Web Archives Registry launched by IIPC

From the announcement on DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK (02009 12 22):

The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) has launched a new registry (http://netpreserve.org/about/archiveList.php) of its members’ web archives. Preserving the web is not a task of any single institution. It is a mission common to all IIPC members, and many practices and lessons are transferable.

The launch of the members' web archive registry showcases international collaboration for preserving internet content for future generations. The registry currently includes descriptions of twenty one archives from around the world. As additional archives are made available by IIPC members, the registry will be updated.

The registry provides an overview of all members web archiving efforts and outputs, offering a single point of access to users of archived web content. It also provide detailed description of each web archive, including information about the collecting institution, the harvesting methods (domain, selective, or thematic), the language of the user interface, methods for accessing the archived content, and whether there are any access restrictions that researchers need to be aware of.

The registry was put in place by IIPC’s Access Working Group, which focuses on initiatives, procedures and tools required to provide immediate access and to preserve the future access to Internet material in a Web archive. The registry provides a basis for IIPC to explore integrated access and search in the future.

Fedora 3.3 available as of 02009 12 21

From the announcement on DIGLIB (02009 12 22),

Today [02009 12 21], the DuraSpace not-for-profit organization and the Fedora digital repository project announced the release of Fedora 3.3 (http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/x/jQ3S). This release marks a new milestone in the process of developing the Fedora open source software. For the first time, the Fedora community came together under the leadership of a Community Release Manager who facilitated the software development process and the integration of community contributions. The effort was led by Kai Strnad, Software Engineer with FIZ Karlsruhe (http://www.fiz-karlsruhe.de/) and member of the eSciDoc project team (https://www.escidoc.org/).

Journal of Digital Information special issue on Information Access to Cultural Heritage

The Journal of Digital Information has published a special issue on Information Access to Cultural Heritage, vol. 10, no. 6 (2009). JoDI is a peer-reviewed Web journal supported by Texas A&M University Libraries. Articles in this issue are available as PDF or HTML documents. JoDI uses the Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems.

Wellcome Library Arabic manuscript digitization project

The Wellcome Library in London, England, has partnered with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and King's College London to create a free, searchable, online catalog of 500 Islamic manuscripts in the Wellcome Library. According to the announcement on the DIGLIB mailing list (02009 12 08), "The website will be hosted by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and digitised content will also be available via the Wellcome Library catalogue, pending inclusion of the complete catalogue on the Wellcome site when circumstances permit." More information on the project is at http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/arabicproject.html.

Conservation OnLine's (CoOL's) new home

Conservation OnLine (CoOL), an amazing resource hosted for many years by Stanford University and which to its shame withdrew its support, has now been fully resurrected by the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation at http://cool.conservation-us.org/.

New DPC Technology Watch Report: File Formats for Preservation released

According to an announcement on DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK (02009 12 02), the Digital Preservation Coalition added

... a new report to the DPC Technology Watch Report Series: File Formats for Preservation, written by Malcolm Todd of The National Archives: http://www.dpconline.org/docs/reports/dpctw09-02.pdf

The selection and manipulation of file formats has long been seen as an important element within digital preservation strategies, especially data migration. However there are different and to some extent competing grounds for selection of file formats. The proliferation of formats, the need to provide long term access to data embedded within files and the role of the file as a container for encoded information create subtle tensions for preservation managers.

This new report provides an extensive account of the challenges that format management creates for long term access and it provides concrete recommendations which can inform preservation strategies. Rather than making generalisations about the merits of common formats, it presents repository managers with the tools they will need to develop nuanced advice specific to their own requirements. It goes on to contribute the implications on file format selection of archival science viewpoint arising from recent research in the UK and North America into a wider digital preservation discourse.

Kindle for PC application

Amazon.com has a free Kindle for PC application that allows you to sync your Kindle Reader to your PC or to use your PC to purchase Kindle-enable e-publications even if you don't own a Kindle. The Kindle for PC application lets you read material in full color.

Highlighting the history of scientific thought with the Royal Society of London's Trailblazing

The Royal Society of London has a new Web site called Trailblazing that contains 350 years of digitized content from its Proceedings. To mark is 350th anniversary, the Royal Society is also providing free access to the Royal Society Digital Journal Archive from November 23, 02009 to February 28, 02010.

Reading Tree, books for charity, a Canadian literacy initiative

Reading Tree is a Canadian literacy initiative that collects books for charitable purposes and places them in schools and libraries across British Columbia. This is a great way to preserve books, though they will of course eventually get worn out.

Points of View 19th century photography exhibit, British Library, October 02009-March 02010

The British Library opened a free physical and online exhibit on October 30, 02009 titled "Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs." If you register for a free account with the Online Gallery at the British Library you can comment on the photographs and select your favorites. The library will choose the best comments for display in the physical gallery (I wasn't quite clear about exactly where this would happen). A blog for the exhibit that links the past with the present is also available.

OSS Watch, Open Source Software Advisory Service for the UK academic community

OSS Watch, which sounds like the title of a World War II B-movie, is managed through the UK's University of Oxford and is an open source software advisory service whose audience is actually more than just the UK academic community. The service features all kinds of useful information for software developers and others in the IT (information technology) community. Good stuff made possible in large part through funding from JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee.

The OSS Watch Wiki is here.

The OSS Watch Twitter feed is at http://twitter.com/osswatch.

A number of OSS Watch RSS feeds are also available.

Library and Archives Canada adds digitized microform content

The Library and Archives Canada has started adding digitized microform content (numérisation de microforme) to its Web site. The only way to access the digitized microform is by title. The online experience replicates what you would experience viewing the film in person on microform equipment. Microform refers to microfiche (plastic sheets) or microfilm (plastic rolls on a spool or reel). If you've used their digitized "Black" and "Red" Series of RG-10, Indian Affairs records, or the digitized Canadian census records then you've already experienced the use of digitized microfilm. Curiously, as of November 26, 02009, the day of this post, they only have two sets of records listed and have not included the census records or the digitized RG-10 records.

Archives of Ontario (Canada) RFI for Trusted Digital Repository - Repository of Archival Digital Records

The Archives of Ontario (Canada) has issued a Request for Information (RFI) for Trusted Digital Repository - Repository of Archival Digital Records.

The purposes of this RFI are to:

- Gather information about the availability of Long Term Digital Preservation solutions (such as a Trusted Digital Repository) that might meet our requirements;
- Identify potential suppliers;
- Gain knowledge about suppliers’ capabilities in the design, development, implementation and maintenance of a Trusted Digital Repository;
- Assist in the determination of future purchasing options or requirements.

This RFI is not a solicitation for tenders or proposals. No contract or other form of commitment will be entered into with any vendor based on responses to the RFI. This RFI shall not constitute an authorization by the Government of Ontario to vendors to undertake any work that would result in any obligation, cost or liability to the Government of Ontario.

For full details of this Request for Information please find the link to MERX.

http://www.merx.com/English/SUPPLIER_Menu.asp?WCE=Show&TAB=1&PORTAL=MERX&State=7&searchtype=pubhome&id=186236&src=osr&FED_ONLY=0&ACTION=&rowcount=&lastpage=&hcode=jFg5GoWIgyT9U0p%2b2Y%2fWPg%3d%3d

Source: DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK (02009 11 18)

Release of Web Curator Tool (WCT) version 1.5

From the announcement on DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK (02009 11 19) about version 1.5 of the Web Curator Tool 1.5, the fourth major update:

Key enhancements include the optional integration of Wayback as an additional quality review tool and the simplification of system configuration using properties files. This release also contains a small number of additional enhancements and bug fixes. ...

This release was commissioned by the British Library and developed during July and August of 2009 by software developers from Oakleigh Consulting in the UK. ....

