit, an e-Archives for university records, and a virtual press (among other initiatives). Future goals are equally ambitious.
Read more about it at "Goals for Ball State University Libraries' Digital Initiative."
OCLC's RLG Program has released the Copyright Investigation Summary Report.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
This report summarizes interviews conducted between August and September 2007 with staff RLG Partner institutions. Interviewees shared information about how and why institutions investigate and collect copyright evidence, both for mass digitization projects and for items in special collections.
The new Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities announced the first five recipients of the of the JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants yesterday.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
The announcement was made by NEH Chairman Bruce Cole during an event at the Folger Shakespeare Library. . . . A total of five projects received over $600,000 in funding. . . .
Inaugurated last year as part of the Endowment’s Digital Humanities Initiative, the JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grant program is supported by both the NEH and the Higher Education Funding Council for England acting through the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). These grants provide combined funding of up to $240,000 for one year of development in the following areas: new digitization projects and pilot projects, the addition of important materials to existing digitization projects, or the development of infrastructure (either technical "middleware," tools, or knowledge-sharing) to support U.S.-England digitization work. Each project is sponsored by both an American and an English institution, whose activities will be funded by NEH and JISC respectively.
The formation of the Endowment’s Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) also was announced during the event. In 2006, the NEH launched the Digital Humanities Initiative, a program encouraging and supporting projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology on research, education, preservation, and public programming in the humanities. With the creation of ODH, the initiative is being made permanent as an office within the NEH. ODH will continue the work of the initiative and will help to coordinate the Endowment’s efforts in the area of digital scholarship.
A complete list of the projects announced can be found below:
The Folger Shakespeare Library and the University of Oxford, with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland and the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, plan to create the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, a freely-accessible, high-resolution digital collection of the seventy-five quarto editions of William Shakespeare's plays. The project will also develop an interactive interface and toolset for the detailed study of the quartos, with full-functionality applied to all thirty-two copies of one play, Hamlet, held at participating institutions, including the British Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, the Huntington Library, and the National Library of Scotland. ($119,598)
The Internet Archive in the United States and the Oxford Internet Institute and Hanzo in the United Kingdom plan to develop procedures and tools to improve the effectiveness of humanities research on the Web. This research and development effort promises to yield superior methods for indexing and analyzing the textual parts of larger digital collections, more focused browsing ("crawling") of the Web, and unified access to data resources, i.e., the ability to search for information across multiple digital databases. ($106,395)
The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London, plan to launch Concordia, a set of tools and procedures to enable seamless textual searches and the dynamic mapping of a variety of humanities collections. The pilot project would concentrate on large holdings of papyrological and epigraphic texts from North Africa during the Greek and Roman periods. ($129,828)
A team of scholars from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in Virginia, the University of Southampton's Nevis Heritage Project, and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool is working together on the St. Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative. Together, they plan to develop an integrated digital archive of diverse archaeological and historical data related to the experiences of slaves on sugar plantations in the Caribbean by digitizing and delivering on the Web information from two 18th-century plantations. ($132,832)
The Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University and the Internet Centre at Imperial College London plan to develop Philogrid, a Web resource for scholars of Classical Antiquity. The project will generate a digital collection of fragmentary writings of Greek historians that is designed to interact with multiple source editions; a repository of philological data about the Greco-Roman world; and set of procedures that draws on the recipient’s experience in processing textual materials from Perseus but that can also be extended to other digital collections. ($119,992)
JISC and the NEH will be awarding grants for US-UK collaborative digitization projects, and a celebration of this joint venture was held at Kings College in January. JISC has released "Transatlantic Collaboration in the Field of Digitisation with UK's JISC and US' NEH," a podcast that includes interviews with the organizers of that celebration and an excerpt from it.
RLG Programs has released its first Webinar, "Out of the Stacks and onto the Desktop: Rethinking Assumptions about Access and Digitization," which is presented by Ricky Erway and Jennifer Schaffner.
Koninklijke Bibliotheek has published Alternative File Formats for Storing Master Images of Digitisation Projects.
Here's an excerpt from the "Management Summary":
The main conclusions of this study are as follows:
Reason 1: Substitution
JPEG 2000 lossless and PNG are the best alternatives for the uncompressed TIFF file format from the perspective of long-term sustainability. When the storage savings (PNG 40%, JPEG 2000 lossless 53%) and the functionality are factored in, the scale tips in favour of JPEG 2000 lossless.
