Digital Public Library Launching April 18th
Archive for the ‘Digital Curation’ Category
What Do You Think?
The British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College Dublin, gain powers to archive the entire UK web, along with e-journals, e-books and other formats.
This film was made by Clay Interactive for the British Library. http://www.clayinteractive.co.uk/
Curators and other experts from all the participating libraries have chosen the 100 Websites to mark the passing of the new regulations. They will judge which will be essential reading for future generations researching our life and times in 2013. From the homepage of a Scottish bus shelter to big culture-changers like Facebook and eBay. the choices are here.
What do you think? They want to know.Which UK websites not included on this list would you want future generations to remember? Please note that the regulations enable us to archive websites that end in .uk, or that are created or published in the UK.
You can join the debate and tell us which websites would be on your list on Twitter using the #digitaluniverse hashtag…
Vatican Library Going Digital
One of the oldest libraries in the world, the Vatican Apostolic Library is planning to digitize many of the rarest and most valuable documents in existence, including the 42 line Latin Bible of Gutenberg. EMC announced that it is providing 2.8 petabytes of storage to support the Vatican Library digitization project which consists of a catalogue of 80,000 historic manuscripts and 8,900 “incunabula” (a book printed before 1501).
EMC will help the Vatican preserve delicate texts in an ISO-certifiable digital format to protect these manuscripts from deterioration and decay from repeated handling. The final stages will result in 40 million pages preserved in digital reproductions. Working with its systems integrator partner Dedagroup, EMC will provide 2.8 petabytes of storage capacity across its various storage solutions over the first phase of the nine-year project, which is expected to take three years.
Monsignor Cesare Pasini, said “The Apostolic Library contains some of the oldest texts in the world that represent a priceless legacy of history and culture,” Prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Library. “It’s very important that these documents are protected, and at the same time made available to scholars around the world. Thanks to the generosity and expertise of supporters such as EMC we are able to meet these goals, preserving a treasure-trove of rare and unique texts in a format that will not suffer from the passage of time.”
Michele Liberato, President, EMC Italy said “The Apostolic Library is one of the oldest libraries in the world and we have a duty to ensure that the knowledge and beauty of the manuscripts in it are available to all in the future. This project will help to preserve and make available a unique heritage of knowledge.”
Brown University’s Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab
This spring,the Brown University Library will host a series of talks to celebrate the opening of the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab at the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library. Speakers will include Brown faculty and visiting scholars from across the academic disciplines who will discuss and use the Lab to demonstrate ways in which digital technologies have impact on their teaching and research and enable new forms of student learning and interaction
Petition To Unlock Mobile Phones
There’s a Petition to reverse a decision by the Library of Congress making the unlocking of mobile phones illegal that needs 15,000 more signatures by Saturday.
Over 85,000 people have signed a Whitehouse.gov petition asking President Barack Obama to reverse a decision by the Library of Congress making the unlocking of mobile phones illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
As of Wednesday morning, the petition, started by phone unlocking entrepreneur Sina Khanifar, still needed nearly 15,000 signatures by Saturday to trigger a response by the Obama administration.
Unlocking a phone is typically used to switch carriers. Jailbreaking a phone for the purposes of adding software unauthorized by the carrier or phone maker remains legal under the DMCA. It’s unlikely mobile carriers will seek prosecution for individual phone users, but operators of businesses that help consumers unlock their phones could face penalties of up to a $500,000 fine under the DMCA.
Khanifar said this week he’s optimistic 100,000 people will sign it by Saturday. The petition has recently won endorsements from Representative Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat,
National Strategy for Information Sharing and Safeguarding
The White House has released a new strategy for federal information sharing lists among its top priorities adoption of metadata standards and the further extension of the Federal Identity Credential and Access Management framework. The new document does define policy objectives, which includes metadata.
ICPSR Project To Improve Metadata
Researchers will be able to retrieve improved metadata and have access to new tools for searching through and analyzing the General Social Survey and the American National Election Studies under a new joint initiative launched by ICPSR, the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, and several partners. The project is supported by a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation, ICPSR. The American National Election Studies program in the Center for Political Studies at UM’s Institute for Social Research and NORC, will carry out the two-year “Metadata Portal for the Social Sciences” project. Technical support will be provided by Metadata Technology North America and Integrated Data Management Services.
The first phase of the project will involve bringing the metadata for the existing GSS and ANES datasets up to the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) standard using XML. In the sample of the surveys, the project will also capture enhanced metadata on questionnaire flow and variable transformations.
The second part of the project will create a metadata portal on the Web to demonstrate some of the prototype tools that can be built with the new structured metadata — for example, survey catalogs and documentation libraries, question and classification banks, dynamic code books customized to user specifications, and tools for harmonization and comparison. These innovations will be broadly applicable to all survey data.
Thirdly, the project will develop new metadata-driven workflows and best practices to capture metadata early in the data production process so that it can be reused across the research lifecycle.
Texas A & M and Early Modern OCR Project
Texas A&M University has received a two-year development grant for $734,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the university’s Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP), to improve the digitization, transcription and preservation of early modern texts
Digital Data News and Information 
Written
on February 10, 2013