Australian music information
The Music Council of Australia has added an Australia Knowledge Base to its
website incorporating information on music sector performance, support, and
statistics. Web: http://www.mca.org.au
Australian Screen Online
The Australian Film Commission, in partnership with other Australian
institutions, has developed Australianscreen Online to facilitate access to
Australia’s audiovisual heritage. It has information about and excerpts from
a wide selection of Australian feature films, documentaries, television
programs, newsreels, short films, animations and home-movies produced over
the last 100 years. It also includes teachers’ notes identifying and
describing the educational values of many of the film clips. Partner
institutions include the National Film and Sound Archive, National Archives
of Australia, ABC, SBS, and AIATSIS. Web:
http://www.australianscreen.com.au
Digital projects in the humanities
Brad Eden’s Innovative Digital Projects in the Humanities (American
Library Association’s Library Technology Reports vol 41, no 4 2005) is a
directory of humanities web portals, digital projects, associations,
conferences, discussion groups, blogs, journals and software. Web:
http://www.ala.org
London Theatre Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum has completed the move of its theatre
collections from the London Theatre Museum building at Covent Garden,
following the decision of the V&A's Board (the Theatre Museum’s parent body)
to close the Covent Garden space. In September 2007, the London Theatre
Museum offices and staff moved to the V&A at South Kensington, where work is
continuing on new plans for the theatre and performance collections,
including new permanent galleries at South Kensington, exhibitions and
touring displays, education activities, on-line publications and digital
projects. The role of the V&A Theatre Collections as the UK’s national
collection for the performing arts will not change. The work of documenting
performance and developing the collections will continue, and research
access to them will continue to be provided at the V&A Collections Centre.
Web:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/tco/index.html
Tunes
Find the Tunes is a website offering details of songs, artists, bands and
free downloads. Web:
http://www.FindTheTunes.com.
UK concert programs
The Concert Programmes Project Online Database describes holdings from 1690
to the present day in major libraries, archives and museums throughout the
UK and Ireland. Participating institutions include the British Library,
Royal College of Music, Royal Academy of Music, national libraries of
Scotland and Ireland, Bodleian Library and Trinity College, Dublin. Although
based on UK collections, the database covers material from venues in 80
countries worldwide. Collection-level descriptions outline the significance
and content of each collection and give details of their physical
arrangement, date range, performers and venues. Phase 1 of the project was
funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and jointly hosted by
Cardiff University and the Royal College of Music. The database does not
include descriptions of individual programs. Web:
http://www.concertprogrammes.org.uk
UK digital arts & humanities
The Arts and Humanities Research Council’s ICT Methods Network, in
collaboration with several other institutions and communities, has launched
the Digital Arts & Humanities site, which aims to promote relevant research
through member profiles, blogs, discussion groups, and RSS feeds. Web:
http://www.arts-humanities.net/.
US humanities collaboration
The US National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and
Library Services have invited applications for collaborative digital
humanities grants. The program, Advancing Knowledge: the IMLS/NEH Digital
Partnership, seeks projects that will “explore new ways to share, examine
and interpret humanities collections in a digital environment and develop
new uses and audiences for existing digital resources.” Grants are intended
“to spur innovation and new collaborations, advance the role of cultural
repositories in online teaching, learning and research, and develop
collaborative approaches involving the scholarly community and cultural
repositories for the creation, management, preservation, and presentation of
reusable digital collections and products.” Projects must have at least one
museum, library, or archive as an integral member of the project team and
seek funds ranging from US$50,000 to US$350,000. Web:
http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/Digital_Partnership.html
Digital lives
The Digital Lives Research Project is studying personal digital collections.
Led by Neil Beagrie of the British Library, and with funding by the Arts and
Humanities Research Council, partner institutions include University College
London and University of Bristol. The project began in September 2007 and
will run until March 2009. Of particular relevance to memory institutions,
it will also be of potential interest to individuals who wish to manage
their own personal digital collections for family history or other purposes.
Web:
http://www.bl.uk/digital-lives/
Digital preservation
Nancy McGovern, in A Digital Decade: Where Have We Been and Where Are We
Going in Digital Preservation? (RLG DigiNews Vol 11, no 1, April 15,
2007), reviews past developments and future needs in digital preservation.
The digital preservation community is coalescing and maturing, she says.
Signs of this maturing include the development of accepted standards and
practices and an increasingly effective communication network. Standards in
archives, libraries, museums and other cultural heritage institutions “are
moving towards more comprehensive codification of accepted practice, the
promulgation of standards and practice through community channels, and the
means to develop and maintain policies and procedures.” Web:
http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=21033#article3.
