SWE Highlight - Memorial to the Footballers Who Fell in the Great World War

One of the intriguing items in the Saskatchewan War Experience is a program describing the unveiling of a Memorial dedicated to the football players who fell in World War I. The unveiling and dedication of the Memorial took place on 8th June, 1921, and included various songs and hymns, an address by the Mayor, and a Roll of the Fallen. The memorial consists of a 6 foot marble statue carved in Naples, Italy, set upon a 12 foot polished granite base, with the names of the 75 soccer players who lost their lives the Great War engraved around the bottom.

The Memorial was later named for Saskatoon footballer Hugh Cairns, a member of the 46th Battalion, Saskatchewan Regiment, who won the Victoria Cross and died just a few days before the end of the War.

Today, the Hugh Cairns Memorial is believed to be the only war memorial in the world dedicated to the players of football. It is located in Kiwanis Park in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

The Memorial to the Footballers Who Fell in the Great World War, 1914-1918, was submitted to the project by the University of Saskatchewan Special Collections.

SDA September Meeting

The Saskatchewan Digital Alliance welcomed Catherine Nygren as the 2010-11 Project Coordinator for The Saskatchewan War Experience digitization project. Catherine is a 3rd year English major at the University of Saskatchewan with excellent technical skills.

The SILS Consortium has purchased the digital collection building software, Content Pro. The SDA is interested in discussing ways to cooperate with SILS on digitization and hopes to begin a dialogue in the coming months.

There was a brief discussion about the BC Books Online project. The Multitype Library Board is investigating the potential for a similar project in Saskatchewan and will look to the SDA and the Multitype Database Licensing Program for advice in the planning of such a project.

The SDA’s website www.saskdigital.ca has been revised with regular updates to follow. The homepage provides access to The Saskatchewan War Experience collection.

The SDA is about to embark on an environmental scan and plans to hold a strategic planning session this winter.

Digital Music Library System

Hey folks,

This is a re-post from a list I subscribe to. It sounds like a great solution for those of you who may be interested in digital music libraries...

Indiana University today announces the release of open source software to
create a digital music library system. The software, called Variations, provides
online access to streaming audio and scanned score images in support of
teaching, learning, and research.

Variations enables institutions such as college and university libraries and music schools to digitize audio and score materials from their own collections, provide those materials to their students and faculty in an interactive online environment, and respect intellectual property rights.

A key feature of the system for faculty and students is the ability to create bookmarks and playlists for use in studying or in preparing classroom presentations, allowing easy access later on to specific audio time points or segments. A key feature for libraries is a flexible access control and authentication system, which allows libraries to set up access rules based on their own local institutional policies.

This software is the culmination of nearly fifteen years of development and use of
digital music library systems at Indiana University. Creation of the current Variations software platform was originally funded by the National Science
Foundation. In 2005, the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded
Indiana University a National Leadership Grant to extend this highly successful
system to the nationwide library community. Beyond IU, the software is currently
being used at the Ohio State University, University of Maryland, New England
Conservatory of Music, and the Philadelphia area Tri-College Consortium
(Haverford, Swarthmore, and Bryn Mawr).

This open source release of Variations complements IU’s earlier release of the open source Variations Audio Timeliner, which lets users identify relationships in passages of music, annotate their findings, and play back the results with simple point-and-click navigation. This tool is also included as a feature of the complete Variations
system.

Indiana University plans to offer a free one-hour Variations webinar at 4:00 PM EST on March 4, 2009 for institutions and individuals interested in learning more about the system. To register, e-mail mnotess@indiana.edu.

The Indiana University Digital Library Program created Variations in collaboration with faculty and students in IU’s Jacobs School of Music. The IU Digital Library Program is a collaborative effort of the Indiana University Libraries and the Indiana University Office of the Vice President for Information Technology.

For more information on the Variations open source release, see: http://variations.sourceforge.net/

-----
Jon Dunn
Associate Director for Technology
Indiana
University Digital Library Program
IU Libraries / University Information
Technology Services
jwd@indiana.edu
(812) 855-0953

This is a reposting from David Lowe and Michael J. Bennett at UConn Libraries. The results of their survey on JPEG 2000 are now available...

• First, thanks very much to those who responded this past fall to our survey of digital project staff regarding JPEG 2000 implementation at your institutions. We have made the results available via our institutional repository at:
  
  http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/libr_pubs/16/
  
  You may choose to download the survey results as a standalone .xls spreadsheet file or, if you prefer a somewhat smoother viewing experience, download and extract the .html version contained in the zip file at the same URL.
  
  From our abstract:
  The survey results reveal several key areas that JPEG 2000’s user community will need to have addressed in order to further enhance adoption of the standard, including perspectives from cultural institutions that have adopted it already, as well as insights from institutions that do not currently have it in their workflows. Current users areconcerned about limited compatible software capabilities with an eye toward needed enhancements. They realize also that there is much room for improvement in the area of educating and informing the cultural heritage community about the advantages of JPEG 2000. A small set of users, in addition, alerts us to serious problems of cross-codec consistency and they relate file validation issues that would likely be easily resolved given a modicum of collaborative attention toward standardization. Responses from non-users disclose that there are lingering questions surrounding the format and its stability and permanence, stoked largely by a dearth of currently available software functionality, from the point of initial capture and manipulation on through to delivery to online users.

JPEG 2000 is a promising format for long-term preservation of documents. Let's hope that acceptance grows rapidly.

Cheers!

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