I was asked recently about how to scan large amounts of old newspapers. These two links came from Humanist and provide a good survey of what a professional library digitization units do.
The University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service has a site on their Digital Conversion Services.
The University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, has a Digital Imaging and Media Technology Initiative which offers Imaging Advice.
Both these links came from Kevin Hawkins on Humanist.
MetaMap is a project by James Turner and VÈronique Moal at the UnivÈrsite de MontrÈal that nicely presents a subway map visualization of the variety of metadata standards. You can travel the subway lines of standards learning about this virtual underground polis.
Continue reading MetaMap: Metadate Subway Map
Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) is a hub standard that links metadata and files. Jerry McDonough of the New York University Libraries presented on METS at the TEI Members’ Meeting. He showed a neat use of METS to joint an MPEG video clip to a TEI transcript, but the heart of his talk was about the proliferation and interaction of standards like TEI, EAD, METS, IMS, and so on. There is a temptation to think that with a bit more a standard like the TEI can embrace (swallow) other standards giving us one instead of many. He argued that a) we don’t technically need to merge related standards, and b) it is not right to do that. He pointed to the politics and histories of these groups/standards. We need a sociology of standards.
Continue reading Jerry McDonough: METS
I am at the 2004 TEI Annual Members’ Meeting at John Hopkins in Baltimore. We just got wireless so I can post notes on the talks.
Daniel Pitti from IATH gave the opening on the TEI and EAD.
Continue reading TEI Members’ Meeting, Daniel Pitti opening on TEI and EAD
XML Protest Politics. I found this on a fascinating blog by dpwolf (David Wolf).
digital information will never survive and remain accessible by accident: it requires ongoing active management. The information and the ability to read it can be lost in a few years. (“Digital Information Will Never Survive by Accident” in SAP INFO)
So what can we do individually to ensure that some of the content of this age survives, “by human accident”? What if we had a Print your blog day once a year when you print out your blog entries for that year on acid-free paper and stored them in the attic. Given that there are millions of blogs, and that these blogs describe other things on the web, we might get a reasonable accidental record as an alternative to centralized archiving projects.
Continue reading Surviving by accident: print your blog
text-e was an online symposium that is interesting both as an online event and in terms of content. The site is tri-lingual (French, English and Italian) and brought a number of speakers, like Umberto Eco, around the subject of “impact of the Web on reading, writing and the diffusion of knowledge” in 2001.
Continue reading text-e
Books on computers: format combines text and audio narration is an example of a story that appeared in a number of Canadian venues about a Florida company, AV Books, Inc., that is coming out with a first title on CD where you have can read a book on the screen and hear it in MP3. I can’t believe that this story was successfully placed by the company – companies have has talking books for at least a decade. The first ones I saw were for kids from Discus Books in the late 80s (correction below), then Voyager has a series of books for computers. The only thing new in this story is MP3 format for the audio and there are plenty of people exchanging MP3s for audio-books.
Continue reading Where’s the news?
One of the best exchanges at the Brown Conference was between Dino Buzzetti, who gave a paper on “Markup and Text Representation”, and Allen Renear who responded on markup. Both are philosophers and their two papers stood out as a very careful working out of the question “what is markup?”
Continue reading Markup: Buzzetti and Renear