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Alternative File Formats for Storing Master Images of Digitisation Projects (Note: PDF)

From the Koninklijke Bibliotheek website

This document is the end result of a study regarding alternative formats for storing master files of digitisation projects of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) in The Hague, the Netherlands. The study took place in the context of reviewing the KB's storage strategy. The objective of the study was to describe alternative file formats in order to reduce the necessary storage space. The desired image quality, long-term sustainability and functionality had to be taken into account during the study.


Many More than a Million: building the digital environment for the age of abundance (Note: PDF)

Find the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) website

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) hosted a workshop in Washington, D.C., on November 28, 2007, to talk about the general problem of what can be done with the very large digital collections now taking shape as a result of mass digitization projects, the so-called “million books” problem. This was the third of what will ultimately be five workshops held on this topic, organized by Tufts University with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This sequence of workshops on the million books problem converges with CLIR’s programs in digital scholarship, cyberinfrastructure and preservation and is part of an extended, distributed conversation on these related topics that CLIR is supporting in several venues in 2007 and 2008. While the November CLIR meeting focused on text collections, we also considered four major questions that are largely format independent but illuminate the implications of scale:
• What is the problem? How does access to large corpora of digital materials change that problem?
• What services do scholars need?
• How do we manage digital collections when the digital material is abundant rather than selective?
• What systems or infrastructure is necessary to provide services and materials to scholars?


The Fifth Blackbird: Some Thoughts on Economically Sustainable Digital Preservation / Brian F. Lavoie

From the D-Lib Magazine website

A few years ago my colleague Lorcan Dempsey and I wrote an article entitled "Thirteen Ways of Looking at ... Digital Preservation". Our purpose was to present a more nuanced view of digital preservation than one typically found in the literature, conferences, and community discussion springing up around the topic. We suggested thirteen different yet intertwined perspectives one can take on the digital preservation problem, with the implicit message that successful digital preservation activities will likely have to accommodate most if not all of them. We summarized our thirteen digital preservation "blackbirds" by noting: Preserving our digital heritage is more than just a technical process of perpetuating digital signals over long periods of time. It is also a social and cultural process, in the sense of selecting what materials should be preserved, and in what form; it is an economic process, in the sense of matching limited means with ambitious objectives; it is a legal process, in the sense of defining what rights and privileges are needed to support maintenance of a permanent scholarly and cultural record. It is a question of responsibilities and incentives, and of articulating and organizing new forms of curatorial practice. And perhaps most importantly, it is an ongoing, long-term commitment, often shared, and cooperatively met, by many stakeholders.
The present article focuses on the fifth "blackbird" in our original list of thirteen: digital preservation as an economically sustainable activity.


The Australian METS Profile – A Journey about Metadata

From the D-Lib Magazine website

In any journey, there's a destination but half the 'fun' is getting there. This article chronicles our journey towards a common way of packaging and exchanging digital content in a future Australian data commons – a national corpus of research resources that can be shared and re-used. Whatever packaging format is used, it has to handle complex content models and work across multiple submission and dissemination scenarios. It has to do this in a way that maintains a history of the chain of custody of objects over time. At the start of our journey we chose METS extended by PREMIS to do this. We learnt a lot during the first two stages that we want to share with those travelling to a similar destination.


Privacy and Mobile Technologies: What are the Risks?

From the Riley Information Services website

This report assesses the ways in which privacy and new technologies are creating tensions as to the degree to which individual privacy is being compromised. Privacy is now a recognized human rights instrument. Privacy and Data Protection commissioners around the world are aware of this issue. However, the biggest challenges facing these privacy advocates are the ways in which information technologies are being used. In this new environment personal information can be bandied about with ease. One technology that is now pervasive in society is mobile technologies. This essay assesses the issues regarding the emergence of mobile (cellular) phones. It is now estimated there are 1 billion plus mobile phones. What are the implications for privacy?