Analysing Selection for Digitisation

An article that appears in D-Lib magazine, that looks at current practices and common incentives. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september09/ooghe/09ooghe.html

Center For History And New Media Project: Mobile for Museums

Quote from site:

‘For many years, art museums have been at the forefront of offering their visitors learning experiences that extend beyond traditional exhibit labels with gallery kiosks and audio guides. More recently, art museums continue leading the way by adding cell phone tours, podcasts, and platform-specific applications in an effort to capitalize on the commonly-owned portable devices—iPods, MP3 players, Blackberries, cell phones—that visitors already carry in their pockets. Museum professionals see great potential in reaching new audiences and pleasing old ones by providing content and social interaction via mobile devices. The biggest challenge is that many museums do not quite know where to begin when working with a small budget and small staff with limited technical knowledge. This site addresses those needs by proving a brief overview of what is being done in the mobile museum world and offers suggestions based on this research on how to economically provide mobile users with a positive experience with your museum.’ from http://chnm.gmu.edu/labs/mobile-for-museums/

‘Rosetta Stone’ offers Digital Lifeline

The BBC have reported on a new technique to preserve digital resources for a thousand years. The project is led by Professor Tadahiro Kuroda of Tokyo’s Keio University. Read all about it at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8172568.stm

Museum-Based Mobile Educational Activities

Gerry McKiernan is collecting information on museums that provide educational activities to mobile devices (especially mobile phones). You can read comments on this at http://tinyurl.com/kpdybn

Virtual Victorian Crystal Palace

 Read all about a project to compare Victorian and Modern Virtual Immersive Environments by clicking on the image above. It will take you to a blog explaining a Second Life project, funded by JISC and the University of Bristol.

NASA Wants Help

The Space Agency is asking for advice from the public as to how they should digitise and make available the notes that chronicle the early history of manned space flight. Read all about it at http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/nasadata-2/

Digital New Zealand

Another site that is attempting to make digital content easier to find. Digital New Zealand allows you to search the digital content of government departments, publicly funded organisations, the private sector, and community groups. There’s a blog and an opportunity to vote on content to be added to the site. One suggestion, made on the blog, was that junk mail should be digitised to give a record of commercialisation in New Zealand.  Is junk mail part of our culture that needs to be recorded? http://www.digitalnz.org/

Europeana

Europeana is a thematic network, funded by the European Commission, which aims to make information resources on the heritage of Europe easier to use in an online environment. Europeana Version 1.0 is being developed and will launch in 2010 with links to over 10 million digital objects. You can view the prototype at http://www.europeana.eu/portal/index.html

Keeping Digital Heritage Alive

A museum in Germany has a problem in that they have a computer file of  a bust of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, made in 1992, which can no longer be read.  A CT from the bust was made to analyse the internal structure and saved on a MOD LM 1200-002. They are now seeking anyone who has a computer that can read the file and wish to update it to a new digital format.

I mention this to point out the perils of digital formats that become redundant over time (we will soon be unable to read CD ROMs in the Library).  If you want to follow the specific problem of the bust, the blog post is at http://digitalcuration.blogspot.com/2009/06/need-to-read-ct-scan-from-old-magneto.html

iPres 2009 Call for Papers

The 6th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects will be held in California this year
The theme is Moving into the Mainstream,  Enabling our Digital Future.
http://www.cdlib.org/iPres/