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

Mimicing Touch as well as Sight - Microsoft at the British Library

The British Library have, in association with various other cultural heritage institutions in the UK, added to their impressive Turning the Pages application.

Various documents from the 12th to the 19th centuries, selected via a national competition, are now online.

The striking concept about the Turning the Pages it that is does not digitise the individual images of a book, but goes further in imitating the process of actually leafing through a book or manuscript - the software attempts to mimic not just visual appearance, but tactile appearance as well. The machines installed in the BL itself where one touches and drags the pages by pressing the actual screen are even more impressive than the online versions, a fact amplified by the larger and clearer monitor

The original Turning the Pages was developed using Shockwave, but the updated software is based on collaboration with Microsoft. I expect to see more such tools as the BL further establishes its Microsoft partnership

Commercialising Digitised Content & Interface Design

Both the British Library and the British Museum have set up websites which allow them to licence rights to their digitised images. According to British Museum Images website: “British Museum Images is the on-line digital image website of the British Museum catering primarily for the image-buying professional”. The British Library version says much the same.

Rather then embed the sites within their institutional sites for delivering collections, providing information for visitors etc. etc Both the websites are clean, efficient and aesthetically pleasing. They are easier to navigate than the main institutional site.

I think there are two main reasons for this navigation.

1) The ‘commerical’ sites have one clear purpose rather than sometimes conflicting purposes the main sites have.

2) With a ‘commercial’ site there is a even greater imperative to have a properly usable site - poor usability damages revenue. The same pressures do not exist on the main institutional site. Perhaps they should?

British Library - Nineteenth-century books being digitised

According to an article on BBC news (although there is no sign of this on the BL’s press release pages)

More than 100,000 old books previously unavailable to the public will go online thanks to a mass digitisation programme at the British Library.

The programme focuses on 19th-Century books, many of which are unknown as few were reprinted after first editions.

There is not too much information about the project but it is obviously has the hand of Microsoft - the initial delivery mechanism will be Microsoft’s Live Book Search. There are no dates mentioned concerning when the books will become available online.

It’s interesting to see the different access models used by the British Library for their various collections. EEBO (Early English Books Online) is available at a price; its nineteenth-century newspapers will be free to the university and college sector in the UK but other users will have to pay, while this project seems like it will be freely available online.

I suppose this reflects the amount of money that partners are prepared to pump into BL digitisatition projects; and this in case Microsoft is supplying plenty of cash to to make the nineteenth-century books freely available. How else can Microsoft try and keep up with Google?

Integrating tools for audio resources

Everyone knows the audio resources are enlightening, educational and entertaining, but it can be difficult to know how to integrate content such as that provided by the British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings.

The EASAIER Project: Enabling Access to Sound Archives through Integration, Enrichment and Retrieval is building tools that solve these problems. Project member Ceila Duffy spoke of the need to create tools that allows audio on the web to go beyond playback.

Some of the tools created by the project include web clients that allow audio files to be speed up or slowed down (useful for music practice), to locate emotions or accents without spoken word files (useful for resource discovery), to separate out different speakers or instruments or sounds, to represent music in visual form, or to do searching based not on keyword but on actual audio content.

This is all fantastic stuff and makes audio material so much more attractive. The next challenge will be to embed such tools into web interfaces that give end-users easy ways to tag, analyse and manipulate the content of audio archives.

Unlocking Audio: Sharing Experience of Mass Digitisation

The British Library is hosting a conference on a topic which there is increasing digitisation interest, such as the BL’s own Archival Sound Recordings project.

According to the project blurb:

“Unlocking Audio is an international conference exploring the planning and strategies required for the successful execution of large-scale audio digitisation projects, and the technical and practical issues involved.”

There is more info on the conference from this weblink

British Library focuses on Web 2.0

Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, gave a talk last night as part of the University College London’s 21st Century Curation series

She had some good points about what makes a 21st-century digital library, but the real focus of the presentation was on the library’s inclusion of Web2 technologies within the resources they are making available online. Projects such as the Archival Sound Recordings allow users to tag content.

While such a focus on user-friendly features is maybe not a surprise for an institution forced to justify its broader public remit, it was odd to see such a focus on Web2 to a relatively sophisticated audience.

Web2 technologies are great, but they have to be based on a bedrock of other skills and expertise for them to work. The sound recordings project mentioned above could not have worked with the in-depth knowledge of project staff in selecting, creating, processing, cataloguing and delivering the audio material. Web2 tools only come into play once you have created or digitised high-quality material.