OpenDocument Format

The SDA would like to highlight the importance of carefully considering file formats for long-term preservation of documents. OpenDocument format (ODF) is an excellent choice for preservation because, as stated in Resolution 2008-1 of the Canadian Library Association’s 2008 Annual General Meeting, “interoperable, vendor-neutral file format standards play a key role in ensuring preservation and future access.” The CLA also noted that “it is essential that governments and other public bodies take steps to ensure that future generations can access information created today.” ODF will not be phased out due to planned obsolescence as commercial products tend to be and it’s code is available to anyone who wants to work with it.

More information from Wikipedia:

The OpenDocument format (ODF) is a file format for electronic office documents
such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents.
While the specifications were originally developed by Sun, the standard was
developed by the Open Office XML technical committee of the Organization for the
Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium and based
on the XML format
originally created and implemented by the OpenOffice.org office suite (see OpenOffice.org XML).
In addition to being a free and open OASIS standard, it is published (in
one of its version 1.0 manifestations) as an ISO/IEC
international standard, ISO/IEC 26300:2006 Open Document Format for Office
Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0.[2]
Published ODF standards meet the common definitions of an open standard, meaning
they are freely available and implementable.
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

For Museums

Pardon me for lifting this post from a list I subscribe to. Eventually, the SDA would like to position itself as an entity that brings together various information and culture providers to share information and resources that will further digitization in Saskatchewan.

See below...
There is still time to join the Museum Computer Network for its annual conference, November 12 through 15, 2008, in Washington, D.C.

Network with your colleagues and take part in a full range of programming spanning diverse aspects of technology and information work in the museum and cultural heritage environment today.

Register online now at http://www.mcn.edu/conferences/index.asp?subkey=2079
Registrations are also accepted on site at any point during the conference.

View the full schedule of sessions and programming at
http://www.mcn.edu/conferences/index.asp?subkey=2093

Digitization Guidelines Initiative for US Federal Agencies

Here are some excepts I picked out from a Library of Congress press release...

The Web site for the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative became publicly accessible on September 30, 2008. The URL is http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/. The initiative represents a collaborative effort to establish a common set of guidelines for digitizing historical materials. Under this initiative, two Working Groups have been established.

1. The Still Image Working Group will focus its efforts on books, manuscripts, maps, and photographic prints and negatives. Its members include the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Gallery of Art, the National Library of Medicine, the National Technical Information Service, the National Transportation Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Government Printing Office.

2. The Audio-Visual Working Group will address standards and practices for sound, video, and motion picture film. Its members include the Defense Visual Information Directorate of the Department of Defense, the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Library of Medicine, the Smithsonian Institution, the Government Printing Office and the Voice of America.

Regards,
Elgin

Fedora 3.0 Released

Fedora has been downloaded 25,000 times in the last year, and is used by over 125 national libraries, institutions, and businesses worldwide to do more with their digital collections, enable long-term preservation of digital assets, build on a flexible and extensible, modular architecture, keep control of their data, and participate in Fedora's innovative community.

"Users will find it simpler to maintain and operate their repositories with version 3.0-it's more scalable and fits better into the Web."

Fedora 3.0 features the Content Model Architecture (CMA), an integrated structure for persisting and delivering the essential characteristics of digital objects in Fedora. (Also availlable at (http://sourceforge.net/projects/fedora-commons). The Fedora CMA plays a central role in the Fedora architecture, in many ways forms the over-arching conceptual framework for future development of Fedora Repositories.

Dan Davis explains the CMA in the context of Fedora 3.0, "It's a hybrid. The Fedora CMA handles content models that are used by publishers and others, and is also a computer model that describes an information representation and processing architecture." By combining these viewpoints, Fedora CMA has the potential to provide a way to build an interoperable repository for integrated information access within organizations and to provide durable access to our intellectual works.

Fedora asks you to continue to contribute your observations and comments to or . Fedora 2.2.2 will continue to be supported for production repositories.

