Sept 30, 2005

The Value Proposition in Institutional Repositories. Erv Blythe and Vinod Chachra. EDUCAUSE Review. September 2005.

http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm05/erm0559.asp

Institutional repositories must have institutional organization, coordination, and investment. However they will be successful only when the individuals in the community participate. Institutional repositories are a “managed collection of digital objects, institutional in scope, with consistent data and metadata structures for similar objects, enabling resource discovery.” They need to allow reading, upload, exporting, and resource sharing. The repository focuses on developing, enhancing, and protecting the value in the creative output of the members of the sponsoring institution. They need to have a broad scope. There needs to be a critical mass to be successful. They are valuable to an institution by housing the items together, allowing interconnections, archiving and preservation. The value to individuals is through sharing resources for research and teaching. But the value is also a function of low cost, as measured by their time and effort.

Glossary: Image Terminology and Acronyms. TASI. September 28, 2005.

http://www.tasi.ac.uk/glossary/images_glossary.html

TASI has just released an updated glossary of image terminology and acronyms. It also includes technical terms and acronyms related to digital imaging, which provide explanations and additional links if needed. Some examples are:

Archival Image A digital image taken at the highest practicable resolution and stored securely

Digital Preservation The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) describes digital preservation as "the preservation of digital materials and to the preservation of paper based materials and other artefacts through their digitisation"

Image Archive Collection of images kept in secure storage

Artefacts A term used to denote unwanted blemishes, which may have been introduced to an image by electrical noise during scanning or during compression

Oldies, Music Rights, and the Digital Age. Peter McDonald. EDUCAUSE Review. September 2005.

http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm05/erm0557.asp

The recording industry looks at current sales yet looks to national sound archives to preserve the music for the future. “At almost every turn, the industry has stymied the legitimate efforts of recorded sound archives to provide digital preservation of and access to their vast collections of “oldies” (recordings from 1890 to the 1950s).” Archives can let users listen to recordings, and in certain conditions, provide fair use “copies” on an item-by-item basis. But the archives are prohibited from creating digital repositories of commercial audio files. The archives are all about access, whereas the recording industry is all about revenue. The two groups need to find a way to work together.

Toshiba First in World to Develop Notebook PC with HD DVD-ROM Drive. Press Release. 27 September, 2005.

http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2005_09/pr2702.htm

Toshiba has introduced a laptop with high-definition imaging in the world’s first notebook PC with a slim-type HD DVD-ROM drive. It will be commercially available next year. The height of the drive is less than 13 mm. It has a single optical lens that can read HD DVD discs and read and write to standard DVD and CD. It also comes with a high resolution LCD display.

StoneD: A Bridge between Greenstone and DSpace. Ian H. Witten, et al. D-Lib Magazine. September 2005.

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/witten/09witten.html

This article compares Greenstone with DSpace, the similarities and differences. They present StoneD which is a bridge between the two systems that allows data to migrate between the two or be used in combination. The two systems have different goals and strengths, though the can both build digital collections. Greenstone is primarily for building and distributing collections, mostly on the web. DSpace is for self depositing institutional repositories and preservation of information. StoneD allows for data to be imported and exported between the two systems to take advantage of the strengths of each.

USB Flash Drives - You CAN Take It with You. Imation website. 2005.

http://www.imation.com/didyouknow/technology_info/USB_Flash_Drives_Take_it_with.html

· Flash memory has a write endurance limit. This limit is the number of times the flash memory cell can be written until it can not be restored to its initial condition. The industry refers to this as the erase cycles. The endurance is rated between 10,000 and 100,000 erase cycles for different types flash memories.

Flash SSDs - Inferior Technology or Closet Superstar? Kelly Cash. BiTMICRO Networks. 2005.

http://www.bitmicro.com/press_resources_flash_ssd.php

· … flash memory chips have a limited lifespan. Further, different flash chips have a different number of write cycles before errors start to occur. Flash chips with 300,000 write cycles are common, and currently the best flash chips are rated at 1,000,000 write cycles per block (with 8,000 blocks per chip). Now, just because a flash chip has a given write cycle rating, it doesn't mean that the chip will self-destruct as soon as that threshold is reached. It means that a flash chip with a 1 million Erase/Write endurance threshold limit will have only 0.02 percent of the sample population turn into a bad block when the write threshold is reached for that block.

· With usage patterns of writing gigabytes per day, each flash-based SSD [solid-state disks] should last hundreds of years, depending on capacity.