Dictionary of Australian Artists Online
Information on the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online is available from
the prototype website. The project, led by UNSW with partners the University
of Sydney, National Library of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Art
Gallery of New South Wales, and State Library of New South Wales, with
financial support from the Australian Research Council, aims to digitise,
update and enhance the printed edition of Joan Kerr’s The Dictionary of
Australian Artists, Vivien Johnson’s Aboriginal Artists of the Western
Desert: A Biographical Dictionary and other sources. Website:
http://www.daao.org.au.
Arts & Humanities Data Service ICT Guides
The Arts and Humanities Data Service in the UK has published ICT Guides to
promote cataloguing best-practice in digital arts and humanities projects.
The guides provide methods, case studies and sources on data capture, data
structure and enhancement, data analysis, data publishing and dissemination,
practice-led research, communication and collaboration, and strategy and
project management. The site also has information on 97 software
applications and programming languages. Web:
http://ahds.ac.uk/ictguides/
Digital newspapers
The University of Richmond, in partnership with the Perseus Project and the
Virginia Center for Digital History, has launched the American Civil War-era
newspaper, the Richmond Daily Dispatch, as an online resource. Funded by the
Institute of Museum and Library Services, the collection features full-text
searching of all issues of the newspaper from November 1860 through December
1865. The product is managed by UM DLXS from the University of Michigan's
Digital Library Production Service. After the purchase of microfilm reels
from ProQuest, the reels were sent to the imaging and re-keying vendor,
Digital Divide Data, to be scanned, hand-keyed, and encoded as XML documents
to the TEI lite and P4 specifications. The resulting digital files were
ingested and indexed by XPAT, the indexing engine of the University of
Michigan's Digital Library Production Service's DLXS software suite. JPEG
2000 images were created from the TIFF format images received from the
vendor. These images reside on the project server and are converted on the
fly into the JPEG format when viewed by users. Web:
http://dlxs.richmond.edu/d/ddr.
European digital strategy
The European Digital Library Initiative Copyright Subgroup’ s interim report
on the European Commission’s digital strategy offers detailed proposals on
orphan works, out of print works and digital preservation. Web:http://europa.eu.int/.
UK scholarly resources
JISC has announced successful bids in the latest £12m investment in the
digitisation of major scholarly resources of national importance in the UK.
The 16 winning bids represent nearly 60 organisations from education and
other sectors, including the British Film Institute, National Archive, BBC,
ITN, British Library, National Library of Wales and Bodleian Library. The
projects will capture a wide variety of aspects of UK life, from Cabinet
papers to First World War poetry, from radio news to East End music hall
archives, and in a wide range of media, including sound, film, images,
journals, newspapers, maps, theses, pamphlets and cartoons. Projects
include: Archival Sound Recordings 2 (British Library); British Newspapers
1620-1900 (British Library); and the East London Theatre Archive (University
of East London). Further information:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/digitisation_home.html
Australian innovation and technology
statistics
The Australian Bureau of Statics released its Innovation and Technology
Update No. 15 in December 2006, summarising developments and statistics on
information and technology, research and development, and innovation. It
also describes a new approach, called the Integrated Business
Characteristics Strategy (IBCS) “to provide innovation and information and
communications technology (ICT) related statistics for businesses. Web:
http://www.abs.gov.au
Australian innovation recommendations
The Business Council of Australia’s report New Pathways to Prosperity: A
National Innovation Framework for Australia, prepared in conjunction
with the Society for Knowledge Economics (SKE), outlines priorities for
achieving greater innovation outcomes. While Australia has always compared
well with other countries on scientific output, the report says, it has a
lower proportion of investment in education and research as a proportion of
GDP when compared with developed nations. It recommends: (1) making
innovation a priority of the Council of Australian Governments; (2)
establishing a new coordinating body ‘Innovation Australia’; (3) setting a
long-term plan for the future by conducting a ‘Knowledge Foresight 2025’
exercise; (4) investigating funding innovation where there are barriers to
private market investment; (5) support ‘innovation partnerships’ between
business and education sectors; (6) supporting university commercialisation
structures; (7) establishing ‘Innovation Resource Centres’ for businesses to
extend programs supported by government; (8) ensuring education and training
systems are capable of supporting and encouraging innovation, such as
through the development of content for a new year 11 and 12 subject on
business innovation; and (9) introducing a national post-school
‘Entrepreneurs and Innovators Internship’ program. The Society for Knowledge
Economics was founded in 2005 by Microsoft, Westpac, CPA Australia,
Institute of Actuaries of Australia and the Australian Government
Consultative Committee on Knowledge Capital (AGCCKC). The report is
available from http://www.bca.com.au/
Designing cyberinfrastructure for
collaboration & innovation
In January 2007, the Committee for Economic Development, Council on
Competitiveness, National Science Foundation, Science Commons, and
University of Michigan in the United States held the conference Designing
Cyberinfrastructure for Collaboration and Innovation to review issues
examined two years earlier in Advancing Knowledge and the Knowledge Economy.
