Leading in the Digital World: Opportunities for Canada’s Memory Institutions report

The Council of Canadian Academics has released its report Leading in the Digital World: Opportunities for Canada's Memory Institutions. The report was assembled by an Expert Panel on Memory Institutions and the Digital Revolution haired by Dr. Doug Owram.

NetarchiveSuite Web harvesting software from Denmark

According to the Web site for the NetarchiveSuite software, it was "developed by the two national deposit libraries in Denmark, The Royal Library and The State and University Library, and has been running in production, harvesting the Danish world wide web for three years. The Danish netarchive currently contains over 120 TB of data that are mirrored on two different geographical locations." It's open source software based on the Heritrix web crawler from the Internet Archive. You can read more information about it on the netarchive.dk project site. I first took note of it on my Ten Thousand Year Blog on July 20, 02004.

Code4Lib Journal Issue 9 now available

Issue 9 of the Code4Lib Journal has at least one article of interest to the archival community, quoting from the announcement on various mailing lists (02010 03 22):

Challenges in Sustainable Open Source: A Case Study Sibyl Schaefer
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/2493

The Archivists’ Toolkit is a successful open source software package for archivists, originally developed with grant funding. The author, who formerly worked on the project at a participating institution, examines some of the challenges in making an open source project self-sustaining past grant funding. A consulting group hired by the project recommended that — like many successful open source projects — they rely on a collaborative volunteer community of users and developers. However, the project has had limited success fostering such a community. The author offers specific recommendations for the project going forward to gain market share and develop a collaborative user and development community, with more open governance.

Three other articles may be of broader interest as well to readers outside the usual audience:

Using Cloud Services for Library IT Infrastructure Erik Mitchell
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/2510

Cloud computing comes in several different forms and this article documents how service, platform, and infrastructure forms of cloud computing have been used to serve library needs. Following an overview of these uses the article discusses the experience of one library in migrating IT infrastructure to a cloud environment and concludes with a model for assessing cloud computing.

Creating an Institutional Repository for State Government Digital Publications Meikiu Lo and Leah M. Thomas
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/2563

In 2008, the Library of Virginia (LVA) selected the digital asset management system DigiTool to host a centralized collection of digital state government publications. The Virginia state digital repository targets three primary user groups: state agencies, depository libraries and the general public.
DigiTool’s ability to create depositor profiles for individual agencies to submit their publications, its integration with the Aleph ILS, and product support by ExLibris were primary factors in its selection. As a smaller institution, however, LVA lacked the internal resources to take full advantage of DigiTool’s full set of features. The process of cataloging a heterogenous collection of state documents also proved to be a challenge within DigiTool. This article takes a retrospective look at what worked, what did not, and what could have been done to improve the experience.

Wrangling Electronic Resources: A Few Good Tools Brandy Klug
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/2634

There are several freely available tools today that fill the needs of librarians tasked with maintaining electronic resources, that assist with tasks such as editing MARC records and maintaining web sites that contain links to electronic resources. This article gives a tour of a few tools the author has found invaluable as an Electronic Resources Librarian.

Islandora.ca, another Canadian, open source digital records lifecycle system

Close on the heels of Archivematica, a digital preservation system built from open source products and created by British Columbia's Artefactual Systems, comes Islandora.ca from the Robertson Library at the University of Prince Edward Island. According to the About page, "Islandora combines the Drupal and Fedora software applications to create a robust digital asset management system that can be used for any requirement where collaboration and digital data stewardship, for the short and long term, are critical." You can see some examples of how the Islandora project is being deployed through IslandArchives, a set of digital collections, and IslandScholar, a "Repository-In-A-Box" solution for institutional repositories. Islandora also maintains a list of Virtual Research Environment (VRE) sites.

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/).

November/December 02008 issue of D-Lib Magazine is here

The November/December 02008 issue of D-Lib Magazine is here. The focus of this issue is digital scholarly communication.