Version 1.5 of the Web Curator Tool is now available for download on Sourceforge: http://webcurator.sourceforge.net/.

AC+erm Project looking for your help with its literature review

Update for 02010 02 18:

The AC+erm Project is looking for your help to "mass peer-review" a subset of its literature review on electronic records management. According to the posting on several mailing lists on 02010 02 18,

If you are willing to share your knowledge and expertise, you can do so by downloading a Word document from our website, completing the response fields, and returning it by email to eb.acerm@northumbria.ac.uk. The document contains the full list of 104 articles along with brief descriptions of the cases and can be found at http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/slr/

Original post, 02009 11 18:

Here is some news about the AC+erm Project (Accelerating Positive Change in Electronic records Management) as posted to the ARCAN-L mailing list (02009 11 18):

1. Third AC+erm Colloquium

This event was held on 24 September [02009] in Edinburgh, and focused on the Systems and Technology facet of ERM.

The outputs from the colloquium consist of versions of the initial documents presented to the delegates, adapted to include their collated notes and responses together with notes taken by the project team. During the workshop, delegates also developed their ideas graphically using tools developed in the course of the project; the outputs include images of these items.

The slides accompanying the project team's presentations are also provided.

http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/coll_diss/coll3_diss/

2. List of resources relevant to electronic recordkeeping and management

We have overhauled our annotated compilation of websites and documents relating to various aspects of electronic recordkeeping.
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/resources/

The list includes official, professional and commercial institutions and organisations; publishers of journals and books in our disciplines, and various individual items such as articles, reports and similar documentary materials. We have checked existing links and repaired them where necessary. The updated version also includes prominent individual blogs.
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/static/5007/ceispdf/resourcelist_2009_11.pdf

The online resources from the list have been added to the AC+erm custom Google search engine, which is intended to improve the relevance of search results by focusing only on records-related websites.
http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=013466523144167055048:kyttraq2tw4&hl=en

Quick links to the online sources are now available through a set of Sqworl groups - links are grouped according to the same categories as used in the main list.
http://sqworl.com/u.php?user=2047

For more details, visit the web pages given above or visit the Project blog at http://acerm.blogspot.com/.

The AC+erm Project is also on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/Northumbria_RM

dpBestflow launched November 11, 02009

From the front page of dpBestflow.org, the new site for photographers on "Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow":

The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) has announced that dpBestflow, the initiative funded by the Library of Congress through its National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, will be launched on November 11th [02009] at the Navy Memorial Auditorium in Washington, D.C. as part of FotoweekDC.

Archivematica, the open archival information system for digital preservation

Update for 02009 11 17:

I easily downloaded and installed the Sun Virtual Box that's required to run Archivematica. Getting the zipped Archivematica file proved to be more challenging as it took three tries before I was able to successfully download the file. The instructions on the Archivematica site are clear and precise. Installation went smoothly and I was able to run the "virtual appliance" that is Archivematica. It's kind of cool to have Ubuntu Linux running virtually within Windows. I'll be following this project as it will likely be an extremely important tool in years to come. My congratulations to the developers for all they've accomplished to date and in such a short time frame.

Archivematica, the open archival information system for digital preservation, is another innovative software application from Artefactual Systems, the creators of the Qubit Toolkit, ICA-AtoM and the Canadiana.org Digital Collection Builder.

According to the front page of the Archivematica site,

"The objective of this project is to integrate a number of open source tools and applications to create a comprehensive digital archives system that is compliant with the ISO-OAIS standard and other digital preservation standards and best practices. ... This project is managed by Artefactual Systems in collaboration with the City of Vancouver Archives, UNESCO Memory of the World Subcommittee on Technology and a number of other client partners.

This project is in early stages of development. We expect to begin making more public announcements about the project technology and methodology by mid 2010."

Canadiana.org Digital Collection Builder software

The Canadiana.org Digital Collection Builder, created by Artefactual Systems and based on its Qubit Toolkit information management software, is available. Qubit is the software that powers ICA-AtoM, the archival description system software, and ICA-AtoM is what powers MemoryBC, the BC Archival Information Network, which will be officially launched the week of November 16, 02009 as part of British Columbia's Archives Week celebration.

November/December 02009 issue of D-Lib Magazine has hit the phosphor pavement

The November/December 02009 issue of D-Lib Magazine is out. Here are the articles:

"Beyond 1923: Characteristics of Potentially In-copyright Print Books in Library Collections" by Brian Lavoie and Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC Online Computer Library Center

"Service-Oriented Models for Educational Resource Federations" by Daniel R. Rehak, LSAL; and Nick Nicholas and Nigel Ward, Link Affiliates, Australia

"From TIFF to JPEG 2000? Preservation Planning at the Bavarian State Library Using a Collection of Digitized 16th Century Printings" by Hannes Kulovits and Andreas Rauber, Vienna University of Technology; and Anna Kugler, Markus Brantl, Tobias Beinert, Astrid Schoger, Bavarian State Library

"A Low Cost, Low Memory Footprint, SQL and Servlet-based Solution for Searching Archived Images and Documents in Digital Collections" by Cristina Tofan and Daniel Tofan, Eastern Kentucky University

"Measuring Citation Advantages of Open Accessibility" by Samson C. Soong, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

"The Importance of Digital Libraries in Joint Educational Programmes: A Case Study of a Master of Science Programme Involving Organizations in Ghana and the Netherlands" by Marga Koelen, International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation; and Jonathan Arthur Quaye-Ballard, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

This is a test of the new Twitter 10KYearBlog feed

Yup, in case you didn't notice the widget in the sidebar, The Ten Thousand Year Blog is on Twitter as http://www.twitter.com/10KYearBlog. Essentially, posts made to my WordPress.com version get posted on Twitter. Carpe tweeti!

Chain, chain, chain, the new CHAIN of digital humanities organizations

An important announcement about a new meta-organization of digital humanities organizations, the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks or CHAIN (via DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK, 02009 11 12):

A meeting was held at King's College, London, on 26th and 27th October 2009, between representatives of the following networks, infrastructure projects, and planning initiatives working with digital technologies in the Arts and
Humanities:

• arts-humanities.net (http://www.arts-humanities.net/)



• ADHO - Association of Digital Humanities Organisations (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/)




• CLARIN (http://www.clarin.eu/)



• centerNet (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/centernet/)



• DARIAH (http://www.dariah.eu/)



• NoC - Network of Expert Centres in Great Britain and Ireland (http://www.arts-humanities.net/noc/)



• Project Bamboo (http://projectbamboo.org/)



• TextGrid (http://www.textgrid.de/)

We identified the current fragmented environment where researchers operate in separate areas with often mutually incompatible technologies as a barrier to fully exploiting the transformative role that these technologies can potentially play. We resolved that our present, proposed, and future activities are interdependent and complementary and should be oriented towards working together to overcome barriers, and to create a shared environment where technology services can interoperate and be sustained, thus enabling new forms of research in the Humanities.

In order to achieve these goals we agreed to form the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks – CHAIN. CHAIN will act as a forum forareas of shared interest to its participants, including:

• advocacy for an improved digital research infrastructure for the Humanities;



• development of sustainable business models;



• promotion of technical interoperability of resources, tools and services;



• promotion of good practice and relevant technical standards;



• development of a shared service infrastructure;



• coordinating approaches to legal and ethical issues;



• interactions with other relevant computing infrastructure initiatives;



• widening the geographical scope of our coalition.

CHAIN will promote an open culture where experiences, including successes and failures, can be shared and discussed, in order to support and promote the use of digital technologies in research in the Humanities.

