Posted: June 27, 2008 | Author: Alastair Dunning | Filed under: digitisation, digitization, science |
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?
Posted: June 4, 2008 | Author: Alastair Dunning | Filed under: evidence | Tags: nof-digitise evidence strategy 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?
Posted: June 3, 2008 | Author: Alastair Dunning | Filed under: metadata | Tags: metadata, oai |
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
