Digitization

An essential and expanding medium for providing online access to journal articles, databases, project, images and more.

General Digitization Information

• Berkeley Digital Library Sun SITE
  http://sunsite.berkeley.edu
  Resources for building digital collections, including information for digital library developers and software tools.
• D-Lib Forum
  http://www.dlib.org
  "Facilitating and supporting the community developing the technology of the global digital library."
• Digital Libraries Initiative
  http://www.dli2.nsf.gov
  Phase two of a multiagency initiative promoting research in and development of digital libraries.
• Digital Libraries: Resources and Projects
  http://www.ifla.org/II/diglib.htm
  Digital libraries resources provided by IFLA.
• Library Digitization Projects and Copyright
  http://www.llrx.com/features/digitization.htm
  Organized into six sections, this article addresses copyright issues that are encountered in digitization projects.
• Digitization of Rare Materials
  http://www.unesco.org/webworld/mdm/czech_digitization/doc/intro.htm
  "This CD-ROM is about digitization of documents. It can give you advice how to master the imaging technology, how to describe the digital data, or how to mark the metadata. It can assist you to take use of SGML-based data structuring; for this, it offers you supporting software tools. Perhaps, you would like only to see some parts of manuscripts or to listen to samples of digitized music. You are free to do it. Our ManuFreT access program will make it very pleasant for you. Find your own way in these hundreds of megabytes of digital data. It depends on your choice."
• Handbook for Digital Projects: A Management Tool for Preservation and Access
  http://www.nedcc.org/digital/dighome.htm
• Strategies for Building Digital Collections
  http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub101/contents.html
  "In this report, Abby Smith synthesizes the nearly 10 years' experience that libraries have had digitizing items from their rare, special, and general collections, and making them available online."
• The Price of Digitization: New Cost Models for Cultural and Educational Institutions
  http://www.ninch.org/forum/price.report.html
  "A Digitization Symposium presented by NINCH and Innodata."
• Digitization of Rare Library Materials
  http://digit.nkp.cz/Trainings/TRAININGS/R_DOBMAccess.ppt
  This PowerPoint presentation outlines metadata format and access to digital materials.
• CLRC (Central New York Library Resources Council) Regional Digitization Plan - Part 2
  http://clrc.org/lstadigital/DraftDigiPlanPart2.shtml
  "Digitization Resources - Model for Planning Digitization Projects."

Primary Sites

• Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries
  http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/cidl/cidle.htm
  "The Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries (CIDL) is an alliance of Canadian libraries that recognize the growing importance of digital information. By collaborating, these libraries can ensure better use of digital information and better service to their users. The alliance was first proposed at a national meeting of 20 Canadian libraries held at the National Library of Canada in March 1997. The Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries will promote, coordinate and facilitate the development of Canadian digital collections and services in order to optimize national interoperability and long-term access to Canadian digital library resources."
• Center for the Study of Digital Libraries
  http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/
  "The Center for the Study of Digital Libraries (CSDL) was established in 1995 by The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents and builds upon research developed in the Hypermedia Research Laboratory established in 1987. A member of the global digital library research community, the Center provides a focal point for digital libraries research and technology for the State of Texas. Its mission is to foster pioneering research on the theory and application of digital libraries and to create flexible and efficient new technologies for their use. The Center provides expertise and experience to help transfer and journals to biological specimens and museum pieces -- into useful digital libraries. Center staff includes experts in key new technologies required for digital libraries: electronic document modeling and publication, hyperbase systems, process-based and spatial hypermedia systems, collaborative systems, and computer-human interaction."
• Digital Library Federation
  http://www.diglib.org/dlfhomepage.htm
  "The Digital Library Federation (DLF) is a consortium of libraries and related agencies that are pioneering in the use of electronic-information technologies to extend their collections and services. Through its members, the DLF provides leadership for libraries broadly by identifying standards and "best practices" for digital collections and network access coordinating leading-edge research-and-development in libraries' use of electronic-information technology helping start projects and services that libraries need but cannot develop individually. The DLF operates under the administration umbrella of the Council of Library and Information Resources (CLIR)."
• DELOS: Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries (European Union)
  http://www.ercim.org/delos/
  "The DELOS Network of Excellence (NoE) is funded by the Information Societies Technologies (IST) 5th Framework Programme. The aim of the DELOS Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries (DLs) is to provide an open context in which an international research agenda for future research activities in the digital libraries domain can be developed and continuously updated. The Network will constitute a reference point for all DL projects funded by the 5th FP-IST, stimulating the exchange of and will also establish close contacts with relevant application communities. It will make testbeds available, facilitate their interoperability, and provide mechanisms for the evaluation of models, techniques, and approaches, and the exchange of open-source software components. It will also contribute to the definition of relevant standards. Appropriate take-up models will be studied and tested to facilitate the exploitation of new DL technologies in the industrial/commercial environment. A dense network of links with the international DL research community will be created."

