BC Women Artists, Community Arts Council of Greater Victoria

The Community Arts Council of Greater Victoria launched its BC Women Artists Web site on January 30, 02009. Developed with the aid of a BC150 grant, the first phase features artists from the Capital Region. The site will eventually expand to includes women artists from elsewhere in the province. The site includes both living and artists no longer with us.

Archives & Social Studies, vol. 2, no. 2 published

As announced on the Archives & Archivists (A&A) List (02009 01 31):

The City of Cartagena, through the Municipal Archives, has launched Vol. 2 no. 2 of Archives & Social Studies: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Research, available at: http://socialstudies.cartagena.es, and with the following contents:

• Editor's note



• Classics



• James M. O'Toole: On the Idea of Uniqueness Intersections



• Adrian Cunningham: Going global: Developing globally harmonised software specifications for records



• Livia Iacovino: Privacy as a human right in Italian data protection law and its impact on records as evidence and memory



• Andrew May, Simon Cooke: Death, Decency and the Dead-House: The City Morgue in Colonial Melbourne



• Andy Miah: (e)text: Error... 404 Not Found! Or The Disappearance of History Notes



• Steven Aftergood: NARA Cannot Assure Complete Transfer of Bush Records

First Digital Lives Research Conference, British Library, London, England, February 02009

From the announcement on DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK (02009 01 30) for the first Digital Lives Research Conference:

Monday 9 February to Wednesday 11 February 2009 at the British Library, London

Scientists, historians, writers and IT specialists will come together to address the challenge of organising and preserving personal digital archives at the first ever Digital Lives Research Conference, which will be inaugurated by British Library Chief Executive Dame Lynne Brindley.

The conference will address (i) how libraries and archives can help all people whose lives are becoming increasingly digital, particularly academics, to secure, preserve and organise their personal archives of digital photographs, documents, correspondence and multimedia, for themselves and their families; and (ii) the possibility of establishing relationships with providers of online services and social systems technologies.

Topics will range from digital curation and digital preservation to the creation of personal digital archives and their use by historians, biographers and scientists. ...

See: www.bl.uk/digital-lives/conference.html for further details.

The first day of the conference will focus on the latest approaches to curating digital objects and archives. The second day will look at the development of such archives from the point of view of the creators and researchers, writers, scientists and historians. The third day will offer an overview of life online and digital archives as they are developing at present.

The conference is FREE to attend on the 9 and 11 of February, registration is required as space is limited. There is a registration fee of L35 for 10 February, but WAIVERS ARE AVAILABLE.

Please register at the Digital Lives Research Conference 2009 website: www.bl.uk/digital-lives/confreg.html

About The Digital Lives Research Project The Digital Lives Research Project is led by the British Library and is designed to provide a major pathfinding study of personal digital archives, and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The project team is drawn from University College London and University of Bristol as well as the British Library itself.

iPRES2009 conference, October 02009, San Francisco, CA, USA

Quoting from the announcement on DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK and other mailing lists (02009 01 31):

The California Digital Library (CDL) is pleased to host iPRES2009 in San Francisco, October 5-6, 2009 at the Mission Bay Conference Center. There will be a formal call for papers soon.

iPRES2009 will be the sixth in the series of annual international conferences that bring together researchers and practitioners from around the world to explore the latest trends, innovations, and practices in preserving our scientific and cultural heritage.

The promise of digital preservation will be realized when it is truly integrated into the mainstream of digital scholarship, culture and commerce. iPRES2009 will continue the discussion of creating our digital future.

We will be posting updated information at the conference website: http://www.cdlib.org/iPres/ipres2009.html

Smithsonian 2.0 Conference, January 02009

At an invited conference on January 23 and 24, 02009, the Smithsonian Institution engaged nearly three dozen digitalari to help it image a better museum experience: Smithsonian 2.0: A Gathering to Re-Imagine the Smithsonian in the Digital Age. According to the site's About page, "Smithsonian 2.0 will bring more than 30 creative leaders from the Web, digital and new media worlds (chosen for their engagement of large audiences, including youth) to meet with a core group of Smithsonian staff to look at our vision, our challenges, and our current level of achievement in Web and new media. This group will try to identify how to move the Smithsonian forward toward a 'Smithsonian 2.0.'"

National Film Board of Canada releases digital collection of films and clips

On the occasion of its 70th anniversary (01939-02009), the National Film Board of Canada launched on January 21, 02009 a digital collection of hundreds of full-length films and clips from its archives that range in time from the amazing "Carts of Darkness" (02008) and on back to 1928 and its predecessor organization, the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau. This is one of the best birthday gifts a country and the world can receive. Thank you NFB!

The Early Chinese Canadians 1858-1947, Library and Archives Canada online resource

The Library and Archives Canada launched a new online resource on January 16, 02009 titled "The Early Chinese Canadians 1858-1947." One of its highlights is a database of the head tax records.