Reason 2: Redigitisation Is Not Desirable
JPEG 2000 and JPEG are the best alternatives for the uncompressed TIFF file format. If no image information may be lost, then JPEG 2000 lossless and PNG are the two recommended options.
Reason 3: Master File is the Access File
JPEG 2000 lossy and JPEG with greater compression are the most suitable formats.
France's Gallica 2 digital book project will go live after the Paris Book Fair, which ends on March 19th. Initially, it will contain 62,000 digital works, mostly from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Publishers will have the option to charge various kinds of access fees.
Read more about it at "France Launches Google Books Rival."
The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced 149 awards and offers, totaling $11.9 million (Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants are included in this announcement).
The awards are contained in three files: Alaska-Indiana, Kansas-Ohio, and Oklahoma-Wisconsin and American scholars abroad.
The TAPE project (Training for Audiovisual Preservation in Europe) has released Audio Tape Digitisation Workflow. Much of the information in the guidelines can also be useful for audio cassettes.
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.
The College Opportunity and Affordability Act, recently passed by the House, included funding for Digital Promise's National Center for Learning Science and Technology Trust Fund. One of Digital Promise's goals is to: "Digitize America’s collected memory stored in our nation's universities, libraries, museums and public television archives to make these materials available anytime and anywhere."
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
We are thrilled to report that legislation embracing the Digital Promise proposal to establish the National Center for Learning Science and Technology Trust Fund as a pilot program (we had originally labeled the Center "DO IT," the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust) was passed by the House of Representatives by a wide margin on Thursday evening, February 7.
The College Opportunity and Affordability Act (HR 4137), authorizes the establishment of the Center as an independent nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation within the Department of Education. Under the legislation, the Center will have its own distinguished nine member board of directors. It will administer a trust fund for precompetitive basic and applied research to help transform education, skills training and lifelong learning for the digital age. It will assess and research prototypes for innovative digital learning and information technologies; support pilot testing and evaluation, encourage their widespread adoption and use, and introduce digital media education programs for parents, teachers, and children to build technology literacy. To carry out its activities the Center will award contracts and grants to colleges and universities, museums, libraries, public broadcasting entities and similar nonprofit organizations and public institutions, as well as to for-profit organizations.
The Council on Library and Information Resources has published Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization: A White Paper by Oya Rieger.
Here's an excerpt from the "Preface":
This paper examines large-scale initiatives to identify issues that will influence the availability and usability, over time, of the digital books that these projects create. As an introduction, the paper describes four key large-scale projects and their digitization strategies. Issues range from the quality of image capture to the commitment and viability of archiving institutions, as well as those institutions' willingness to collaborate. The paper also attempts to foresee the likely impacts of large-scale digitization on book collections. It offers a set of recommendations for rethinking a preservation strategy. It concludes with a plea for collaboration among cultural institutions. No single library can afford to undertake a project on the scale of Google Book Search; it can, however, collaborate with others to address the common challenges that such large projects pose.
Although this paper covers preservation administration, digital preservation, and digital imaging, it does not attempt to present a comprehensive discussion of any of these distinct specialty areas. Deliberately broad in scope, the paper is designed to be of interest to a wide range of stakeholders. These stakeholders include scholars; staff at institutions that are currently providing content for large-scale digital initiatives, are in a position to do so in the future, or are otherwise influenced by the outcomes of such projects; and leaders of foundations and government agencies that support, or have supported, large digitization projects. The paper recommends that Google and Microsoft, as well as other commercial leaders, also be brought into this conversation.
Full scholarships are available for students interested in obtaining a graduate certificate in Digital Information Management from the University of Arizona's School of Information Resources and Library Science. Recently, the Library of Congress honored Richard Pearce-Moses, one of the key figures in the development of the program, by naming him as a digital preservation pioneer.
Here's the announcement:
The University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science is pleased to announce that a number of full scholarships are still available in the school's graduate certificate program in Digital Information Management. The program is scheduled to begin a new series of courses starting this summer. Prospects have until April 1, 2008 to apply for one of the openings and available financial aid.
DigIn, as the program is known, provides hands-on experience and focused instruction supporting careers in libraries and archives, cultural heritage institutions and digital collections, information repositories in government and the private sector and similar institutions. The certificate is comprised of six courses covering diverse topics including digital collections, applied technology, technology planning and leadership, policy and ethics, digital preservation and curation, and other subjects relevant to today's digital information environments.