Institutional digital repositories
The Primary Research Group has published an International Survey of
Institutional Digital Repositories, presenting data from 56
institutional digital repositories from eleven countries, including the USA,
Canada, Australia, Germany, South Africa, India, Turkey and other countries.
The 121-page report covers costs, budgets, software, personnel, open access
policies, marketing, relations with faculty and other contributors of
content, and many other issues relevant to those managing or designing an
institutional digital depository. Among its findings: the average
institutional digital repository spends US$78,802 in start-up costs and the
largest repositories — those requiring 3,600 hours or more annually — have
budgets averaging US$145,444. The mean number of journal articles held is
772. Available for purchase at Web:
http://www.primaryresearch.com/200711071-Information-Science.html
Newspaper digitisation
Edwin Klijn, in The Current State-of-art in Newspaper Digitization: A
Market Perspective (D-Lib Magazine Feb 2008) gives a bird's-eye overview
of current technology in the field of newspaper digitisation. “Market trends
reflect shifting goals on the side of those that produce the requirements,
ie the cultural heritage institutions. There is a growing tendency to open
up newspaper collections at the article level. Zoning and segmentation
technologies provide article-level access. Also, in an increasing number of
newspaper digitization projects, the digitized articles are classified into
specific genres such as news items, classified ads, editorials, etc. These
technologies can be very labour-intensive, as they are usually
semi-automated processes. The accuracy of OCR technology is improving, but –
especially for historical texts – there is still a lot that needs to be
done.” Web: http://www.dlib.org/
Sydney Morning Herald
The National Library of Australia has received $1 million from the Vincent
Fairfax Family Foundation to support the digitisation of out-of-copyright
editions of The Sydney Morning Herald from its inception in 1831 to 1954, as
part of a nationwide collaborative effort, coordinated by the Library, to
provide free online access to a major daily newspaper from each state and
territory, from the first newspaper published in 1803 through to 1954. The
$8 million newspaper digitisation program, involving millions of pages of
content, began this year. The Herald project will cost an additional
$1.7million, with $700,000 contributed by the Library, and is expected to be
completed in 2009. Other titles in the digitisation program include: The
Sydney Gazette; The Maitland Mercury; The Argus; The Courier-Mail; The
Hobart Town Gazette; The Advertiser; and The West Australian. For more
information about the program, see http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp
Open access trends
Peter Suber, in his SPARC Open Access Newsletter, January 2008, pinpoints 13
open access trends of the past year. Among them: (1) The compelling case for
mandating OA for publicly-funded research spread even further in 2007; (2)
OA journals and repositories grew vigorously in 2007; (3) the hybrid OA
journal model, publishing both OA and non-OA articles in the same journal,
generally charging a publication fee for the OA articles, expanded in 2007,
but much more slowly than in 2006; (4) with or without mandates, more
governments committed themselves to OA for publicly-funded data; (5)
book-scanning projects grew significantly in 2007; (6) more countries and
institutions saw the logic of OA for electronic theses and dissertations;
(7) there was an explosion of interest in OA videos for scholarship,
research, and education; (8) there was a flurry of activity in what could be
called the Wikipedia neighborhood; (9) more and more OA discussions zeroed
in on the details of open licenses; and (10) open access to courseware and
other teaching and learning materials surged in 2007. Web:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/
Blogging about libraries
Meredith Farkas, in The Bloggers Among Us (Library Journal, 15 December
2007), after surveying the "biblioblogosphere", found among other things
that (1) there are many more bloggers in the library community than before;
(2) women have begun to close the blogging gap with their male counterparts,
and (3) the number of public librarians blogging has also increased in
comparison to academic librarians. Web:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6510669.html.
Libraries in a digital information landscape
Eric Lease Morgan, in Today's Digital Information Landscape (Musings on
Information and Librarianship, 1 December 2007), after exploring MARC and
XML, databases and indexing, networks and relationships, institutional
repositories and open access, and library cataloguing concludes: "The
principles of collection, organization, preservation and dissemination are
extraordinarily relevant in today’s digital landscape. The advent of the
globally networked computers, Internet Indexes and mass digitization
projects have not changed this fact. If anything, they highlight the need
for these processes even more. Libraries are just one of many players in the
information universe. It is increasingly important to adapt to the changing
landscape and at the same time bring new value to the collections and
services we provide. It is not so much about the what we doing. It more
about the how.” Web: http://infomotions.com/musings/digital-landscape/.
Cyberinfrastructure and museums
Academic Commons December 2007 is devoted to cyberintrastructure and the
liberal arts and is dedicated to the memory of Roy Rosenzweig (1950-2007,
http://thanksroy.org/). A section on colleges and museums, includes: David
Green’s Museums, Cataloging & Content Infrastructure: An Interview with
Kenneth Hamma and John Weber’s College Museums in a Networked
Era--Two Propositions.
