The Source: news about digital libraries and library innovations from around the web

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ISO 28500:2009, Information and documentation -- WARC file format

From the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) website

For many years, heritage organisations have tried to find the most appropriate ways to collect and keep track of World Wide Web material using web-scale tools such as web crawlers. At the same time, these organisations were concerned with the requirement to archive very large numbers of born-digital and digitised files. A need was for a container format that permits one file simply and safely to carry a very large number of constituent data objects (of unrestricted type, including many binary types) for the purpose of storage, management, and exchange. Another requirement was that the container need only minimal knowledge of the nature of the objects.
The WARC format is expected to be a standard way to structure, manage and store billions of resources collected from the web and elsewhere. It is an extension of the ARC format, which has been used since 1996 to store files harvested on the web.


Public Libraries, Archives and Museums: Trends in Collaboration and Cooperation (Note: PDF)

From the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) website

This report examines the recent trends in collaboration and cooperation between public libraries, archives and museums. In many cases, the shared or similar missions of the institutions reviewed make them ideal partners in collaborative ventures. Different types of collaborative projects are examined, including exhibits, community programmes, digital resources and joint-use facilities. Examples come from Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom (UK), as well as from Russia, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Spain, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The report concludes with a guide to collaborations, including examples of best practices in the field, a guide to a successful collaboration, a discussion of the benefit and risks of collaboration, and a list of resources consulted.


2009 WebWise Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World

From the WebWise Conference website

Each year, the WebWise Conference brings together some 300 museum and library professionals to address the development of technological and digital resources and their impact on museums, libraries, and other cultural organisations. The theme of the 2009 WebWise was ‘Digital Debates’ - issues faced by museums, libraries, archives and other cultural institutions in terms of emerging technologies.
Presentations include:
* Rights and Responsibilities
* Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives
* Identity and Collaboration
* Chasing the Edge and Maintaining the Core


Local objects Telling Global Stories

From the Collections Australia Network (CAN) website

How do collections and objects “speak” to audiences? How can museums present their collections online in ways that can be resourced and sustained at a local level? Collections Australia Network national project manager, Ingrid Mason presented this paper at the 2009 Museums Australia conference to discuss how galleries, libraries, archives and libraries (GLAMs) can bring their collections to life online and engage new audiences.


M-Libraries: Information use on the move (Note: PDF)

From the University of Cambridge Arcadia Programme website

When people talk about mobile libraries, they tend to mean a bus or truck that has been kitted out as a roving branch library. However, with a growing number of people accessing the internet from their pocket PCs and mobile phones, libraries are investigating ways to deliver their services to mobile phones and other small-screen devices so their customers can access them any time anywhere. This can be as simple as sending text message alerts about reservations becoming available or overdue books, or as complex as the Athabasca University Library’s Digital Reading room, which allows readers to access full eBooks and journal articles through their library’s subscriptions on any mobile device.


Explore Australian collections and worldwide online sources

From the National Library of Australia website

The National Library of Australia has just released the first prototype of its new ‘Single Business Discovery Service’ for comment by key stakeholders. The service provides integrated access to over 42 million metadata and text resources from a range of the National Library's collaborative services and from elsewhere. For this initial version there are a range of data sources including: the Australian National Bibliographic Database, Australian Newspapers, Picture Australia, the ARROW Discovery Service and Pandora. The new service will also provide the discovery interface for the People Australia initiative. Additionally we have included some external sources of data such as OAIster, Open Library, the Hathi Trust, the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress tables of contents, publishers' descriptions and sample book chapters.
In leveraging off the collaborative approach the National Library takes with its discovery services, and in integrating results from across collections and formats, this new service will have distinct benefits for users. For example a researcher searching for images relating to "George Woodroffe Goyder" will also be presented with results for people, books, manuscripts, maps and full text newspapers articles. This new approach presents major benefits to the researcher who, in the past, would have had to visit each discovery service in turn and conduct separate searches for the material they sought.


Running code as part of an open standards policy

From the First Monday website

Governments around the world are considering implementing or even mandating open standards policies. They believe these policies will provide economic, socio–political, and technical benefits. In this article, we analyse the failure of the Massachusetts’s open standards policy as applied to document formats. We argue it failed due to the lack of running code. Running code refers to multiple independent, interoperable implementations of an open standard. With running code, users have choice in their adoption of a software product and consequently economic and technological benefits. We urge governments to incorporate a “running code” requirement when adopting an open standards policy.


Wikidentities: Young people collaborating on virtual identities in social network sites

From the First Monday website

Wikis and social networking sites (SNS) are arguably two of the most popular tools used by young people as part of their everyday social interactions. We propose that the concept of the wiki may be useful for understanding the kinds of virtual identities that are constructed, visually presented, and narrated in online contexts, such as MySpace. The term wikidentities is used in this paper to encapsulate the kinds of identity work, which may occur through SNS. We argue that wiki-like behaviour has consequences for reconceptualising identity as something that is mediated by (rather than at odds with) technology. Our research opens up ways for considering new forms of agency for young people appropriate to a high–tech era that encourages collaboration, negotiation, and risk.