Establishing digitisation workflows and guidelines
When it comes to digitisation projects it is easy to become seduced into rushing straight into the digitisation before thinking about anything else.
However, it is often the case that successful digitisation projects spend what seems like a lot of time thinking about and drafting their work flows and guidelines before embarking on the ‘real work’.
The open-access repository digitisation work being undertaken at Exeter University Library by CHARTER (Creating Heritage Artefacts for Research and Teaching in an E-Repository) has created a robust document for their digitisation workflow and guidelines.
CHARTER is a small scale digitisation project which runs for one year, but has still recognised the advantages of documenting their guidelines.
CHARTER’s willingness to share and be open with their guidelines also allows the opportunity for other projects to explore and borrow from their work, as well as opening up the possibility of feedback and ever improving workflows and guidelines for this and future projects.
JISC Digital Media’s guidelines on project-management for a digitisation project offers a great place to begin. CHARTER’s progress can be followed on their blog, where their guidelines have also been posted.
Digital Project Staff Survey of JPEG 2000 Implementation
There has been recent uptake of the JPEG 2000 format, particular as highlighted in a report written by the Royal Dutch Library. This survey should help clarify positions of current usage
I am writing to solicit your help with a survey of library-related digital project staff regarding the implementation of the JPEG 2000 standard for digital images (specifically still images and not motion). We estimate that this task will take approximately 15 minutes of your time. It is available now at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=WXFAJwyRNZZilRWzrnum_2fw_3d_3d
The survey will remain active until October 31, 2008. Afterward, we will post the results via a report uploaded to our institutional repository, digitalcommons.uconn.edu.
Please note that in our report, personal information from the survey will not be revealed, and any comments used will remain unattributed unless the respondent prefers to be credited and indicates that desire in a separate email to me directly at david.lowe@uconn.edu.
Thank you for your help,
David Lowe
Preservation Librarian
UConn Libraries
Digital Standards: Going beyond Stalin
Standards for digital content such as file formats or metadata aren’t sexy. But they are crucial - without them resource discovery is impeded, functionality is diminished and long-term access is imperilled.
But implementing standards is not just a matter of a ‘Stalinist’ top-down mandate. Within in a project, service or an organisation standards impinge on all kinds of other issues - staff skills, costs of hardware, tools and software available, different end-users amongst others.
Alastair Dunning gave a talk at the Strategic Content Alliance’s event at Edinburgh, illustrating how standards need to be thought of as existing in an organic, shifting environment. Choosing to adopt an standards is not a straightforward matter - the ramifications of choosing any standards need be thought through.
It was followed up with a round table, also involving Brian Kelly from UKOLN.
The presentation is available from Slideshare. Details of the event as a whole, where along with standards, content licensing and sustainability models for digital content were discussed and debated in detail, will be available from the SCA blog.
In the news: National Archives and Microsoft partnership
The Guardian reports today that the National Archives and Microsoft have announced a partnership to prevent what was described as a “digital dark age”.
Microsoft has worked with the archives and the British Library to install the Virtual PC 2007, allowing users to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on the same computer, and unlock what are called “legacy” Microsoft Office formats dating back 15 years or more. The system should retrieve not just the text but, crucially, the formatting and original appearance of the files as they were created.
The archives are estimated to hold at least 580 terabytes of such data, the equivalent of 580,000 encyclopaedias. The virtual PC should make accessible all stored government files created using versions of Office, but the archives have not begun to address the problem of Mac files.
Read the full story here: National Archive project to avert digital dark age