The Digital Blog

Metadata for Digital Resources: Implementation, Systems Design and Interoperability

by Muriel Foulonneau, Jenn Riley

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.

Anybody read it already?

Thanks to Jill Hurst-Wahl, digitzation101

I’ve written a fair number of blog posts of digital preservation and none talk about the preservation of digital materials without the use of technology. Our “bet” is that technology is here to stay. If past events can predict future performance, then our history tells us that our technology will continue to become more advanced. However, the use of materials on our planet is changing.

Will those of us who have been used to unlimited electricity, for example, continue to be able afford it? And will the electricity be there? How “preserved” are our digital assets if they cannot be used due to periods of darkness?

I am not predicting a digital dark age. Nor am I saying that we should not digitize because we have a fragile infrastructure. If we limited what we all did because we felt the future was uncertain, we’d never do anything. But I do hope that somewhere someone is working through scenarios and thinking about what we’ll need in order to bring our digital assets back to life should a period of darkness occur. (Will they require some special care?)
 Yes, a deep thought on the day after Earth Day. A day on which I drove too much, because taking public transportation was not an option. A day where I saw gas prices over $3.70/gallon. A day where I participated on a panel about technology (blogging), while the sun was setting over the lake, reminding us that technology isn’t everything.

From Drs. 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.

Found: http://availableonline.wordpress.com/