For presentations and other resources see http://advancingknowledge.com and
http://cyberinfrastructure.us
Social networking websites
Amanda Lenhart and Mary Madden, in Social Networking Websites and Teens:
An Overview (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 7 January 2007)
report on the wide use of social networks such as MySpace and Facebook by
teenagers. Over half the respondents in an associated survey said they had a
profile on the sites and slightly less than half (48%) said they frequented
the sites every day. The vast majority use the sites to communicate with
friends. Web:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/198/report_display.asp.
UK e-infrastructure
The UK Office of Science and Innovation (OSI) e-Infrastructure Working Group
has published Developing the UK’s e-Infrastructure for Science and
Innovation, which sets out the requirements to help the UK maintain and
enhance its global standing in science and innovation. It calls for greater
coordination between the key agencies in the field, greater investment in
e-infrastructure and a 'step-change' in e-infrastructure development.' The
Working Group six sub-groups have each produced detailed reports in the
following areas: data and information creation; preservation and curation;
search and navigation; virtual research communities; networks, compute and
data storage; authentication, authorisation, accounting, middleware and
digital rights management. The overarching report presents the six areas as
distinct but interconnected stages of a lifecycle. Web:
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/documents/OSI/report.pdf
Library of Congress RSS feeds
For details of RSS newsfeeds available at the Library of Congress, including
News, Upcoming Events, New on the Web, New Webcasts, News from the John W.
Kluge Center and What's New in Science Reference, see its central RSS Web
page at http://www.loc.gov/rss.
Cataloguing
Karen Coyle and Diane Hillmann, in Resource Description and Access (RDA):
Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century (D-Lib Magazine vol 13 no 1/2,
January/February 2007) describe the tensions existing between those
advocating an incremental change to cataloguing process and others who
desire a bolder library entry into the digital era. They call for concerted
effort with interested non-library communities and the adoption of the
principles of systems analysis. The library community needs to “set a new
goal to achieve consensus on the top layer model, basic principles and
general rules, and leave the details to the specialised communities…Within
the library ranks, particularly at the management level, there is a growing
discomfort with the leadership provided by the JSC. If new cataloging rules
are developed without the parallel development of new models for library
catalogs, then it will be necessary for some in the library world to set off
in their own direction, rejecting what they see as insufficient change with
a large price tag for implementation. Members of [the] profession who have
embraced the present information technologies and are looking forward to
what the future will bring are particularly dismayed at the creation of
another set of cataloging rules based on technologies that are now decades
past. Despite [the] long history of service to users, it will be a
continuing struggle for libraries to interact as equals with the key players
in the fast-paced information age; it will be impossible for [them] to do so
if [there isn’t] a unified vision allowing [them] to harness [their]
collective strength” Web:
http://dlib.org/dlib/january07/coyle/01coyle.html
Karen Markey, in The Online Library
Catalog: Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained? (D-Lib Magazine, vol 13 no
1/2, January/February 2007) proposes a new direction to regain the online
catalogue's status and users. This will require a paradigm shift. Libraries
need to (1) embrace post-Boolean probabilistic searching (2) embrace subject
cataloguing (3) expand with qualification metadata and (5) ameliorate the
full-text retrieval problem. Web:
http://dlib.org/dlib/january07/markey/01markey.html
LibraryThing is a web application for
storing and sharing personal library catalogues and book lists, developed by
Tim Spalding and launched in August 2005. By its first anniversary, it had
attracted more than 73,000 registered users who had catalogued 5.1 million
individual books, representing nearly 1.2 million unique works. Personal
library catalogues can be kept private, but most people choose to make them
public. On of its attractions is an 'add books' feature which will take a
title, author, or ISBN and search the holdings at the Library of Congress or
more than seventy other public and research libraries, as well as Amazon.com.
Once the right book and edition has been located, a simple click adds it to
the user's catalogue, at which time personal tags may be added. The
availability of MARC data through major libraries makes it possible for an
individual to attain a high level of accuracy in record keeping. Web:
http://librarything.com.
Library digitisation
Richard K Johnson, in In Google's Broad Wake: Taking Responsibility for
Shaping the Global Digital Library (ARL: A Bimonthly Report, no 250,
February 2007 considers mass digitisation policy recommendations from ALA,
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Francophone National Libraries, the
Committee on Institutional Cooperation, OCLC's Programs and Research
Division, and others, then summarises the common themes and provides a
checklist for libraries to review when negotiating a contract for
digitisation. “While Google’s aim is not at odds with the needs or goals of
the academy—indeed it promises to advance information sharing
dramatically—Google Book Search isn’t a perfect substitute for library
digitization.” Web:
http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br250.shtml).