Digitization Activities planning document from the U.S. Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative

The U.S. Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative's Still Image Working Group has released a new planning document: Digitization Activities: Project Planning and Management Outline. FADGI was established in 2007 and consists of two working groups: "The Federal Agencies Still Image Digitization Working Group will concentrate its efforts on image content such as books, manuscripts, maps, and photographic prints and negatives. The Federal Agencies Audio-Visual Working Group is focusing its work on sound, video, and motion picture film."

Programmable Web, get your APIs and Mashups here

Programmable Web is a terrific resource for APIs and mashups. You'll even find contests here. Many of these APIs and mashups involving mapping applications. Among the newest players in this growing field is the mobile device company Nokia which is bringing out an open API platform called Ovi. The Ovi for Developers site has a lot of great information and tools.

Notes on Photographs wiki from George Eastman House

Notes on Photographs, George Eastman House, is a wiki that was launched in June 02009 and according to the About page "was begun as the Photograph Connoisseurship Resource by Luisa Casella during her 4th cycle fellowship in the Advanced Residency Program in Photograph Conservation at George Eastman House from 2005-2007."

CACAO Project offers some sweet spots for cross-language searches

The European Union's CACAO Project, a two-year project that started in December 02007 and ends in November 02009, developed a cross-language search and retrieval platform so Europeans could search for digital content and bibliographic citations in any EU language and see the results in the language of their search. Three subject portals for public access were also created: Geography, History of Europe and Mathematics. The European Library will adopt the CACAO infrastructure.

Archive of American Television (EmmyTVLegends.org)

Back in August 02009 my local newspaper reported on a story from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences about a new Web site it was launching on September 1, 02009 at the URL TVlegends.org that "will have more than 2,000 hours of interviews, some of them more than three hours long, with luminaries like Burnaby-raised Michael J. Fox and Montreal native William Shatner." Today I went looking for this site only to discover it doesn't exist and the URL is likely EmmyTVLegends.org, otherwise known as the Archive of American Televison. The Web site indeed states that "The Archive has collected hundreds of in-depth video interviews with TV's greatest legends and pioneers -- now available worldwide. The interviews can be watched all the way through, or browsed by person, show, topic or profession. Enjoy the site and be sure to visit often -- new interviews and indexes are added regularly." For anyone in cultural studies this site has to be a dream come true. Congratulations to the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation for making this terrific resource freely available.

ECA 2010: 8th European Conference on Digital Archiving, April 02010

The 8th European Conference on Digital Archiving, abbreviated as ECA 2010, will be held in Geneva between April 28 and 30, 02010. Online registration for the conference is open. One of the speakers at the closing session is Charles Leadbeater, currently known for his book on ideasourcing called We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production: The Power of Mass Creativity (02008).

1,000 Year Web Page

The 1,000 Year Web Page looks like a fascinating plan, but, as with any private enterprise on the Internet, it's buyer beware. This is the ultimate in online vanity publishing and at $59 it does seem too good to be true for 1,000 years, especially since the best longevity plan the two men behind the scheme could come up with was a cadre of volunteers. Currently, the company is accepting page reservations only at a cost of $10. Disclosure: I offered to provide them with a critique for a fee of their plan and technical infrastructure but they declined.

Openness and the Future of Higher Education: special issue of IRRODL

The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning published a special issue on Openness and the Future of Higher Education (vol. 10, no. 5, 2009).

JISC infoNet, UK-centric e-learning and records management tools

JISC infoNet is a UK-centric resource filled with all kinds of practical case studies, toolkits, integrating Web technology into education and publications around information and records management, e-learning and curriculum development. Hosted and maintained by Northumbria University, it's a service of JISC Advance.

Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing

A wonderful Web site titled Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing brings to life some of the many stories behind the writing and production of Canadian books. According to the Overview page:

The aim of this website is to highlight archival documents relating to Canadian publishing history. These documents – letters, manuscripts, photographs, diaries, artwork, audio interviews, financial records, and many other materials – are found in publishers’ and authors’ fonds and collections at McMaster University Library, Queen’s University Archives, and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.

Emerging and senior scholars from across Canada have written over 90 case studies – short essays – based on these materials. Authors were asked to consult the archives and choose documents to help them tell a story relating to Canadian publishing. The site was launched on 8 October 2009.

Source: ARCAN-L mailing list, 02009 10 19

First international Open Access Week, October 19-23, 02009

The first international Open Access Week celebration was launched on October 19 and ends on October 23, 02009. According to the Web site's About page,

Open Access Week builds on the momentum started by the student-led national day of action in 2007 and carried by the 120 campuses in 27 countries that celebrated Open Access Day in 2008. 2008 organizers SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition), the PLoS (The Public Library of Science), and Students for FreeCulture welcome new key contributors for 2009: OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook); Open Access Directory (OAD); and eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries), which will again spearhead events in developing and transitional countries.

Did It?, tell the world and share your stories

And on the travel theme, here's a site I read about in a newspaper on September 12, 02009: Diddit.com, is kind of like a 1,000 Places to See Before You Die for social media fans. Diddit is a product of Ludic Labs and as of October 17, 02009 is in Alpha mode.

Share Your B.C. Adventure Database

Sponsored by British Columbia Magazine, which has not paid me for this endorsement, the Share Your B.C. Adventure Database lets you tell your story about your travel experiences in British Columbia, Canada. There are a large number of travel activities under which you can categorize and search for yours or others travel adventures. You can match these activities to either a specific community or a larger tourism region within the province.

PREMIS Implementation Fair, San Francisco, USA, October 02009

Update for 02009 10 16: Presentations (PowerPoint and support documents) from the PREMIS Implementation Fair are available.

On October 7, 2009, the PREMIS Editorial Committee will sponsor a free, one-day PREMIS Implementation Fair at the Presidio's Officers' Club in San Francisco. The PREMIS Implementation Fair immediately follows iPres 2009, the 6th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects, held in San Francisco on October 5-6.

The PREMIS Implementation Fair is for anyone with some knowledge of PREMIS who might be planning or is already involved in a PREMIS implementation.

Several PREMIS-implementers repositories will present case-studies at the day-long event. Confirmed case studies include:

* University of California San Diego Libraries (Bradley Westbrook, UCSD)

* United States Government Printing Office (Kate Zwaard, GPO)

* Implementation in Italy (Angela Di Iorio, Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale)

* Towards Interoperable Preservation Repositories (TIPR) (Priscilla Caplan, FCLA)


Other case studies will be added to the schedule in the upcoming weeks. Additional panel discussions will focus on the latest in:

* Tools for creating and transforming PREMIS metadata

* Preservation systems

* Implementing PREMIS in METS

* PREMIS conformance issues

* Controlled vocabularies


There will also be time allotted for an open discussion of PREMIS implementation issues.

A draft schedule is at: http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/premis-implementation-fair2009.html

If you have questions about the event or if you think a tool or project from your organization might make an interesting case study at the PREMIS Implementation Fair, feel free to contact the PREMIS Editorial Committee by visiting http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/contact-premis.php or emailing Rebecca Guenther at rgue@loc.gov.

Source: DIGLIB mailing list, 02009 07 15

The Interactive Archivist: Web 2.0 Case Studies

The Interactive Archivist: Case Studies in Utilizing Web 2.0 to Improve the Archival Experience, also known as Web 2.0 and Archives, by J. Gordon Daines III and Cory L. Nimer, is the Society of American Archivist's vehicle for promoting Web 2.0 technology. The site, which bears a date of May 18, 02009, is hosted by the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.

What Is New in Digital Preservation, Issue no. 21 (May-September 02009) available

What's New in Digital Preservation no. 21 covering the period May to September 02009 is available. It's compiled by Najla Rettberg for the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and reviewed by PADI, the National Library of Australia.

