The MetaArchive Cooperative has released a Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation:
This volume is devoted to the broad topic of distributed digital preservation, a still-emerging field of practice for the cultural memory arena. Replication and distribution hold out the promise of indefinite preservation of materials without degradation, but establishing effective organizational and technical processes to enable this form of digital preservation is daunting. Institutions need practical examples of how this task can be accomplished in manageable, low-cost ways.
CNET has a good run-down of free and fee-based file sharing services:
There are now a handful of free and paid services that make it easy to host these gigantic files and send them to a friend, family member, or business associate.
Very cool do it yourself project from Instructables.com:
What’s the most efficient method for nearly choking a small digitization shop? Success. That’s something we’re experiencing at The University of Montana and we couldn’t be happier. Over the summer, the library partnered with Dave Beck of Native American Studies on a trip to the National Archives to scan documents from their Central Classified Files centering on the Blackfeet Agency during the period from 1907 – 1935 (Record Group 75.) We were pleasantly surprised by the amount of material that our two (very organized) graduate students were able to come back with: 15,000 images taken in a little under four weeks. We’re in the process now of ingesting the material into our digital collection to make them widely available eventually, but in the meantime I thought I’d share the equipment used on the trip.
Testing the camera setup before sending to DC in 2009.
Equipment List:
- Camera: Canon Rebel XSI
- Lens: Canon EF-S 18-55 IS (both came as a kit)
- Tripod: Manfrotto 055X Pro with a center post that fold out horizontally
- Tripod Head: 484RC2 Mini Ball
- Laptop: Dell 131L (one of our circulating laptops for students)
- Carrying Case: Pelican 1300
- Glass bubble level that is attached to the hot shoe
- Seagate 500GB extermal hard drive
- Total cost: Approximately $1,400
The camera was driven by the laptop which previewed the image being captured. The images were saved to the external hard drive and then FTP’d back to the library on a nightly basis. All images were captured as RAW files, and will be converted before being made live. Here’s an example of the quality of image the students came back with. The master image from which this example was derived is 4,272 x 2,878 pixels, the equivalent of a 240 PPI full color scan.
Example of a natural light capture
Found via elearnspace, here is a useful article from apophenia on the three types of social networks along with an important caveat:
- Sociological “personal” networks
- Behavioral social networks
- Publicly articulated social networks
“We do ourselves an intellectual disservice when we assume that these different types of networks are interchangeable or that studying one automatically tells us about another.”
The rumors are beginning to be convincing:
Book publishers have been in talks with Apple and are optimistic about being included as part of its new portable tablet-sized computer, which the computer giant hopes to launch in time for the Christmas shopping season, according to the FT.
The device is expected to be launched alongside new content deals, including some aimed at stimulating sales of CD-length music, according to people briefed on the project. The touch-sensitive computer will have a screen that may be up to 10 inches diagonally. It will connect to the internet like the iPod Touch – probably without phone capability but with access to the web, and to Apple’s online stores for software and entertainment.
According to the FT, the device could provide an alternative to Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader and a forthcoming device from Plastic Logic, recently allied with Barnes & Noble. “It would be a colour, flat-panel TV to the old-fashioned, black and white TV of the Kindle,” one publishing executive said.
Via The Centered Librarian here’s a roundup of the state of ePaper (which is not limited to Kindle clones apparently.)
State of ePaper
Amazon and the Kindle have the clear lead in the eReader wars. However, numerous competitors to Amazon’s Kindle are cropping up and it’s worth taking a moment to review the state of the art in ePaper. [...]