U of Michigan Exposes Records for Harvesting, Releases OAI Toolkit

The University of Michigan Library recently announced that records from their MBooks collection are available for Open Archives Initiative (OAI) harvesting. The MBooks collection consists of materials digitized by Google in partnership with the University of Michigan.
Only records for MBooks available in the public domain are exposed, (split into sets containing public domain items according to U.S. copyright law, and public domain items worldwide). There are currently over 100,000 records available for harvesting, with plans for 1 million records when the whole collection has been digitized by Google.

In conjunction, the open-source OAI toolkit has been released on SourceForge. This toolkit contains both harvester and data provider, both written in Perl.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/umoaitoolkit/

New Exhibit at the University of Saskatchewan Archives

New Exhibit: Ambisextrous: Gender Impersonators of Music Hall and Vaudeville
Ambisextrous: Gender Impersonators of Music Hall and Vaudeville is an exhibition of images from the collection of the University of Saskatchewan Archives.

In 2006 Neil Richards donated to the University of Saskatchewan Archives a collection dealing with the history of theatrical transvestism and gender impersonation. The collection was assembled in connection with research for his digital exhibition All Frocked Up: Glimpses of Cross-Dressing in Saskatchewan (2003).
"The Richards collection comprises sheet music, programs, postcards, photographs, audio and video recordings. The collector attempted to represent many of the performing artists who crossed genders in their acts and the various arenas in which these impersonations were presented. An especial strength of the collection is the representation of performers associated with British music hall and with vaudeville, its North American counterpart."
"Ambisextrous is a contribution to Saskatchewan Resources for Sexual Diversity (SRSD), a project established in 2004 to improve access to information on gender and sexual diversity available in Saskatchewan’s libraries and archives."

Imaging best practices

The Collaborative Digitization Program has developed a set of Imaging Best Practices http://www.bcr.org/cdp/best/comments.html. They are no longer looking for feeback; but, their knowledge base is certainly interesting.

Here is how they describe their initiative...

"It is intended to serve as a guide for practitioners in cultural heritage institutions that seek to create digital images from physical objects. Originally published by the Colorado Digitization Program in 2003 as the Western States Digital Imaging Best Practices, this updated version reflects the many changes that have occurred in the digitization field during the last five years."

PDF should be used to preserve information for the future, says a new report from the Digital Preservation Coalition.

This report reviews PDF and the newly introduced PDF/Archive (PDF/A) format as a potential solution to the problem of long–term digital preservation. It suggests adopting PDF/A for archiving electronic documents as the standard will help preservation and retrieval in the future. It concludes that it can only be done when combined with a comprehensive records management programme and formally established records procedures.

This full report is available on the Digital Preservation Coalition's website: www.dpconline.org/graphics/reports/index.html#twr0802

AlouetteCanada merges with Canadiana.org

Canadiana.org and AlouetteCanada merger announced

Ottawa – On March 6, 2008 the Boards of the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions (CIHM) and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) concluded an historic agreement to merge the CIHM and the AlouetteCanada initiative to create a new body with the official name of Canadiana.org. All parties declared their commitment to a coordinated and sustained program to digitize Canada's information and knowledge resources and to provide easy online access to the extraordinary wealth of written and other resources by and about Canadians

See full press release: http://www.canadiana.org/pdf/en/press_200804.pdf

Online Digitization Workshops

For those of you looking for online learning opportunities related to digitization, here are some upcoming workshops from SOLINET:

• Caring for Originals During Scanning Projects (Live Online) April 7, 2008 2:00pm-4:00pm (EST)
• Basic Digital Stewardship (Live Online)
  April 25, 2008 10:00am-12:00pm (EST)
• Understanding Digital Photographs (Live Online) June 5, 2008 2:00pm-4:00pm (EST)
• Digital Photograph Collections: Access and Standards (Live Online) June 19, 2008 10:00am-12:00pm (EST)

For more information, or to register, please visit: http://www.solinet.net/workshops/

I have yet to register for one of these workshops; however, the prices seem quite resonable.

Regards,
Elgin