Version 2 of Archivist's Toolkit released

Version 2 of the Archivist's Toolkit software, "an open source collection management / metadata authority application funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation" was released on September 30, 02009. According to the announcement on the ARCHIVES & ARCHIVISTS (A&A) LIST,

New features added to AT 2.0
• Revised Digital Object module, so that Digital Object records can be created and managed independent of Resource records.
• Tab delimited Digital Object import
• Batch export of Digital Objects
• Assessment module
• New reports for Digital Object and Assessment modules
• Revision of all other reports (Names, Subjects, Accessions, Resources)
• Improved stylesheets for EAD to PDF and EAD to HTML outputs
• Bug fixes as noted in release notes

New Digital Holocaust Collection from Footnote.com and the U.S. National Archives

Some details about a new digital Holocaust Collection launched on September 29, 02009 by Footnote.com and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration are available on Gary Price's blog The Resource Shelf.

Madrona, an open source museum collections management system

Madrona, an open source museum collections management system, is being launched in its free, community edition and the commercial version in November 02009. Madrona is based on Spectrum, a standard developed in the UK. Madrona is a project of Zero One Design, a Victoria, British Columbia, company that works with museums and art galleries to create Web sites.

Ten Thousand Year Blog (June 02003 to September 02008) lives again

For those of you who missed The Ten Thousand Year Blog that lived between June 02003 and September 02008 (just over five years) at http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress, I've resurrected it at http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress. This is a semi-inactive version to which I'll make changes from time to time, so for the current WordPress.com version continue to read The Ten Thousand Year Blog at http://digitalarchivist.wordpress.com. I've decided not to renew and link my domain name davidmattison.ca to the current WordPress version, but there will be a pointer to the current version on the start page of http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress.

BagIt: Transferring Content for Digital Preservation, a Library of Congress video on the WePreserve.eu YouTube channel

The announcement on DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK (02009 09 28) contains this blurb about "bags" and the BagIt specification and open source utilities (SourceForge and RubyForge) for transferring digital content which is described in this short video, "BagIt: Transferring Content for Digital Preservation", a Library of Congress video on the WePreserve.eu YouTube channel:

The Library of Congress - with the California Digital Library and Stanford University - has developed guidelines for creating and moving standardized digital containers, called "bags."

Bags have a sparse, uncomplicated structure that transcends differences in institutional data, data architecture, formats and practices. A bag's minimal but essential metadata is machine readable, which makes it easy to automate ingest of the data. Bags can be sent over computer networks or physically moved using portable storage devices. Bags have built-in inventory checking, to help ensure that content transferred intact. Bags are flexible and can work in many different settings, including situations where the content is located in more than one place. This video describes the preparation and transfer of data over the network in bags.

BagIt: Transferring Content for Digital Preservation

September/October 2009 issue of D-Lib Magazine is out

The September/October 2009 issue of D-Lib Magazine is out. Among the articles are

• "Establishing Trust in a Chain of Preservation: The TRAC Checklist Applied to a Data Staging Repository (DataStaR)" by Gail Steinhart and Dianne Dietrich, Cornell University; and Ann Green, Yale University




• "Subject-based Information Retrieval within Digital Libraries Employing LCSHs" by Ioannis Papadakis and Michalis Stefanidakis, University of Ionio; and Konstantinos Kyprianos and Rosa Mavropodi, University of Piraeus




• "Analysing Selection for Digitisation: Current Practices and Common Incentives" by Bart Ooghe, Heritage Cell Waasland; and Dries Moreels, Flemish Theatre Institute (BE)




• "OA Network: An Integrative Open Access Infrastructure for Germany" by Uwe Mueller, Robin Malitz, and Peter Schirmbacher, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin; and Thomas Severiens, Universitat Osnabruck




• "Curriculum for Digital Libraries: An Analytical Study of Indian LIS Curricula" by R.S.R.Varalakshmi, Andhra University

Expanding Horizons: Painting and Photography of American and Canadian Landscapes exhibition

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts' exhibition Expanding Horizons: Painting and Photography of American and Canadian Landscape 1860-1918, which will be travelling to the Vancouver Art Gallery, is a spectacular assemblage of some of the best landscape art and photography of its period. Except for Emily Carr whose earliest explorations of Northwest Coast First Nations villages are included, none of the Canadian photographers or artists lived west of Ontario. The Museum's Web site includes every artwork and photograph in the show, so it's well worth exploring. The Museum is also encouraging on-site and remote visitors to share their own comments and photographs of American and Canadian landscapes.

Sounding off archivally at the British Library

The British Library has launched an online archives of 28,000 sound recordings (2,000 hours) that date back to 1898 when wax cylinders were all the rage. According to the library's announcement of 2009 09 04:

The Archival Sound Recordings project makes a variety of music, spoken word, and environmental sounds from the British Library Sound Archive available online and is part of the British Library's ongoing commitment to improving access and ensuring the preservation of invaluable primary source materials for research, teaching and learning. All recordings on Archival Sound Recordings can be accessed from British Library reading rooms and are available for free to licensed UK higher and further education institutions. In addition, where permission has been granted, these recordings can be listened to by the public online at: http://sounds.bl.uk.

The digitisation of the sounds was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) which supports education and research in the use of information and communications technology: www.jisc.ac.uk.The British Library’s Archival Sound Recording project is part of the JISC Digitisation Programme, which has received over £22 million in funding from the Higher Education Funding Councils for England and Wales to make available a wide range of heritage and scholarly resources of national importance. This includes sound recordings, moving pictures, newspapers, maps, images, cartoons, census data, journals and parliamentary papers for use by the UK further and higher education communities.

Source: DIG_REF@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU (02009 09 07)

City of Vancouver Archives does Twitter

The City of Vancouver Archives launched its Twitter feed on September 3, 02009. I'm fairly certain they are the first government archives in British Columbia with this distinction.

The RSS feed URL is http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/61024030.rss

Dutch national digital preservation survey summary published in English

The Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation published an English summary of its 1 July 02009 report, A Future for Our Digital Memory: Permanent Access to Information in the Netherlands: Interim Report. You can also read the full Dutch report.

Science historians and digital curators grapple with digital data deluge

On August 28, 02009 the Wall Street Journal (online edition) published an article by Robert Lee Hotz titled "A Data Deluge Swamps Science Historians." Here are some notes I made of a printout of this article:

Dr. Jeremy Leighton John is the first curator of eManuscripts at the British Library and has assembled his own museum of dead media in order to access obsolete digital data storage media. At the time of the Wall Street Journal article, he was also on the tail end of a research program at the British Library called Digital Lives.

Update for February 21, 02011: I searched the British Library Web pages (10,000+) for "eManuscripts" and only came up with 4 hits. I'm not sure what this means, but it is rather surprising to me.

Digital curator Sayeed Choudhoury at Johns Hopkins University is "principal investigator for a national consortium of data preservationists called the Data Conservancy." (hyperlink added)

Update for February 21, 02011: On the News and Events page of the Data Conservancy site, the only news between the awarding of a huge ($20 million!) grant in October 2009 for the Data Conservancy's work and today were a link to this online article "Rethinking scientific data management" (October 27, 02010, isgtw.org), two video interviews of a student and a professor, an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education "A Digital Library Guru Discusses New Rules on Sharing Scientific Data" (January 28, 02011) and a February 14, 02011 report of an award to professor Christine L. Borgman for her academic research -- no mention, however, in the report of the Data Conservancy. She was also the professor whose video interview is among the news and events. So where has the $20 million gone over the past 18 months or so. On the Objectives page, the answer is given:

The first 18 months of DC were focused on prototyping, which have created the foundation for full-fledged preservation, improved conduct of science, and developed greater insights into current science and frameworks for new forms of science. In the next three years, DC will:

* Augment the open and flexible architecture for data curation and data synthesis.
* Extend the current data model or define new data models.
* Develop additional pilots and proofs of concept.
* Research the full problem space of CI development and cross-disciplinary science.
* Strengthen connection points between DC socio-technical research and infrastructure.
* Create a DC operational environment that provides data management support.
* Build capacity through continued community engagement of various stakeholders.
* Expand upon initial sustainability planning through case studies and further market analysis.

