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 However, the use of frames looks a bit outdated and some of the functions of the icons are not easy to guess.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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Forwarded on behalf of Dr Julie Tolmie, King’s College London

The next cross-domain networking event held by this group will be the vizNET 2008 Workshop held in Loughborough 7-9 May:

http://www.viznet.ac.uk/viznet2008/

We would like to invite you, your students and your institution to showcase your research in visualisation in the Arts & Humanities and associated interdisciplinary activities by video or by poster at our event.

We also invite you to contribute your expertise and insight to day three of vizNET 2008 (9 May) in which we will explore and identify a series of Grand Challenges as perceived by the UK Visualization Community:
http://www.viznet.ac.uk/viznet2008/grandchallenges

Early registration for this event closes next Friday 18 April:
￡40 / ￡15 Students
Video/Poster submission closes in two weeks on Friday 25th April 2008.

Register now for
vizNET 2008: The 2nd Interdisciplinary Conference on Intersections of Visualization Practices and Techniques , 7th-9th May, Loughborough University

A JISC funded joint event hosted by vizNET and 3DVisA.
http://www.viznet.ac.uk/viznet2008/

The Guardian ran two articles on sharing data in its Technology section of 20th March 2008.

One was the economic benefits of freeing up data (e.g. map data) The long-term economic benefits outweigh the income gained from licencing the data.

Another was on the public concerns for the sharing of personal data. Recent data loss fiascos have made the public wary about giving their electronic details.

The two issues are actually not in direct competition with each other, but they could easily become confused. Advocates of freeing up data need to be very wary of how their arguments are perceived within the broader public domain

From Astrid Verheusen, National Library of the Netherlands

The Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, has published a report on possible alternative file formats for storing master images from mass digitisation projects. Uncompressed TIFFs, the KB’s preferred format so far, take up far too much storage capacity to be a viable storage strategy for the long term. The report is available from the KB website.

At the Koninklijke Bibliotheek mass digitisation projects are taking off. In the next four years millions of high resolution RGB master image files will be produced and will have to be (permanently) archived. However, if all projected 40 million images are to be stored as uncompressed TIFFs, the KB will need some 650 TB of storage capacity by 2011. This is quite a capacity challenge, and thus the need arose to develop a new strategy for storage of images.

The project considered whether it would be possible to distinguish between master image files which must be stored for all ‘eternity’ (because the originals decay rapidly and/or digitisation costs are so high that repeating the digitisation process is not a viable solution) and objects which are stored for access. The distinction would allow for a more pragmatic and economic storage policy, whereby projected usage would determine the storage strategy.

The draft of the report was reviewed by a group of selected specialists on digitisation, digital preservation and image science. Their feedback was in incorporated in the final version of the report which is available at: http://www.kb.nl/hrd/dd/dd_links_en_publicaties/links_en_publicaties_intro.html

 **CALL FOR PAPERS AND PERFORMANCES**

DRHA 2008: ‘New Communities of Knowledge and Practice’

University of Cambridge, September 14-17

Visit the website at www.rsd.cam.ac.uk/drha08/ for more information and a link to the proposals website.

The deadline for submissions will be 30 April 2008.

The DRHA (Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts) conference is held annually at various academic venues throughout the UK. The conference theme this year is to promote discussion around new collaborative environments, collective knowledge and redefining disciplinary boundaries.  The conference, hosted by the University of Cambridge with its fantastic choice of conference venues will take place from Sunday 14th September to Wednesday 17th September

The aim of the conference is to:

*       Establish a site for mutually creative exchanges of knowledge.

*       Promote discussion around new collaborative environments and

collective knowledge.

*       Encourage and celebrate the connections and tensions within the

liminal spaces that exist between the Arts and Humanities.

*       Redefine disciplinary boundaries.

*       Create a forum for debate around notions of the ’solitary’ and

the collaborative across the Arts and Humanities.

*       Explore the impact of the Arts and Humanities on ICT: design and

narrative structures and visa versa.

There will be a variety of sessions concerned with the above but also with a particular emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration and theorising around practice. There will also be various installations and performances focussing on the same theme. 

Keynote talks will be given by our plenary speakers who we are pleased to announce are Sher Doruff, Research Fellow (Art, Research and Theory Lectoraat) and Mentor at the Amsterdam School for the Arts, Alan Liu, Professor of English, University of California Santa Barbara and Sally Jane Norman, Director of the Culture Lab, Newcastle University.

In addition to this, there will be various round table discussions together with a panel relating to ‘Second Life’ and a special forum ‘Engaging research and performance through pervasive and locative arts projects’ led by Steve Benford, Professor of Collaborative Computing, University of Nottingham. Also planned is the opportunity for a more immediate and informal presentation of work in our ‘Quickfire’ style events. Whether papers, performance or other, all proposals should reflect the critical engagement at the heart of DRHA.

Cambridge’s venues range from the traditional to the contemporary all situated within walking distance of central departments, museums and galleries. The conference will be based around Cambridge University’s Sedgwick Site, particularly the West Road concert hall, where delegates will have use of a wide range of facilities including a recital room and a ‘black box’ performance space, to cater for this year’s parallel programming and performances.

  Sue Broadhurst

             DRHA Programme Chair