Rebecca L Mugridge, in Managing
Digitization Activities (SPEC Kit 294, Association of Research
Libraries, 2006) provides a snapshot of digitisation efforts by ARL
libraries. It identifies the purposes of ARL member libraries' efforts, the
organisational structures the libraries use to manage digital initiatives,
where funding to sustain digital activities originated and how that funding
is allocated, how priorities are determined, whether libraries are
outsourcing any digitisation work, and how the success of libraries' digital
activities has been assessed. The focus of the survey was on the
digitisation of existing library materials, rather than the creation of
born-digital objects. The survey suggests that digitisation is still a
fledgling activity, with a wide range of budget allocations. She concludes:
“Comments throughout the survey indicate that many libraries are in a period
of transition as they attempt to determine the best organization, staffing,
and budgeting models for their particular digitisation operations.
Small-scale operations are ramping up for more substantial activity.
Collaborative projects are common. Digitization activities increase the
availability and access to information for everyone, not just an
institution’s local users. As libraries continue to pursue digitization
activities, it’s important to share what is learned in order to benefit from
each other’s experiences and develop a collective knowledge of best
practices”. Web:
http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/spec294web.pdf.
Websites
Winners of the Best of the Web awards at the annual Museums and the Web
conference in San Francisco (April 2007) were: National Theatre, UK, http://stagework.org.uk
(Best Overall Museum Web Site and Best Education Use); Discover Nikkei
Japanese American National Museum, http://www.discovernikkei.org (Best
Research Site); Collections Link, managed by MDA in partnership with
Institute of Conservation and The National Preservation Office, http://www.collectionslink.org.uk
(Best Museum Professional's Site); SFMOMA ArtCasts, http://www.sfmoma.org/podcasts/
(Best Innovative or Experimental Application) and Caught & Coloured, Museum
Victoria, Australia, http://museumvictoria.com.au/caughtandcoloured/ (Best
On-line Exhibition Honourable Mention). Papers presented at the conference
covered a range of topics and included: How Shall We Label Our Exhibit
Today? Applying The Principles of On-Line Publishing to an On-Site
Exhibition (Mayra Ortiz-Williams, Ross Parry, Andrew Sawyer, United
Kingdom); Reflecting Organizational Change in On-line Presence (Emily Bottis,
Christine Klaehn, USA); Transcending the Boundaries of the Museum! Managing
Organisational Change in the Museum and on the Web (Jenny Berthling, Anna
Engquist, Sweden); Addressing the Limitations of Open Standards (Alastair
Dunning, Marieke Guy, Brian Kelly, United Kingdom); OpenCollection Web-Based
Collection Cataloging and Access Software (Megan Forbes, Carl Goodman, Seth
Kaufman, USA); and Facilitating Access: Empowering Small Museums (Joy
Suliman, Australia). Web:
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007
Web-based museum exhibitions
Richard Entlich, in The Missing Dimension in Web-based Museum
Exhibitions: Obstacles to Adding Depth to Digital Data (RLG DigiNews,
vol 10, no 6, 15 December 2006) observes that in the late 1990s, virtual
museum exhibitions based on three dimensional imagery were a growing trend,
and he poses the question why aren’t there more of them available today?
After discussing the development of 3D technology on the World Wide Web, its
adoption by museums, and the obstacles preventing it from a fully
mainstreamed activity, he provides a summary of 3D technologies such as
VRML, QuickTime-VR, Shockwave3D, and others. And he concludes that although
the future for 3D on the Web is looking better, “it’s hard to predict when
events will propel 3D on the Web to a critical mass of interest that will
break the current chicken and egg logjam”. But it “is promising enough to
merit keeping an eye out for new developments.” Web:
http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=20999#article5.
Social software for libraries
Michael Stephens’ Web 2.0 & Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software,
published by the American Library Association in the series Library
Technology Reports vol 42, no4) comments on the use of blogs, RSS, instant
messaging, wikis and Flickr by libraries. Web:
http://www.techsource.ala.org/
MODS
The Digital Library Federation/Aquifer Implementation Guidelines for
Shareable MODS Records (Washington, DC: Digital Library Federation,
November 2006) provides recommendations for applying the Metadata Object
Description Schema1 (MODS) for use in describing digital cultural heritage
and humanities-based scholarly resources that are to be shared within the
Aquifer Initiative and beyond. The guidelines are specifically meant for
metadata that will be shared with others (whether through the Open Archives
Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting —OAI-PMH — or some other means),
and, as such, is focused on how to derive metadata that will make sense and
be useful outside of its local context. Web:
http://www.diglib.org/aquifer/dlfmodsimplementationguidelines_finalnov2006.pdf.
Metasearching
Jonathan Rochkind, in (Meta)search Like Google (Library Journal, 17 February
2007), says “The time has come for libraries, too, to negotiate for rights
to index full text.” Drawing on the example of the Scholars Portal Project
of the Ontario Council of University Libraries, he predicts “as we do get
more and more full text, we will be able to get meaningful relevancy
ranking, useful clustering, more advanced presentation of result sets, and
other advanced features that will serve more needs without requiring the
user switch to a ‘native’ interface.”. Web:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6413442.html.
This issue of Cross Currents compiled by Paul
Bentley.
The
Wolanski Foundation would be grateful for feedback
on the scope, format and content of this bulletin..