The University of New Mexico has a data-preservation network it calls DataONE. It also received a $20 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the same amount it gave the Data Conservancy. Ironically or not, DataOne Director William (Bill) Michener is quoted as saying "We lose an awful lot of data that is collected with public funds."

Update for February 21, 02011: According to its first-year report (August 23, 02010), DataONE appears to have accomplished a lot more than the Data Conservancy.

The article concludes with mentions of Japanese researchers who early in 02009 revealed a "memory chip designed to last for centuries" and California research physicists who in April 02009 "published the design of of a digital device that could store data for a billion years, at least in theory."

Update for February 21, 02011: Here's an article from SEED Magazine about the billion-year data storage device.

Inventing the digital dark ages one encryption key at a time

Computer scientists at the University of Washington, according to this New York Times story, "New Technology to Make Digital Data Self-Destruct" (02009 07 20), have invented a method for letting digital data destroy itself. The article by John Markoff mentions "unexplored legal issues surrounding the use of their technology. For example, certain laws require that corporations archive e-mails and make them accessible." No kidding.

The system from the University of Washington is called Vanish. Perfect name.

Library à la Carte, a free content management system for libraries

Oregon State University's free content management system for libraries, Library à la Carte, looks like a real winner. System and technical requirements are

* Ruby
* MySQL Database
* Apache HTTP Server
* RMagick Graphics Interface
* ReCaptcha Key
* Recaptcha Gem
* Google API Key

You can read about the development of the software by OSU staff and alumni through various papers and presentations.

Library à la Carte was the first program track presented by OCLC Research in its free Technical Advances for Innovation in Cultural Heritage Institutions (TAI CHI) Webinar series that began on August 26, 02009.

United States National Archives goes Web 2.0 bigtime

The United States National Archives and Records Administration, NARA for short, has gone Web 2.0 bigtime: a new blog NARAtions was launched in August 02009 and they are also accessible through YouTube, Flickr and Facebook, the last with two facets: events and news, and research and genealogy.

You'll find more details about their Web 2.0 and social media outreach work at http://www.archives.gov/social-media/.

Source: Archives and Archivists mailing list, 02009 08 17

New Zealand launches digital continuity action plan

The government of New Zealand launched its digital continuity action plan on August 6, 02009. According to the announcement, "the Digital Continuity Action Plan was the first government-mandated public sector approach to digital continuity anywhere in the world. While other countries had separate initiatives – none had developed a unified public sector approach." Archives New Zealand is the lead agency.

My new blog, The Doomsday Blog

I've been thinking about all the hype around the end of the world that's scheduled for December 21, 2012. Now if the ancient Mayans had somehow synchronized their timekeeping efforts with the Western world's calendar and had the world ending on December 20, 2012 (get it, 20122012 as some people might express the date), I might have been a believer, but then again, maybe all the big disasters are happening on December 20 and the world officially ends on December 21, 2012.

So I've decided it's a great time for me to start a new blog, The Doomsday Blog, that gives my point of view and yours on the ways and days till the world ends through both scientific evidence and fictional creations. To help put this in perspective, I'm not insensitive to real-world disasters and have supported various Canadian Red Cross relief efforts. WordPress.com where my new blog is hosted has a widget that links to SocialVibe. I've set up a widget badge to support the American Red Cross in its disaster relief efforts. I hope you'll consider making a donation if you're in the United States.

Want to try a cloud computing OS now?

If you're itching to try an open source cloud computing operating system now a la Google OS, take a look at eyeOS, which appears to be a fully functional Web-based operating system. A public server is available at http://eyeos.info. Took me a while to find it, but to close your eyeOS session on the public server, there's a double-circle icon in the lower right corner of the screen. Clicking that brings up a menu with the Close Session option.

I think the Google developers might want to save themselves a lot of work and simply ask their bosses to buy up this open source project.

Center of Oral History & Digital Storytelling, Concordia University, Canada

Since I started my archival career in part as an oral historian, I'm delighted to see a revitalization of this important tool through examples at and a software application under development by the Center of Oral History & Digital Storytelling at Concordia University, Canada. The Oral History Research Lab is finishing work on software for building oral history collections that it calls Stories Matter. Although described as open source software, the application uses Adobe AIR, but can run on Windows, Mac or Linux platforms. According to the Stories Matter blog post (2009 07 05),

"In its current state, Stories Matter is free, open source software that is compatible with MacIntosh and PC operating systems. It allows for the archiving of digital video and audio materials, enabling users to annotate, analyze, evaluate and export materials, as well as tag, index, search, and browse within interviews, sessions, and clips or across entire collections. ... the development of Phase II of Stories Matter, which will begin on July 15th. Its purpose is to enable increased collaboration among oral historians by providing an intuitive online database tool that can assist group projects and encourage public engagement. Phase II of Stories Matter is scheduled to be completed in December of 2009, with a public launch to follow shortly thereafter."

Among its projects are the Working Class Public History Website and the Sturgeon Falls Mill Closing Project.

Portal of Architectural Image-based Modeling

This is really cool, a portal devoted to 2D and 3D modeling of architectural works. The site contains articles, tutorials, experiences, resources and a gallery of images, videos and 3D models. User submissions are encouraged. The portal is the work of a group of French organizations, among them a body with the interesting name of MAP [UMR 694].

New York State Archives launches RSS news feed

I'm not sure why it is that some government jurisdictions, especially at the state or provincial level, have been slow to adopt RSS as a publicity and outreach tool, so it's good to see that the New York State Archives has launched a RSS news feed (feed URL). According to the announcement (Archives & Archivists mailing list, 02009 07 16),

"Subscribers will be among the first to find out about Archives events, new records brought into the Archives, press releases, resources for state agencies and local governments, and any major changes to the website - such as new guides to records, new educational sites for
teachers and students, and award and grant opportunities."

D-Lib Magazine July/August 02009 issue is out

From the announcement on various mailing lists (02009 07 15):

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

This issue contains three articles, seven conference and workshop 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 East Carolina University's Joyner Library Digital Collections, courtesy of Gretchen Gueguen, East Carolina University.


The articles include:

Measuring Mass Text Digitization Quality and Usefulness: Lessons Learned from Assessing the OCR Accuracy of the British Library's 19th Century Online Newspaper Archive
Simon Tanner and Trevor Munoz, King's College London; and Pich Hemy Ros, Digital Divide Data

21st Century Shipping: Network Data Transfer to the Library of Congress
Michael Ashenfelder, Library of Congress

Semantic Integration of Collection Description: Combining CIDOC/CRM and Dublin Core Collections Application Profile
Irene Lourdi and Christos Papatheodorou, Ionian University; and Martin Doerr, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas

EmeraldView, open-source PHP frontend for the Greenstone digital library system

From the announcement to the WEB4LIB mailing list (02009 07 10):

"The systems team at Touro College Libraries is pleased to announce the beta release of EmeraldView, a new open-source PHP frontend for the Greenstone digital library system.

More information is available at the project website at http://emeraldview.tourolib.org/

A live demo is running at http://emeraldview-demo.tourolib.org/

We would be excited if anyone has a bit of time to contribute to the project, particularly in the design department, as the user interface is still waiting for a visionary."