Kenneth Hamma says museum digitisation is “about attitude and a willingness
to invest effort. The Pacific Asia Museum is a good example. It doesn't have
the budget of the other large institutions in LA and yet it was among the
most successful in taking advantage of this opportunity from the Getty's
electronic cataloging initiative. They were very clear about the fact that
they wanted to create a digital surrogate of everything in their collection,
do some decent cataloging and documentation and make it available. That just
sounds so perfectly obvious.”
John Webster, on college museums, argues for
(1) the importance of networked digital technologies to the mission of the
college museum, and (2) the potential importance of the college museum in
teaching forms of visual literacy. “If [they] are to play an even more
essential and intriguing role in higher education, museums of all varieties
must explore how [they] can function as a core aspect of the overall
teaching effort of institutions, and how [they] can regularly address
multiple disciplines in exhibitions.” Web:
http://www.academiccommons.org/).
Online resources and open content licences
Eduserv, the not-for-profit IT services group, has published a study which
reveals that while many UK museums, libraries and archives share their
collections online with the public, the majority are not familiar with the
use of open content licences which would allow the public to use texts,
images and other materials legally for their own projects. About 40 percent
were unfamiliar with open licensing and only 22 respondents are currently
using or planning to use open licences. Of the digital material being made
available, the organisations surveyed were most likely to share text and
images online. Multimedia materials were among those that many organisations
were planning to make available for the first time. In contrast, many
organisations surveyed did not have audio materials available online, nor
were they intending to do so in the future. Web:
http://www.eduserv.org.uk
Archivopedia
Archivopedia is a new wiki-based encyclopedia for people who want to write,
edit and create articles about terms, important individuals, news and issues
of interest to archivists, librarians, records managers and museum
professionals. Web:
http://archivopedia.com/
Online archive development
Ian G. Anderson, in Necessary but Not Sufficient: Modelling Online
Archive Development in the UK, (D-Lib Magazine January/February 2008),
gives a framework for evaluating the state of online archives and indicates
potential paths for future development. He concludes: “As it stands, the
majority of UK archives are providing the necessary, if sometimes basic,
range of information and services that support different archive functions
and user needs…However, UK archives overall are far from providing online
services that are sufficient to reflect the full range of their services in
the analogue world. In particular, the development of online finding aids,
digitised content and material to support different types of user require
more development…Making more use of hub services (particularly to implement
Web 2.0 technologies), integrating local versions of hub finding aids back
into repository web sites and harnessing user input may lift the burden of
service delivery sufficiently to enable archives to accelerate the
development of their online presence. In the meantime, there are a range of
relatively minor steps that a large number of archives could take that would
greatly enhance their online presence. Indicating the extent to which
holdings are represented in online finding aids is one obvious example.
Linking existing exhibition material to finding aids, tailoring research and
source guides to particular users, providing more extensive external links
and providing more information on the range of services, policies and
practices that archives have are all small, but valuable, steps archives
could take.” Web: http://www.dlib.org
Bibliographic control
The Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, convened by the
Library of Congress, has released On the Record, its report on the future of
bibliographic description in light of advances in search engine technology,
the popularity of the Internet and the influx of electronic information
resources. The report presents findings on how bibliographic control and
other descriptive practices can effectively support management of and access
to library materials in the evolving information and technology environment,
recommends ways in which the library community can collectively move toward
achieving this vision, and advise the Library of Congress on its role and
priorities.
Three broad guiding principles form the
foundation of the report: bibliographic control is broader than cataloguing;
the bibliographic universe has moved beyond libraries, publishers and
database producers to include creators, vendors, distributors, stores, and
user communities, among others, across sectors and international boundaries;
and it is neither feasible nor necessarily appropriate for the Library of
Congress to continue to perform all its assumed roles.
It makes five general recommendations: (1)
increase the efficiency of bibliographic production for all libraries
through cooperation and sharing of bibliographic records and through use of
data produced in the overall supply chain; (2) transfer effort into
high-value activity — particularly for knowledge creation by leveraging
access for unique materials held by libraries that are currently hidden and
underused; (3) position technology by recognising that the World Wide Web is
libraries’ technology platform as well as the appropriate platform for
standards; (4) position the library community for the future by adding
evaluative, qualitative and quantitative analyses of resources, particularly
in realising the potential of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic
Records framework; and (5) strengthen the library and information science
profession through education and development of metrics that will inform
decision-making. The Working Group hopes that the report will be viewed as a
“call to action” that “informs and broadens participation in discussion and
debate, conveys a sense of urgency, stimulates collaboration, and catalyzes
thoughtful and deliberate action” and “looks forward to the development of
specific implementation plans, research agendas, and educational programs.”
