Friday, October 24, 2008

Digital Preservation Matters - 24 October 2008

HathiTrust: A Digital Repository for Libraries, by Libraries. Beth Ashmore. Information Today. October 23, 2008.

HathiTrust is a shared digital repository of two dozen libraries aimed at bringing the vast collections of print books and journals in libraries into the digital world for access, discovery, and preservation. "We have become convinced that there are some approaches to using this content, from an academic standpoint, that Google may not address." One of the areas in which the projects diverge is the importance placed on long-term preservation. "[Long-term preservation] is something we feel libraries need, and I think it has been one of the concerns about Google as a digitization partner. These resources need to be, in the long term, managed by libraries. This is something Google understood from the beginning in their partnership with us." One of the goals is an open technical framework. As well as a public discovery system which will hopefully be available in early 2009.

Bringing a Trove of Medieval Manuscripts Online for the Ages. John Tagliabue. The New York Times. October 20, 2008.

One of the oldest and most valuable collections of handwritten medieval books in the world, housed in the library of the abbey in St. Gallen, Switzerland, is going online with the help of a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The reduced price of computer memory helped make this possible. This will make the library more visible. “On the Internet we now have more visitors than in the real library.”

Government Documents Online. NELA Conference Blog. CT State Library October 19, 2008.

Julie’s Schwartz’s Presentation: The Connecticut State Library initiated the Connecticut Digital Archive Project because so many state documents and reports are now only available online, and often are posted for only a month or two and then disappear. Search engines don’t provide access to most of these publications even though users expect easy access. The archive project harvests and ingests “born digital” Connecticut state publications, catalogues them in MARC, and integrates linked records in their OPAC, and available in WorldCat. The WebHarvest program can harvest an entire webpage and sometime find other documents on archived pages. Preservation metadata is important for accuracy and management. Standardization is in important principle of digital preservation.

Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda drive -- quiet, sips power. Rich Ericson. Computerworld. October 23, 2008.

Seagate has a new 1.5 terabyte drive which provides good performance into a single internal hard drive, despite the large capacity.

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