National Archives sign at Kew Gardens Station

National Archives sign at Kew Gardens Station

2009-03-30

A Movable Past: the Internet Archive Gets Boxed

Sun Microsystems has set up the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine, founded by Brewster Kahle, in a datacenter that's self-contained within a shipping container. This Ars Technica story (02009 03 27) has a photo of the container while HotHardware (02009 03 27) has interior photos of the generic container. Sun and the Internet Archive worked together to develop this solution which is located in Santa Clara, California, USA. Here's a video of the mobile datacenter from the Sun Channel.

Twitter 101 on SearchEngineWatch.com

Ron Jones is writing a multi-part article on "one of the most popular social media tools" that he calls Twitter 101. Part 1 appeared on March 30, 02009.

2009-03-16

March/April 02009 issue of D-Lib Magazine is out

From the announcement on the DIGLIB mailing list (02009 03 16):



The March/April 2009 issue of D-Lib Magazine (http://www.dlib.org/) is now available.

This issue contains five articles, an opinion piece, two conference reports, the 'In Brief' column, excerpts from recent press releases, and news of upcoming conferences and other items of interest in 'Clips and Pointers'. This month, D-Lib features the Washington College of Law Historical Collection, courtesy of Susan McElrath, American University and Allison B. Zhang, Washington Research Library Consortium.

The opinion piece is:

What's Wrong with Citation Counts?
Jose H. Canos Cerda and Manuel Llavador Campos, Technical University of Valencia, Spain; and Eduardo Mena Nieto, University of Zaragoza, Spain

The articles include:

Going Grey? Comparing the OCR Accuracy Levels of Bitonal and Greyscale Images
Tracy Powell and Gordon Paynter, National Library of New Zealand

How Good Can It Get? Analysing and Improving OCR Accuracy in Large Scale Historic Newspaper Digitisation Programs
Rose Holley, National Library of Australia

Profiling Social Networks: A Social Tagging Perspective
Ying Ding and Elin K Jacob, Indiana University; James Caverlee, Texas A&M University; Michael Fried, University of Innsbruck, Austria; and Zhixiong Zhang, Chinese Academy of Science

Digitization Education: Courses Taken and Lessons Learned
Mats Dahlstrom and Alen Doracic, Swedish School of Library and Information Science

Toward Digitizing All Forms of Documentation
George V. Landon, Eastern Kentucky University

The Conference Reports include:

International Data curation Education Action (IDEA) Working Group: A Report from the Second Workshop of the IDEA
Carolyn Hank, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Joy Davidson, University of Glasgow

Report on the 2nd Ibero-American Conference on Electronic Publishing in the Context of Scholarly Communication (CIPECC 2008)
Ana Alice Baptista, University of Minho, Portugal

2009-03-08

Bye, Tech: Dealing With Data Rot

CBS News ran this story from contributor David Pogue, "Bye, Tech: Dealing With Data Rot," on March 1, 02009 that looks at migration issues for audio, video and electronic records as the only solution for data rot.

2009-03-05

Freeze Frame and East London Theatre Archive digital collections from the UK JIC Digitisation Programme

From the announcement on DIGLIB (02009 03 05):

The UK's JISC Digitisation Programme is delighted to announce that another two of its digitisation projects are online and available open access.

Freeze Frame: Historic Polar Images, 1845-1982 from the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge http://www.freezeframe.ac.uk/

East London Theatre Archive: Theatre in East London from the 19th Century the present day, University of East London http://www.elta-project.org/

... For a full list of the 50+ digitisation projects funded by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), many of which will be completing in Spring 2009, please visit http://www.jisc.ac.uk/digitisation/

2009-03-03

Archiving 2009 preliminary program, Crystal City, Virginia, USA, May 02009

From the announcement on DIGLIB (02009 03 03):



IS&T is pleased to announce that the Archiving 2009 Preliminary Program, including the conference registration and hotel information, is available at http://www.imaging.org/conferences/archiving2009/

The conference will be held May 4-7, 2009 in Crystal City, Virginia at the Crystal City Hilton.

The early conference registration deadline is April 6, 2009.

The hotel reservation deadline is April 2, 2009.

The conference's program committee has put together a strong technical program that presents the latest in:

Digital Collection Stewardship
Imaging and Preservation

California Digital Library announces self-guided tutorial for the eXtensible Text Framework (XTF)

From the announcement on DIGLIB (02009 03 03):



The California Digital Library (CDL) is pleased to announce the availability of an extensive self-guided tutorial for its eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) application (http://xtf.wiki.sourceforge.net/). XTF is an open source, highly customizable piece of software supporting the search, browse, and display of heterogeneous digital content and offering efficient and practical methods for creating customized end-user interfaces for distinct digital collections. The tutorial provides guidance for implementing and customizing XTF, from core functionality to overall look and feel. Downloads for the Mac and Windows operating systems (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=119724) are available from the XTF Project page on SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/xtf/), along with the complete distribution and documentation.

The tutorial comes with a complete XTF package that is ready to run when uncompressed; no other installation is required. It contains nine modules spanning the most powerful and popular features, including how to:

• Add new content
• Change metadata
• Change logo and colors
• Increase significance of titles in ranking hits
• Customize and enable default status of advanced search
• Change fields displayed in search results
• Enable structural searching
• Create a hierarchical facet
• Change footnote behavior