Web:
http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/
Descriptive metadata practices
The Research Libraries Group has published the results of a descriptive
metadata practices survey involving 18 RLG partners in the United States and
the United Kingdom with "multiple metadata creation centers" on campus that
included interacting libraries, archives, and museums. Its aim was to gain a
baseline understanding of current descriptive metadata practices and
dependencies with a view to changing metadata creation processes. There were
some expected variations in practice across libraries, archives and museums,
as well as high levels of customisation and local tool development. This
produces limited opportunities for sharing tools and practices, highlights
the lack of confidence institutions have in the effectiveness of their
tools, the disconnect between their interest in creating metadata to serve
their primary audiences and the inability to serve that audience within the
most commonly used discovery systems (such as Google). The reports are
available at
http://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/.
Functional requirements for library,
archive and museum records
Brad Eden’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records
(Library Technology Reports vol 42, no 6, November/December 2006) provides
an overview and list of annotated sources in relation to FRBR — it’s impact
on current standards, application studies, FRBR implementations, relation to
other models and types — such as ISAD (G) and Archives — and other
functional requirements. Other functional requirements include FRAR
(Functional Requirements for Authority Records), FRMAR (Functional
Requirements for Numbering of Authority Records), FRSAR (Functional
Requirements for Subject Authority Records), FRVRR Functional Requirements
for Visual Resources Records), FROR (Functional Requirements for Object
Records) and FRDA (Functional Requirements for Describing Agents). According
to Eden: "It has become apparent to library administrators the current
organizational arrangement and division of operations of technical services
and public services is not sustainable either financially or
organizationally. The clear imperative is: libraries need to be able to
morph, change, reengineer, and strategically invest and train personnel and
resources toward a future in which information is no longer controlled or
held by the library, but by a large number of publishing and service
conglomerates for whom there is little incentive to think about issues, such
as persistent access, preservation, or standardization of digital
objects....We have neither the money nor the market dominance that companies
like Google, Amazon and eBay have in the new information environment; we
must change, and we must change now! FRBR and its subsequent follower
abbreviations and/or acronyms may be able to provide the marketability and
viability towards this new direction. Only time will tell." Web:
http://www.techsource.ala.org/ltr/
KNOLS
Google has invited selected people to test a new, free tool called Knol,
aimed at encouraging people to write authoritative articles on topics and
seen by some as a rival to Wikipedia. Editorial responsibilities and control
will rest with the authors. Google will rank pages to enhance search
quality. Once testing is completed, participation in Knol will be completely
open.
Library systems
Marshall Breeding, in Perceptions 2007: An International Survey of
Library Automation (9 January 2008, http://www.librarytechnology.org/perceptions2007.pl)
explores perceptions of library systems and their vendors by looking at
customer satisfaction dimensions. The article complements his annual
Automated Systems Marketplace in the Library Journal (http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6429251.html).
Open source digital archival and
preservation systems
Kevin Bradley, Junran Lei and Chris Blackall’s report for the UNESCO Memory
of the World Sub-Committee on Technology, Towards an Open Source
Repository and Preservation System: Recommendations on the Implementation of
an Open Source Digital Archival and Preservation System and on Related
Software Development (Paris, 2007), defines the requirements for a
digital archival and preservation system using standard hardware and
describes a set of open source software which could be used to implement it.
It recommends that UNESCO (1) establish a steering committee to support the
development of a single package open source digital preservation and access
repository; (2) support a pilot project with a number of communities or
institutions who can articulate their requirements and act as beta testers
of such a system; (3) through that and other committees and projects,
influence and support the development of specific software; (4) investigate
the development of solutions to the system gaps noted in this report,
particularly in the area of preservation planning and archival storage
systems; (5) support the integration of a number of open source tools to
develop a single package open source repository system; (6) encourage the
development of federated and cooperative approaches through the adoption of
standard data packages; (7) ensure that, low cost notwithstanding, the
solution is based in international standards and best practice; (8) support
and expand existing training and education to include technical training in
the envisaged system in parallel with work on intellectual property and
cultural rights; (9) liaise with existing open source distributors to
support these aims. Web://portal.unesco.org.
Sound preservation
The Sound Directions project at Harvard University and Indiana University
has published Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation,
dealing with personnel and equipment for preservation transfer, digital
files, metadata, storage, preservation packages and interchange, and audio
preservation systems and workflows. Web:
www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/sounddirections/.
Xena 4.0
The National Archive of Australia’s has made available the 4.0 version of
Xena software as a free and open source tool for digital preservation. Xena
(Xml Electronic Normalising for Archives).may be used as a desktop
application to determine file formats and convert files into standards
based, open formats. New features include an export facility (un-Xenafy), a
default audio plug-in, an image file metadata device and an archive plug-in.
Web: http://xena.sourceforge.net.
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..
