Mackintosh Italian Job

A little known sketchbook used by the world famous Glasgow architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh on a tour of Italy has now been opened up for use online at www.vads.ac.uk/collections/MAC

The sketchbook, which is today held in the Glasgow School of Art archive, was taken by Charles Rennie Mackintosh on his tour of Italy, France and Belgium in 1891 as the recipient of the Alexander Thomson Travelling Studentship.

It provides a unique insight into the architect’s formative years and shows Mackintosh as a young architect with a mind of his own.  Mackintosh ignored the strict stipulations of the grant body which made his trip possible, and instead pursued his desire to learn more about Renaissance architecture.

Not just old documents

Digitisation is often focussed on cultural heritage materials. However, it’s remit can be wider than that as this digitised collection of butterflies demonstrates. The work has been done by the Linnean Society of London, the world’s oldest active biological society.

A gallery of further images is available from the Guardian website (a great publicity coup), and the full database is available from the Linnean Society website.

The next question for the project team must be this: now they have established this collection online, how are they going to integrate their collections with others of scientific value?

Evidence of the Impact of Early Digitisation?

Representatives from the UK funding bodies Museums, Libraries and Archives (MLA) and the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) which spoke at an event in spring 2008 which suggested there was not much enthusiasm from them for digitisation.

Two bloggers, Bridget MacKenzie and Jeremy Ottevanger produced some really interesting responses.

One of the rationales for the lack of appetite for digitisation is the supposed failure of the NOF-digitisation programme, which ran from 1999 to 2004.

But is there actually any formal evidence of this? And if there is, what mistakes could be learnt from it? Could there be a way that we could be running improved programmes for the cultural heritage sector, quite possibly for much lesser costs?

Beta Release of ORE Specifications and User Guides

Forwarding on behalf of Carl Lagoze & Herbert Van de Sompel:

Over the past eighteen months the Open Archives Initiative
(OAI), in a project called Object Reuse
and Exchange (OAI-ORE), has gathered
international experts from the publishing, web, library, and eScience
community to develop standards for the identification and description of
aggregations of online information resources. These aggregations,
sometimes called compound digital objects, may combine distributed
resources with multiple media types including text, images, data, and
video. The goal of these standards is to expose the rich content in
these aggregations to applications that support authoring, deposit,
exchange, visualization, reuse, and preservation. Although a motivating
use case for the work is the changing nature of scholarship and
scholarly communication, and the need for cyberinfrastructure to support
that scholarship, the intent of the effort is to develop standards that
generalize across all web-based information including the increasing
popular social networks of “web 2.0″.

The beta version of the OAI-ORE specifications and implementation
documents are released to the
public on June 2, 2008. These documents describe a data model to
introduce aggregations as resources with URIs on the web. They also
detail the machine-readable descriptions of aggregations expressed in
the popular Atom syndication format, in RDF/XML, and RDFa.

The table of contents page with links to the following other documents
is located at .

The full press release for this beta release is located at
http://www.openarchives.org/ore/documents/oreBetaPressRelease.pdf.

Carl Lagoze – Cornell University
Herbert Van de Sompel – Los Alamos National Laboratory

Scottish Parliamentary Records to 1707

New digitisation projects keep on appearing.

The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland has transcriptions (of the Latin) and translation of all known Scottish acts of parliament up until 1707, when the Scottish Parliament merged with the English one – it did not sit again until 1999.

It’s a reasonably tidy interface and browsing and searching is reasonably intuitive and it deals well with the issue of presenting original text and translation side by side. However, the use of frames looks a bit outdated and some of the functions of the icons are not easy to guess.

It’s quite text heavy and obviously aimed at researchers more than the general public – adding some images of the manuscripts would have added some aesthetic appeal. It would also be useful to find out more about the technical / digitisation side of the project.

Nevertheless, this looks like a high-quality resource. Researchers love having entire runs of material – knowing that all the known acts from 1235 to 1707 is included should keep them contented. And the editorial work that must have gone into creating the resource much have been a labour of love – but a crucial one that will ensure that scholars will treat the resource with respect.