Digital Library Examples

• Emory University. Digital Library Project. Selected Archives of Georgia Tech and Emory (SAGE)
  http://sage.library.emory.edu/
  "In May 1997, the Emory and Georgia Tech Libraries received a grant from a local foundation for a three-year collaborative project to build virtual libraries capacities at both libraries. SAGE will digitize selected text, photographs, and audio/video recordings from the Sam Nunn papers, the Witness to the Holocaust Project files, the Ralph McGill papers, and the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) of Greater Atlanta records. New files will be added periodically to the digital archive during the three-year project."
• Columbia University. Project Bartleby (Bartleby.com)
  http://www.bartleby.com/
  "The most up-to-date and comprehensive free full-text reference site, Bartleby.com also ranks among the oldest of Internet brands. Begun in 1993 as a personal research project into the benefits of electronic publishing, Bartleby.com has come to be esteemed among academics and enjoyed by millions of students and the intellectually curious alike. With over 370,000 full-text searchable web pages categorized by subject, and indexed by author, title and other unique criteria, Bartleby.com attracted over 15 million unique users last year who read the biographies of today's newsmakers, found the right quotations to illustrate their work, verified points of English usage, read poems and short stories, and performed in-depth research on Shakespeare and other literary and historical figures."
• Library of Congress. Digital Library Collections
  http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html
  "Of the millions of books, photographs, prints, drawings, manuscripts, rare books, maps, sound recordings, and moving pictures held by the Library, only a small fraction are in digital form. American Memory, a major component of the Library's digitization program, offers multimedia collections of digitized documents, photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures, and text from the Library's Americana collections. Through a grant from Ameritech Foundation, the LC/Ameritech Digital Library Competition enables public, research and academic libraries, museums, historical societies and archival institutions to create digital collections of primary resource material to complement the Library's program. The Library also cooperates internationally to collect digitized laws, regulations, and other complementary legal sources in the GLIN project."
• LSU Digital Library
  http://www.lsu.edu/diglib/
  The Louisiana State University (LSU) Digital Library includes the results of digitization projects involving numerous special collections in Louisiana. Its collections cover areas such as Art & Architecture, History, and Geography.
• Making of America
  http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/
  "Making of America (MOA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The collection currently contains approximately 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. The project represents a major collaborative endeavor in preservation and electronic access to historical texts. Making of America (MOA) represents a major collaborative endeavor to preserve and make accessible through digital technology a significant body of primary sources related to development of the U.S. infrastructure. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MOA seeks to involve research institutions and national consortia to develop common protocols and consensus for the selection, conversion, storage, retrieval, and use of digitized materials on a large, distributed scale. The initial phase of the project, begun in the fall of 1995, focused on developing a collaborative effort between the University of Michigan and Cornell University. Drawing on the depth of primary materials at the Michigan and Cornell libraries, these two institutions are developing a thematically-relate digital library documenting American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. At the University of Michigan, approximately 1,600 books and ten journals with imprints primarily between 1850 - 1877 were selected, scanned, and made available through the present system."
• National Library of Canada. Electronic Collection
  http://collection.nlc-bnc.ca/e-coll-e/index-e.htm
  "The Electronic Collection of the National Library of Canada (NLC) consists of Canadian books and periodicals published online. It includes more than 4,636 titles published by both the commercial publishing sector and the government publishing sector. The archived publications exist in various formats, including HTML, ASCII and others, i.e., the format in which they were produced. In some cases, certain software such as Acrobat Reader, RealAudio, Ghostview or others are required to read publication content. For various reasons, some links may no longer be active. Archived online publications are catalogued in the same manner as printed publications, and bibliographic records are available via AMICUS Web. Some titles which are labelled "Restricted Access" are accessible through Library staff or by using the public Internet workstations in the National Library Reference Room."
• Digital Libraries Initiative Phase 2
  http://www.dli2.nsf.gov
  Excellent source for links to a number of digital library projects across the country.
• University of California, Berkeley. Digital Library Project.
  http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu
  "The UC Berkeley Digital Library Project is developing the tools and technologies to support highly improved models of the scholarly information life cycle. Its goal is to facilitate the move from the current centralized, discrete publishing model, to a distributed, continuous, and self-publishing model, while still preserving the best aspects of the current model such as peer review. The UC Berkeley Digital Library Project is part of the Digital Libraries Initiative, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and many others. Additional funding at Berkeley comes from the CNRI-sponsored D-Lib Test Suite, and the NSF-sponsored National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI)."

Metadata

• Dublin Core Initiative
  http://dublincore.org/
  "The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is an organization dedicated to promoting the widespread adoption of interoperable metadata standards and developing specialized metadata vocabularies for describing resources that enable more intelligent information discovery systems. Ongoing efforts of DCMI participants include the collaborative development and continual refinement of metadata conventions based on research and feedback between DCMI Working Groups"
• OCLC Connexion (Cooperative Online Resource Catalog)
  http://www.oclc.org/connexion/
  "OCLC Connexion will eventually provide a single point of entry with all of the major features of current OCLC cataloging services. You can now enjoy features once found in CORC, CatExpress and the OCLC Cataloging service in one place through Connexion." The OCLC Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) service was a metadata creation system for bibliographic records and pathfinders describing electronic resources."
• EAD (Encoded Archival Description)
  http://www.loc.gov/ead/ead.html
  "The EAD Document Type Definition (DTD) is a standard for encoding archival finding aids using the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). The standard is maintained in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress (LC) in partnership with the Society of American Archivists."

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