For people just starting in the field or considering career changes, the DigIn certificate program offers an alternative path to graduate studies that helps prepare students for success in traditional graduate programs or the workplace. The certificate also provides a means for working professionals and those who already have advanced graduate degrees in the library and information sciences to broaden their knowledge and skills in today's rapidly evolving digital information landscape.
The program is delivered in a 100% virtual environment and has no residency requirements. Students may choose to complete the certificate in fifteen or twenty-seven months.
The certificate program has been developed in cooperation with the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records and the University of Arizona Office of Continuing Education and Academic Outreach. Major funding for program development comes from the federal government's Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which has also provided funding for a number of scholarships.
Additional details on the program including course descriptions, admissions requirements and application forms may be found on the program website at http://sir.arizona.edu/digin. Or, contact the UA School of Information Resources and Library Science by phone at 520-621-3565 or email at sirls@email.arizona.edu.
The University of Michigan Library has digitized and made available one million books from its collection.
Here's an excerpt from "One Million Digitized Books":
One million is a big number, but this is just the beginning. Michigan is on track to digitize its entire collection of over 7.5 million bound volumes by early in the next decade. So far we have only glimpsed the kinds of new and innovative uses that can be made of large bodies of digitized books, and it is thrilling to imagine what will be possible when nearly all the holdings of a leading research library are digitized and searchable from any computer in the world.
In "Reading Bad News Between the Lines of Google Book Search" (Chronicle of Higher Education subscription required), Peter Brantley, Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation, discusses his concerns about Google Book Search.
Here's an excerpt:
Q. Why are you concerned about Google Book Search?
A. The quality of the book scans is not consistently high. The algorithm Google uses to return search results is opaque. Then there's the commercial aspect. Google will attempt to find ways to make money off the service.
The Library of Congress has put two collections of digital images on Flickr: 1,600 images from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information and around 1,500 images from the George Grantham Bain News Service. The images can be found at The Library of Congress' Photos.
Regarding copyright, LC says:
Although the Library of Congress does not grant or deny permission to use photos, the Library knows of no copyright restrictions on the publication, distribution, or re-use of these photos. Privacy rights may apply.
See the FAQ for more details.
TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images) has published descriptions of information management software resulting from a vendor survey (e.g., see the Greenstone description). TASI notes: "The information has been provided by the system developer/vendor in answer to TASI's survey, but has not been independently verified."
TASI recommends that readers consult Systems for Managing Image Collections and Choosing a System for Managing your Image Collection as background for evaluating the survey responses.
Both the Columbia University Libraries and Bavarian State Library have joined the Google Book Search Library Project.
Here are the announcements:
The University of Michigan Libraries have made over 100,000 metadata records from its MBooks collection available for OAI-PMH harvesting. The records are for digitized books in the public domain.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
The University of Michigan Library is pleased to announce that records from our MBooks collection are available for OAI harvesting. The MBooks collection consists of materials digitized by Google in partnership with the University of Michigan.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/o/oai/oai?verb=Identify
Only records for MBooks available in the public domain are exposed. We have split these into sets containing public domain items according to U.S. copyright law, and public domain items worldwide. There are currently over 100,000 records available for harvesting. We anticipate having 1 million records available when the entire U-M collection has been digitized by Google.
Rice University has released the Travelers in the Middle East Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
IMEA provides access to:
- Nearly 1,000 images, including stereocards, postcards and book illustrations
- More than 150 historical maps representing the Middle East as it was in the 19th and early 20th centuries
- Interactive geographical information systems (GIS) maps that serve as an interface to the collection and present detailed information about features such as waterways, elevation and populated places
- Successive editions of classic travel guides and major museum collection catalogues
- Convenient educational modules that set materials from the collection in historical and geographic context and explore the research process
TIMEA is able to offer seamless access for researchers by providing a common user interface to digital objects housed in three repositories. Texts, historical maps and images reside in DSpace, an open-source digital repository system. Educational research modules are presented within Connexions, an open-content commons and publishing platform for educational materials. TIMEA also uses Google Maps and ESRI’s ArcIMS map server.
The Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) has updated the following documents that deal with digital imaging issues:
The University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science's Graduate Certificate in Digital Information Management (DigIn) program is accepting applications for its second cohort of students, who will begin their studies in the summer of 2008.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Students and working professionals interested in careers in digital information have until Feb. 1 to apply to The University of Arizona's online graduate-level certificate program in digital information management. The program, commonly known as "DigIn," is offered exclusively by the UA's School of Information Resources and Library Science at the University of Arizona.
The program prepares students to build and manage digital collections in a variety of government and private settings, including libraries, archives and museums. Also, the students in the program acquire practical applied technology skills, along with a solid foundation in the theory and strategy underpinning digital collections.
The digitization and creation of collections of books, photographs, museum archives, artifacts, documents, film and video, and other kinds of resources has exploded over the last several years. This has created a demand for individuals with both an understanding of the information management disciplines and also technical knowledge and skills needed to create, manage and support digital information collections.
Those admitted will become part of the DigIn program's second cohort of students, who begin taking courses in the summer of 2008.
The program starts with an intensive hands-on course in applied technology covering the basics of the Linux operating system and also fundamentals of web servers, databases and scripting applications commonly used in today's digital information environment.
In subsequent courses, students are introduced to strategic technology planning and project management; creating, managing, and preserving digital collections; and basic principles of the information professions. Students will learn to apply key concepts and technologies through case studies, applications, theory, and hands-on work with metadata, content management systems and real-life digital collections. Students complete the certificate with a capstone course involving an individual project and electronic portfolio. Many complete the six-class 18-credit hour online course of study in 15 months, and extended options are available.
The DigIn program has been created in partnership with the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records. The certificate is administered by the UA Office of Continuing Education and Outreach. Admissions requirements include a bachelor's degree from an accredited institution and other stipulations of the School of Information Resources and Library Sciences and the UA Graduate College.
DigIn is currently supported with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which will also be providing a generous number of scholarships for the new cohort of students starting in summer of 2008. For more information, visit the website at http://sir.arizona.edu/digin, or call 520-626-4631.
In "On Being in Bed with Google," Paul N. Courant, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan, vigorously rebuts arguments against research libraries participating in the Google Books Library Project.
Here's an excerpt:
Since 2005, Siva Vaidhyanathan has been making and refining the argument that libraries should be digitizing their collections independently, without corporate financing or participation, and that those who don’t are failing to uphold their responsibility to the public. "Libraries should not be relinquishing their core duties to private corporations for the sake of expediency."
"Expediency" is a bit of a dirty word. Vaidhyanathan’s phrase suggests that good people don’t do things simply because they are "expedient." But I view large-scale digitization as expeditious. We have a generation of students who will not find valuable scholarly works unless they can find them electronically. At the rate that OCA is digitizing things (and I say the more the merrier and the faster the better) that generation will be dandling great-grandchildren on its knees before these great collections can be found electronically. At Michigan, the entire collection of bound print will be searchable, by anyone in the world, about when children born today start kindergarten.
Jim Ashling provides an update on the progress that the British Public Library and Microsoft have made in their project to digitize about 100,000 books for access in Live Book Search in his Information Today article "Progress Report: The British Library and Microsoft Digitization Partnership."
Here's an excerpt from the article:
Unlike previous BL digitization projects where material had been selected on an item-by-item basis, the sheer size of this project made such selectivity impossible. Instead, the focus is on English-language material, collected by the BL during the 19th century. . . .
Scanning produces high-resolution images (300 dpi) that are then transferred to a suite of 12 computers for OCR (optical character recognition) conversion. The scanners, which run 24/7, are specially tuned to deal with the spelling variations and old-fashioned typefaces used in the 1800s. The process creates multiple versions including PDFs and OCR text for display in the online services, as well as an open XML file for long-term storage and potential conversion to any new formats that may become future standards. In all, the data will amount to 30 to 40 terabytes. . . .
Obviously, then, an issue exists here for a collection of 19th-century literature when some authors may have lived beyond the late 1930s [British/EU law gives authors a copyright term of life plus 70 years]. An estimated 40 percent of the titles are also orphan works. Those two issues mean that item-by-item copyright checking would be an unmanageable task. Estimates for the total time required to check on the copyright issues involved vary from a couple of decades to a couple of hundred years. The BL’s approach is to use two databases of authors to identify those who were still living in 1936 and to remove their work from the collection before scanning. That, coupled with a wide publicity to encourage any rights holders to step forward, may solve the problem.
