digitization

IA Torrent

Yesterday in a meeting for our Digital Initiatives Advisory Group we were discussing what collections we should consider sending over to the UofT Internet Archive shop, and I asked an innocent newbie question - So, do we have copies of everything we have had the Internet Archive digitize? NOPE. No big deal. We’re in the infant stages of creating a digital preservation program here, and everything that comes with it. INFRASTRUCTURE!

Digitized books into the IR - workflow

This past week, we started depositing digitized books into our institutional repository instance for The McMaster Collection. As of this posting we have 216 books in the collection. However, currently these materials are only available to the McMaster community. This is completely out of my control, and I agree what some of you may be thinking, “wait, out of copyright books are not available to the general public!?” The workflow is a little complicated right now, but it is the beginning and will definitely be improved.

MEETINGS ALL DAY - ?_?

Meetings all day. Will everything go better than expected, or will I rage? Morning: email - nope, I’m in meetings all day. Got into work and discovered the contract worker for the giant 25,000 object digitization project started yesterday and nobody told me. LOOK OF DISAPPROVAL Checked in the worker and made sure that she was provided with proper documentation regarding file-naming convention, scanning requirements, and storage. Liaison meeting - teaching with iClickers.

New Stuffs on the Horizon...

Now that Historical Perspectives of Canadian Publishing is all finished up we have time, albeit a small amount of time, to concentrate on other portions of the Digital Collections site, and other collections. World War, 1939-1945, German Concentration Camps and Prisons Collection is nearly complete. Only a few boxes remain to be scanned. The next portion of the project is World War, 1939-1945, Jewish Underground Resistance Collection. This collection is predominantly from 1941-1944 and will contain 325 items.

Historical Perspectives of Canadian Publishing - LAUNCH!!!

Oops, I was supposed to write about this last Thursday when we actually launched. Busy, busy week. So, without further ado - Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing! So, here is the actual library news story. The site was a year in the making, and still has some content that will be added. An immense amount of hard work was put in by the team. I would like to give a special thanks for all the hard work put in by the project coordinator, Judy Donnelly, Bev Bayzat who handled the data management portion of the project, and Matt McCollow who took over the majority of development responsibilities on the site.

Internment Camp Correspondences, Gestapo Camp Correspondences, updates, and Russell Library

More updates on the World War, 1939-1945, German Concentration Camps and Prisons Collection. The Internment Camp Correspondences are now finished. There weren’t too many of them - only 56 to be exact. With the internment camp letters finished, we have moved on to the Gestapo Camp Correspondences. I have also added the “Related Information” feature to the World War, 1939-1945, German Concentration Camps and Prisons Collection and Russell Library Collection. It is just a block in the right column, which is an extension of the faceted search module.

Concentration Camp Correspondences

After an entire year of scanning and meta data entry by a couple of amazing students, we have finished a portion of the World War, 1939-1945, German Concentration Camps and Prisons Collection. The entirety of the Concentration Camp Correspondences [http://digitalcollections.mcmaster.ca/concentration-camp-correspondence] - 1031 to be exact - are up online with full meta data records. Also, a very help volunteer has been going through and translating/summarizing the records. If anybody knows German, Yiddish, Polish, or French and would like to volunteer, please contact me.

2009 OLITA Digital Odyssey

I must say that the Digital Odyssey was the best one day event I have been to. Just a fantastic day with fantastic people talking about awesome projects. It cheered me up and gave me hope in these crap times. Best part of the day had to be Mike Ridley’s keynote speech - The Age of Information is over. It is time for the Age of Imagination. It will be the library’s job to nurture and foster creativity.

OMG! You Don't Need CONTENTdm!!!

So, I bet a lot of you are wondering what is up with my with my title? Well, I don’t plan on standing up here taking potshots at OCLC for 15 minutes, but I am sure some people in the crowd wouldn’t mind. Basically, the title should have had a very long sub-title along the lines of, like Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Open Source Software.

Drupal & Digital Collection Sites - 2

Ok, more Drupal stuff for Digital Collections site. I’ll yammer on about “must have” modules in this one. Hit the snooze button if you’d like. Oh, and this is in addition to the ones I mentioned in the previous post… Community Tags, Tagadelic, Service Links, Faceted Search, Views, Zen Theme, Quicktabs, and of course CCK. First thing first, CCK add-ons: Audio Field - Defines audio field type for CCK content.