Second international m-Libraries Conference (July 02009) presentations available

According to this blog post from the University of British Columbia's Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, presentations are now available from "The second international m-Libraries Conference, held and sponsored by the University of British Columbia in conjunction with Athabasca University,The Open University and Thompson Rivers University...." The conference occurred on June 23 and 24, 02009 at UBC’s Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and the First Nations Longhouse. The blog post went on to note the conference objectives:

"This conference aimed to explore and share work carried out in libraries around the world to deliver services and resources to users ‘on the move,’ via a growing plethora of mobile and hand-held devices. The conference will bring together researchers, technical developers, managers and library practitioners to exchange experience and expertise and generate ideas for future developments."

Chrome OS from Google, is it truly time for the Net as the Computer?

I'm very skeptical myself given issues around computer security and sustainability of cloud computing resources of Google's announcement of its Chrome Operating System that will turn the Net into a Computer, or something like that. How do you feel about this question? Would you buy a computer running Chrome OS and why? If existing netbook computers are perfectly capable of handling Windows XP or Linux and doing all the things that one does today in an online environment, what incentive or benefit do you think Chrome OS besides offering users more of a choice of operating systems?

Some of the media stories about Chrome OS are, like my attitude, less than enthusiastic.

Photographing the American Dream: the Maynard L. Parker Collection, Huntington Library, California

As announced on the ARCHIVES AND ARCHIVISTS mailing list (02009 07 07), the Maynard L. Parker Collection at the Huntington Library in California is now accessible online:

"The archive of noted architectural photographer Maynard L. Parker, who captured midcentury modern architecture on the West Coast and the nation, is now cataloged and accessible online through The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. The archive consists of some 58,000 photographs, negatives, and other materials documenting the modern home and garden in mid-20th-century America. The project was funded by a "We the People" grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Parker (1901-1976) was a Los Angeles-based photographer whose work captured a postwar era of suburban middle class homes that celebrated an indoor-outdoor lifestyle and burgeoning consumer culture. From the late 1930s to the early 1970s, his images were featured in many of the nation's top shelter magazines, including House Beautiful, Architectural Digest, Better Homes & Gardens, and Sunset."

According to the Huntington page on the collection, "The archive is organized by photographic assignment (identified as “projects”) and is searchable by keyword and across multiple fields in a database. Many projects also include selected digital images made from original collection material. See the finding aid through the Online Archive of California for a complete description of the archive and its contents." The collection is also linked through Calisphere, a digital collections service of the University of California Libraries designed for educators.

Illinois shoulders ATLAS (Alliance's Trail to Learning-casts and Syndicated Sites)

Illinois, long a leader in the digital world, has put together another fascinating tool called ATLAS (Alliance's Trail to Learning-casts and Syndicated Sites). A project of the Alliance Library System and LearningTimes, ATLAS, according to announcement posted to various mailing lists,

"is a new set of social media tools ALS is using to promote information and historical photos about Illinois history. ALS and LearningTimes partnered to create this innovative and exciting new model of collaborative digital imaging collections using multimedia and social networking tools to bring historical times to life, and involving a community at large in its creation. The project debuted June 29th with an online conference. A recording of the event is available at http://www.atlaspodcasts.org/webcast-2009-06/. The Cullom-Davis Library at Bradley University will serve as the first partner library to produce additional podcasts on Illinois history to be added to the site. They were involved in the first set of ten podcasts, providing the material for the five from Peoria.

At the heart of the ATLAS project are digital images of historic people, places, documents and objects. The images are combined with audio descriptions and placed on a map of Illinois to produce an engaging new interactive learning model for libraries and their customers. The project began with ten short high-quality podcasts about nineteenth century Illinois and famous women from the first hundred years of statehood. Produced in association with LearningTimes, each podcast spotlights a specific person or topic area. ATLAS visitors are able to mouse over a city in Illinois and select a story of interest, featuring engaging commentary and information. A searchable database allows users to search sound files, narratives and photographs. The programs may be enjoyed right from the ATLAS site, or downloaded to a portable audio player."

The site includes an Add Your Podcast component for those wishing to participate in the building of more online history about Illinois and its people.

Collaborative Electronic Records Project (CERP) email preservation parser available

The Collaborative Electronic Records Project (CERP), a partnership of the Smithsonian Institution Archives and the Rockefeller Archive Center that wrapped up in December 02008, has released its CERP Email Parser as an open source application. Here's more information from an announcement that's been circulated to various mailing list beginning on July 6, 02009:

"The Email Parser ... migrates an email account and its messages into a single XML file using the Email Account XML Schema developed in collaboration with the North Carolina State Archives and the EMCAP project.

The CERP Email Parser migrates an email account in MBOX format into XML, using the schema to preserve the full body of messages, together with their attachments, and keeps intact the account’s internal organization (e.g., an Inbox containing subfolders labeled Policies, Special Events, and Projects). The CERP team successfully preserved email accounts from a variety of applications including Microsoft Outlook, AppleMail, LotusNotes, and Netscape. All email messages retain their full header content, in contrast to some tools produced in earlier research efforts.

The parser runs on a workstation in a virtual machine environment compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and some Unix platforms. CERP testing was limited to the Windows XP environment. The CERP Email Parser is licensed as open source software so that it may be used, supported, and enhanced by all organizations that adopt it.

The Email Parser is designed to address the task of preserving bodies of email, such as an account, without requiring access to the original email systems. Still, email accounts from active email systems may also be preserved using this tool. The CERP Email Parser will be featured in the pre-conference workshop “Achieving Email Account Preservation With XML” at the Society of American Archivists 2009 Annual Meeting this August."

Green moth on green door, evolution in action?

For several years I've been watching the colors of moths outside my front door on the yellow wall of my house. Although I did not photograph it, one day in June 02009 I saw a distinctive yellow moth unlike the dark or white colored moths that usually rest on the wall and sometimes the door. On July 4, 02009 I was absolutely stunned to see a green moth at rest on my green front door. I had never noticed green moths before. I would like an explanation around this phenomenon. Is this truly evolution in action?

Here are two photos I took, one of the whole door with the moth barely visible resting on the bottom trim of the top panel and the other an extreme closeup. Click on each photo to see a larger version.

[caption id="attachment_2780" align="aligncenter" width="141" caption="Green moth on green door"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_2781" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Closeup of green moth on green door"][/caption]

RODA open source digital repository software archives from Portugal

From the announcement on DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK (02009 06 21):

RODA is an open source digital repository specially designed for archives, with long-term preservation and authenticity as its primary objectives. Created by the Portuguese Directorate-General for the Portuguese Archives in partnership with the University of Minho, it was designed to support the most recent archival standards and become a trustworthy digital repository.

RODA embodies high level standards of security, scalability and usability. Its centralized architecture enables an easy management while the self-deposit ingest tools and workflow procedures account for the scalability of the human-resources.

RODA's main features are:

- Based on standards (OAIS, METS, EAD, PREMIS, etc.)
- Long-term Preservation and Authenticity
- TRAC compliant (Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification)
- Secure (SSL, fine grained permissions)
- Scalable (SOA)
- Clean web user interface and ingest desktop tool
- For archivists, for producers, for consumers
- Open source

A DEMO installation of RODA is now open to the general public at the URL: http://roda.di.uminho.pt

RODA, which has a bilingual Portuguese and English language, appears to be built on Fedora. A RODA ingest tool, RODA-in, is available for Windows or any Java-enabled platform under the Pre-Ingest menu. It does not appear as though the software itself is available for downloading.

Celebrate 200 Years of Darwin with Amazon.com

Amazon.com jumped on the Darwin twin anniversary bandwagon with this page of books by and about Darwin and his radical theory of biological evolution published in his 1859 bestselling book On the Origin of Species.