International Conference for Preservation of Digital Objects (2008) – Call for Papers

Posted on behalf of Jane Humphreys of the BL.

iPRES 2008 Call for Papers

The British Library Conference Centre, St Pancras, London

29 & 30 September 2008

Submission of abstracts is invited to The Fifth International Conference for Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES 2008), which will be hosted by The British Library at its Conference Centre, in St Pancras, London, on 29&30 September.

The theme of this years’ conference is: Joined up and Working: tools and methods for digital preservation. Papers are invited which present substantial new results, contribute to conceptual foundations of digital preservation or show novel applications of work. Empirical evidence demonstrating what works and what doesn’t is also welcome

Details about the Call for Papers and iPRES 2008 can be found on The British Library web-site at: www.bl.uk/ipres2008. Abstracts should be submitted in AAAI Style and restricted to two pages maximum including title, author but excluding references. Submissions should be made through the mailbox: http:papers@bl.uk/ipres08 by 28 May 2008. Speakers will be notified of acceptance on 14 June.

iPRES is a series of international conferences which seek to address issues relating to digital preservation. The conference brings together experts and practitioners across the spectrum of digital preservation disciplines. Registration will open on 12 May 2008

Getting Big Publicity

Two recent digitisation projects have got big dollops of publicity on the mainstream media

The Complete Works of Charles Darwin I have mentioned before, but it was the newly expanded Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913 that really hit the headlines.

The site featured in numerous national newspapers, magazines such as the Economist, radio and, perhaps the best way of getting users interested, a link from the BBC website home page.

Of course, success does not come without its teething problems. Both the Darwin and Old Bailey websites had hiccups in service provision because of the excessive number of hits. But this is a small price to play (and perhaps one that can be eliminated with suitable load testing) for getting such good publicity.

PDF should be used to preserve information for the future

Press release from the Digital Preservation Coalition

Good news the already popular PDF file format adopted by consumers and business alike is one of the most logical formats to preserve today’s electronic information for tomorrow.

According to the latest report released today by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), Portable Document Format (PDF) is one of the best file formats to preserve electronic documents and ensure their survival for the future. This announcement will allow information officers to follow a standardised approach for preserving electronic documents.

Information management and long–term preservation are major issues facing consumers and businesses in the 21st Century. This report is one of a series where The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) aims to think about and address the challenges facing us.

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.

Betsy Fanning, author of the report and director of standards at AIIM, comments, “A standardised approach to preserving electronic documents would be a welcome development for organisations. Without this we could be walking blindly into a digital black hole.”

The National Archives works closely with the DPC with issues surrounding digital preservation and will continue to do so. Adrian Brown, head of digital preservation at The National Archives said: “This report highlights the challenges we all face in a digital age. Using PDF/A as a standard will help information officers ensure that key business data survives. But it should never be viewed as the Holy Grail. It is merely a tool in the armoury of a well thought out records management policy. “

The report is a call to action, organisations need to act now and look hard at their information policies and procedures to anticipate the demand for their content (documents and records) in the future. Everybody has different criteria, types and uses for documentation so you need to find one that works for your organisation.

If you would like to read the full report please go to the Digital Preservation Coalition website. This can be accessed here: www.dpconline.org/graphics/reports/index.html#twr0802

New book on using metadata in digital resources

Muriel Foulonneau (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France) and Jenn Riley (Indiana University) have published a new book on using metadata for cultural resources.

According to the blurb

This book is intended to assist information professionals in improving the usability of digital objects by adequately documenting them and using tools for metadata management. It provides practical advice for libraries, archives, and museums dealing with digital collections in a wide variety of formats and from a wider variety of sources.

It will be interesting to see if it looks at some of the more recent additions to the field, such as METS and MODS.

Darwin Manuscripts Online

One of the most successful digitisation projects in Britain is Cambridge University’s The Complete Works of Charles Darwin. It has recently added private papers, including the first draft of his theory of evolution, notes from the voyage of the Beagle and recipe book by Emma Darwin.

The project has has fantastic media exposure in the UK and beyond, including a mention on prime time television. As the history page of the resource recounts, this is not without its problems.

A related project at Camrbridge is the Darwin Correspondence Project, which presents letters Darwin sent and received. There is an interesting research project in waiting to try and bring the two resources together