January/February 02009 issue of D-Lib Magazine is here

The January/February 02009 issue of D-Lib Magazine is out. According to the announcement on various mailing lists:

The articles include:

A Policy Checklist for Enabling Persistence of Identifiers
Nick Nicholas, Nigel Ward, and Kerry Blinco, Link Affiliates

A Set of Transfer-Related Services
Justin Littman, Library of Congress

Sharing Functionality on the Web: A Proposed Services Infrastructure for The European Library
Theo van Veen and Michel Koppelaar, Koninklijke Bibliotheek; Georg Petz, Austrian National Library; and Christian Sadilek, Austrian Research Centers

Search Web Services - The OASIS SWS Technical Committee Work: The Abstract Protocol Definition, OpenSearch Binding, and SRU/CQL 2.0
Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress

Institutional Repository on a Shoestring
George Wrenn, Carolyn J. Mueller, and Jeremy Shellhase, Humboldt State University

Classroom Information Needs: Search Analysis from a Digital Library for Educators
Marcia A. Mardis, Florida State University

The Conference Reports include:

A Workshop Series for Grid/Repository Integration
Andreas Aschenbrenner, State and University Library, Goettingen; Tobias Blanke and Mark Hedges, King's College London; Neil P Chue Hong, OMII UK, and Nicholas Ferguson, OGF Europe

Baltimore SPARC IR and SUN PASIG Meetings: Towering Content and Evolving Online Scholarly Publishing Models
Carol Minton Morris, Cornell University

B3OK: machines 1, humans 0

According to a blurb for a workshop she's presenting on wikis in libraries, Bonnie Peirce, Head of Children's Services, Dover Town Library, created B3OK, "an open global mobile knowledge network connecting the physical and digital worlds." B3OK is built around QRCodes and the site is powered by Semantic MediaWiki.

Source: WEB4LIB mailing list, 02009 01 13

Third Digital Preservation Challenge from DigitalPreservationEurope

DigitalPreservationEurope has launched the Third Digital Preservation Challenge:

About the Digital Preservation Challenge DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) raises awareness and improves practice in the management, longevity, and reuse of digital assets. The Digital Preservation Challenge aims to promote innovation at all levels and will provide an insight into the range of digital preservation risks currently being faced.

We are looking for ideas from creative students from all backgrounds with an interest in computer science. The challenge is to develop digital preservation solutions that overcome the barriers hindering access to five digital objects, each accompanied by a scenario based on real-life
situations: Electronic art, Webarchiving and Unknown files.

Evaluating submissions
Submissions to the third Digital Preservation Challenge will be assessed by a panel of international digital preservation experts and practitioners.
Submissions will be evaluated according to the quality of the documentation of the processes used to solve a challenge task rather than the overall outcome itself.

Important dates
Opening of the Challenge: 5 January 2009 Deadline for submissions: 15 June 2009 at 4pm GMT Announcement of winners: iPres2009, 5-6 October 2009, San Francisco, United States

To learn more about or to take part in the Digital Preservation Challenge, please visit http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu/challenge.

Source: DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK, 02009 01 14

1911 census of England and Wales launched

Just to show they're not superstitious, the online 1911 census of England and Wales was launched today, January 13, 02009, by the United Kingdom's National Archives' partner FindMyPast.com, formerly 1837online.com. Unlike the disastrous launch of the 1901 census several years ago, this one works right out of the starting gate.

CollectiveAccess open source collections management software

Yet another entrant into the pool of open source collections management software for archives, museums and libraries is CollectiveAccess (formerly known as OpenCollection), described on its Overview page as

"a full-featured collections management and online access application for museums, archives and digital collections. It is designed to handle large, heterogeneous collections that have complex cataloguing requirements and require support for a variety of metadata standards and media formats. Unlike most other collections management applications, CollectiveAccess is completely web-based. All cataloging, search and administrative functions are accessed using common web-browser software, untying users from specific operating systems and making cataloguing by distributed teams and online access to collections information simple, efficient and inexpensive."

Get reading at weRead.com

From weRead.com's About Us page; weRead was established in 2007:

weRead is a community for book lovers. Whether you love classics or popular fiction; whether you love Dickens or Dan Brown; is a place where you can find others who share your reading tastes and through them discover new books that you will love.With weRead you can:

* List, rate and write reviews about the books you are reading or have read in the past.
* Browse what other readers are reading and what they are saying about books you're interested in.
* Find readers with similar reading interests as you and learn which books they recommend.
* Have fun with books! And who wouldn't want that?
* With weRead anywhere, you can take your bookshelf with you anywhere! for example, myspace page, blog, homepage.


Only 11 months old, weRead is already one of the largest book community on Facebook with over one million registered users and over 44 million books added.

I stumbled across weRead.com through a link on Lulu.com, a self-publishing platform founded by Bob Young. weRead is owned by Ugenie Inc, a company founded in 2006.

Digital Document Quarterly newsletter volume 7 number 4 available

Dr. Henry Gladney sent this announcement around on New Year's Day 2009:

The Digital Document Quarterly newsletter volume 7 number 4 is available at http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/ddq_7_4.htm. Its table of contents is available at http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/ddq.htm#Y2008.

In 2006, Deanna Marcum, Assoc. Librarian at the Library of Congress wrote, "we kept on producing digital resources because we had to while whistling in the dark about their long-term preservation".

This DDQ number sums up the long-term digital preservation (LDP) situation by asserting that it is time for major institutions to choose LDP strategies, arguing that the technical alternatives are now known, with few surprises likely about what can be done. Readers who want to acquire understanding of the topic quickly can do so by selectively following Web links in recent DDQ numbers.

The number also summarizes a recent CLIR assessment of the role of research librarians. Its conclusions are unlikely to please members of the profession.

As usual, the number provides technical news, practical advice, and recommends books that I found excellent.