Google Wave generating a tsunami of interest

I guess you saw that one coming. Check out the official Google Wave preview. Lots of hype that you can read about through this Google search. Since it's dependent on this protocol, don't forget to go over the Google Wave Federation Protocol to learn even more. This is what the Google Wave API says about Google Wave:

Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

Scoopler (beta) real-time search results

Here's an impressive looking proof-of-concept undergoing beta testing: Scoopler, a search engine that gives you real-time search results. This is a screenshot:

WARC file format published as an international standard

The big news today in the Web preservation world is the publication of the WARC file format as an international standard. Here's most of the announcement as circulated to various mailing lists:

The International Internet Preservation Consortium is pleased to announce the publication of the WARC file format as an international

standard: ISO 28500:2009, Information and documentation -- WARC file format.

[http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=44717]

For many years, heritage organizations have tried to find the most appropriate ways to collect and keep track of World Wide Web material using web-scale tools such as web crawlers. At the same time, these organizations were concerned with the requirement to archive very large numbers of born-digital and digitized files. A need was for a container format that permits one file simply and safely to carry a very large number of constituent data objects (of unrestricted type, including many binary types) for the purpose of storage, management, and exchange.

Another requirement was that the container need only minimal knowledge of the nature of the objects.

The WARC format is expected to be a standard way to structure, manage and store billions of resources collected from the web and elsewhere. It is an extension of the ARC format [http://www.archive.org/web/researcher/ArcFileFormat.php ], which has been used since 1996 to store files harvested on the web. WARC format offers new possibilities, notably the recording of HTTP request headers, the recording of arbitrary metadata, the allocation of an identifier for every contained file, the management of duplicates and of migrated records, and the segmentation of the records. WARC files are intended to store every type of digital content, either retrieved by HTTP or another protocol.

The motivation to extend the ARC format arose from the discussion and experiences of the International Internet Preservation Consortium [ http://netpreserve.org/ ], whose core mission is to acquire, preserve and make accessible knowledge and information from the Internet for future generations. IIPC Standards Working Group put forward to ISO

TC46/SC4/WG12 a draft presenting the WARC file format. The draft was accepted as a new Work Item by ISO in May 2005.

Over a period of four years, the ISO working group, with the Bibliothèque nationale de France [http://www.bnf.fr/ ] as convener, collaborated closely with IIPC experts to improve the original draft.

The WG12 will continue to maintain [http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/ ] the standard and prepare its future revision.

Standardization offers a guarantee of durability and evolution for the WARC format. It will help web archiving entering into the mainstream activities of heritage institutions and other branches, by fostering the development of new tools and ensuring the interoperability of collections. Several applications are already WARC compliant, such as the Heritrix [http://crawler.archive.org/ ] crawler for harvesting, the WARC tools [http://code.google.com/p/warc-tools/ ] for data management and exchange, the Wayback Machine [http://archive-access.sourceforge.net/projects/wayback], NutchWAX [http://archive-access.sourceforge.net/projects/nutch] and other search tools [http://code.google.com/p/search-tools/] for access. The international recognition of the WARC format and its applicability to every kind of digital object will provide strong incentives to use it within and beyond the web archiving community.

A press release is available on the IIPC website:

http://netpreserve.org/press/pr20090601.php

What Is New in Digital Preservation, Issue no. 20 (January-April 02009) available

What’s New in Digital Preservation no. 20 covering the period January to April 02009 is available. It’s compiled by Najla Rettberg for the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and reviewed by PADI, the National Library of Australia.

Journal of Information Architecture inaugural issue, Spring 02009, is out

The Journal of Information Architecture inaugural issue, Volume 1, issue 1, Spring 02009, is now available online at http://journalofia.org/. According to an announcement I received,

The Call for Papers for the Autumn 2009 issue, Issue 2, Volume 1, is open and available at http://journalofia.org/cfp/.

The Journal of Information Architecture is an international peer-reviewed scholarly journal whose aim is to facilitate the systematic development of the scientific body of knowledge in the field of information architecture.

This first issue is freely available to the public. Each subsequent current issue will be accessible first to Information Architecture Institute http://www.iainstitute.org members, while the archives will be available to everyone.

DCC Digital Curation Manual: call for authors and topics

The UK's Digital Curation Centre is looking for topics and authors for its collaborative Digital Curation Manual. According to the announcement on various digital preservation mailing lists (02009 05 05), "A list of current instalments and proposed new topics and abstracts are available on our website (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resource/curation-manual/chapters/)." If you are interested in writing for this manual, contact Joy Davidson, DCC Acting Associate Director, at british.editor@erpanet.org by June 1st 2009. Her announcement included a Microsoft Word proposal template, but I wasn't able to include it and I couldn't find it on the Digital Curation Manual site. And did I mention they're paying for your contribution?

DigitalPreservation Europe joins YouTube

From the announcement on various digital preservation mailing lists (02009 05 05):

As many of you will know DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) are committed to making digital preservation materials available to the widest possible audience and to breaking down barriers to access. The release of a new series of short animations introducing and explaining digital preservation problems and solutions for the general public marks an important step reaching this goal.

We are delighted to announce that the first animation is now ready for viewing at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbBa6Oam7-w

We believe these cartoons encapsulate complex digital preservation issues and problems and explain them in a funny and easy to follow plot. Please fee free to make use of these animations as part of your own work to raise awareness and understanding about digital preservation.

Future animations will be released on our You Tube Channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/wepreserve

To learn more about DPE or to access our suite of preservation resources and tools, please go to http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.org.

Celebrating Evolution the Web Way, Searcher magazine, May 02009

My most recent article for Searcher: The Magazine for Database Professionals was published today. It's titled "Celebrating Evolution the Web Way" and commemorates the 200th anniversary of naturalist Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary in November 02009 of his book On the Origin of Species. The article is not online for free but will be available through ProQuest and other full-text commercial databases licensed by Information Today.

[caption id="attachment_2750" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="Searcher magazine cover, May 02009"][/caption]

ICA-AtoM (MemoryBC) workshop at AABC Conference

Two of the crew from Artefactual Systems, the boss himself Peter van Garderen and systems archivist/analyst and consultant Evelyn McLellan, along with AABC education coordinator Kelly Stewart, presented a great workshop around ICA-AtoM, the open source archival description tool under development by Peter's company for the International Council on Archives.

The Archives Association of British Columbia adopted ICA-AtoM as a replacement for the existing process and computing infrastructure around the British Columbia Archival Union List or BCAUL (B-Call). Come November 02009 when it will be officially launched, BCAUL will be rebranded as MemoryBC. Workshop participants got a taste of the current iteration of ICA-AtoM through a LiveCD version in the UBC SLAIS computer lab. I volunteered my services as someone familiar with ICA-AtoM to assist the participants. Peter introduced me as a "power user."

I think most everyone was very excited by the application and had many questions and useful suggestions for Peter. One of the big questions, which I asked, is whether ICA-AtoM will evolve into a full-fledged archival management system and Peter gave an affirmative answer to that.

Artefactual Systems is also now offering Web hosting of ICA-AtoM for institutions at $125/month, a very reasonable cost considering you're getting a phenomenal 100GB of storage for any digital objects you attach to item-level records.

Peter also reported on the workshop on the ICA-AtoM discussion group on Google Groups.

Web 2.0 workshop at the AABC Conference

Thanks to a retired archivist from UBC Library, I was able to borrow a laptop to use in a Web 2.0 workshop at the Archives Association of British Columbia Conference on April 24, 02009 at UBC. A laptop is mandatory and mine wasn't up to the task since a wireless connection was required and my laptop's wireless was temporarily broken.

