Friday, December 08, 2006

Weekly readings - 08 December 2006

European Digital Library Initiative. Europe's Information Society. Interim Report. October 16, 2006.

The High Level Group (HLG) on European Digital Libraries appointed a subgroup to discuss intellectual property rights issues. The Copyright Subgroup agreed on a number of principles, including: the importance of having legal certainty in the collections; getting permission for digitizing and accessing works. They identified three interlinked groups of issues:

  • digital preservation;
  • orphan works; and
  • out-of-print works.

They recognize that for some items, digitization may be the only way to ensure that some materials will be available for future generations. For preservation purposes, rights-holders should authorize institutions to make multiple copies and to migrate them as needed. “Preservation should be justified by the scarcity of the works in the market.” Coordination should take place between institutions to avoid duplication.


The DSpace Digital Repository: A Project Analysis. Stevan Chabot. Subject/Object. November 9, 2006.

An analysis of DSpace. There are some problems with it. Those used to working with commercial software vendors need to be aware that it is open source and commercial support does not yet exist. There are problems with metadata, particularly with the lack of authority control in fields. There are also many benefits. It is flexible and robust and should be able to handle most needs without customization, but it can be customized by an institutions programmers if needed.


PKI will grow, but policy problems remain. Jeremy Kirk. Computerworld. November 28, 2006.

Public key infrastructure uses certificates that have been verified by a certification authority which allows others to exchange information in a trusted way. This idea may be talked about more in the future, but there are still problems, such as changing policies and entities, and having an authority that can vouch for other entities.


Radio stations launch drive to save historic recordings. Charlie Imes. Raw Story. November 29, 2006.

The Pacifica Radio Archives is the oldest and largest audio collection of public radio programming in the United States. It contains 50,000 master reel-to-reel tapes from 1949 to today. The challenge is that these magnetic master tapes are deteriorating at a predictable rate. The Archives has started a campaign to preserve these tapes by transferring them to digital media. They are trying to fund the preservation through grants and public fund raising.


EMC announces embedded Documentum. Press release. Computer Technology Review. November 28, 2006.

EMC has launched the Documentum OEM Edition which contains a preconfigured version of the Content Server. It has the same functionality and API as the enterprise version.

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