The workshop was presented by techie Jethro Taylor who works for the Nisga'a Nation school district. After a quick definition of Web 2.0, he showed an interesting video by Kansas State University Professor Dr. Michael Wesch on digitalethnography. He pointed out that the video kept coming back to the importance of metadata.

Some of the Web 2.0 tools he described were blogs, wikis, RSS, tags, and crowdsourcing. He had us use Google Reader to subscribe to a RSS feed. I learned through Google Reader that I have at least 202 subscribers to the current iteration of The Ten Thousand Year Blog, which I consider pretty remarkable considering that people had to make a conscious effort to subscribe. This took some time because the UBC wireless connection went down more than once. He wanted us to set up a blog but ran out of time. He talked about wikis and pointed out a sandbox wiki he set up at http://archivist.wikispaces.com. Heck, I set up my own because Wikispaces participates in OpenID so I was able to use my WordPress.com ID to get into Wikispaces and create http://digitalarchivist.wikispaces.com.

Because of the wireless problems we were all experiencing, the workshop didn't go as smoothly as it could have.

I-CHORA 5: Fifth International Conference on the History of Records and Archives, London, UK, July 02010

The Fifth International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (I-CHORA 5) will be held in London, UK, between July 1 and 3, 02010. The title of the conference is "Records, archives and technology: interdependence over time." According to the conference Web site, "The conference will explore this subject from a historical perspective, but will interpret it as broadly as possible. It will consider the evolving interrelationships between records, archives and any technology, not just the digital technology of our own time; and will embrace any kind of interdependence, including the role, challenges or opportunities of technology in creating, maintaining or using records. It will provide an opportunity to examine these topics from the standpoint of different disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, history, archival science, computer science, law and literary and cultural studies." A call for papers is available.

The Digital Dilemma report, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

I'd been curious about The Digital Dilemma: Strategic Issues in Archiving and Accessing Digital Motion Picture Materials report, published in November 02007, from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences's Science and Technology Council and was pleased to find a link to a page through which it can be downloaded as a PDF file.

Source: Library of Congress, Digital Preservation Newsletter, April 02009

Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training eBook

Athabasca University Press has published a paperback and eBook editions of Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training, edited by Mohamed Ally. According to the AU Press blurb,

This collection is for anyone interested in the use of mobile technology for various distance learning applications. Readers will discover how to design learning materials for delivery on mobile technology and become familiar with the best practices of other educators, trainers, and researchers in the field, as well as the most recent initiatives in mobile learning research. Businesses and governments can learn how to deliver timely information to staff using mobile devices. Professors can use this book as a textbook for courses on distance education, mobile learning, and educational technology.

You can download the entire Creative Commons Licensed eBook edition or just the individual chapters.

Society of American Archivists ePublications

The Society of American Archivists has a growing list of ePublications, "edited monographs, case studies, and formal papers that have gone through a review process. These professional publications are available online free of charge."

Governance and Recordkeeping Around The World newsletter debuts from the Library and Archives Canada

From the announcement on the ARCAN-L mailing list (2009 04 15):

Library and Archives Canada is pleased to announce the debut of our online newsletter entitled "Governance and Recordkeeping Around the World".

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/government/news-events/007001-1000-e.html

Published regularly, the newsletter explores and highlights issues pertaining to government and recordkeeping practices in the public and private sector.

This collaborative tool was designed to help readers stay up-to-date with the latest news, events, trends, products and publications in the field of public administration and recordkeeping.

Graphics Atlas available from the Image Permanence Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology

The Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology has released its Graphics Atlas Web application. According to an announcement on the Archives & Archivists (A&A) List (02009 04 15):

Graphics Atlas is a new online resource that brings sophisticated print identification and characteristic exploration tools to archivists, curators, historians, collectors, conservators, educators, and the general public. Initial development of this resource began in 2006.
 
Graphics Atlas has two central web applications. The print identification application guides you through a concise set of representations that replicate the experience of identifying prints using common tools (i.e., a loupe and simple stereomicroscope).

A second application, the Object Explorer, allows you to browse and compare traits across processes using a set of 18 views made with various lighting techniques and magnifications. Characteristics including size, format, color, texture, sheen, and layer structure are explored logically. The Graphics Atlas contains additional web pages devoted to the history of printing technologies expressed through text, images, and diagrams.

The Road to Area 51 - Los Angeles Times

The Road to Area 51 - Los Angeles Times

Posted using ShareThis.

This story reminds me of my one and only UFO sighting when I was growing up in Hawaii. It was around 1963. I was playing in a neighbor's yard and happened to look up and noticed a very high-flying round object, very silver, heading in a northwesterly direction. There was no vapor trail. I later thought it was a weather balloon, but this news story about declassified OXCART files makes me now wonder whether there had indeed been an early overflight of Oahu.

Digital Document Quarterly vol. 8, no. 1 (1Q2009) available

H.M. Gladney's Digital Document Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 1 (1Q2009) is available.

William Mumler the spirit photographer

Though I haven't seen this book, it looks like a great contribution to the literature of ghost photography: The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer by Louis Kaplan, University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Here's a link to a Google search that will lead you to various Web sites about the book. The virtual American Museum of Photography also has a great exhibit on spirit photography called Do You Believe?: A Ghostly Gallery.

Why Darwin Matters to Creationists

Professor skeptic Michael Shermer blogs about a presentation he gave at the University of California at San Diego Biological Science Symposium on April 2, 02009 based on his book Why Darwin Matters and the reaction to his talk by " 'expelled' creationist Caroline Crocker" whose reaction to his talk she blogged about under the title "How Disappointing!" on the Access Research Network's blog The ID Update: News and Commentary Updates for the ID Community.

World Digital Library to launch on April 21, 02009

According to this blurb on its site, "The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research." First proposed to UNESCO in 2005 by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, the WDL is largely a project of the Library of Congress with contributions from UNESCO, IFLA, around three dozen partner institutions and Google, Inc.

SPER (System or Preservation of Electronic Resources) digital preservation testbed, U.S. National Library of Medicine

From the overview of SPER (System or Preservation of Electronic Resources) is a digital preservation testbed created at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, U.S. National Library of Medicine. It's a Java-based client-server system and uses DSpace and the OAIS model for digital archiving. Interestingly enough, "The ingested documents may be searched and retrieved publicly using a Web browser, submitting simple and advanced queries. A MySQL database is used by SPER for storing all ingest and retrieval information." There are several conference papers available about SPER.

SPER was used to create the FDA Notices of Judgment Collection, 1906-1963, "a set of historic medico-legal documents aquired by NLM from the Food and Drug Administration. This collection of more than 40,000 digitized pages, referred to as FDA Notices of Judgment (FDANJ), consists of about 70,000 published notices of judgment (NJ) from court cases, involving products seized under authority of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act."

Museums and the Web 2009 papers online

Papers and demos from the Museums and the Web 2009 conference being held April 15 to 18, 02009 in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, are online. Another great roundup of fascinating museuological practices, concepts and dreams.

Art talk: Curators in Context

Curators in Context is a project of the Ontario Association of Art Galleries and the Artist-Run Centres & Collectives of Ontario to publish Canadian visual art curators talking about their work. The talks are available as bilingual video and as a PDF transcript. Linked to the site is a wiki that attempts to document some of the new vocabulary around new art media.

VoiceThread: please leave a message about this document, video or image

VoiceThread is an interesting free and premium (user-pay) service that lets users comment on videos, documents or images. I came across it in the April 02009 issue of the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) Newsletter where there is a link to its use by the Yukon Historical and Museums Association. They are "posting digital copies of photographs at Yukon Archives online using the Voicethread technology. With Voicethread anyone can post text, audio, or video comments on the photographs. It's part information gathering, part story telling, and part community commentary."