Strategy for Digitizing Archival Materials for Public Access, 2015-2024 December 2014 Introduction See also our PDF Version of this document Adjudicated Comments on Strategy The National Archives and

What it says on the tin: software tools for automated detection of common video digitization problems before they become preservation problems.

We are all aware of the expectation from the general public that EverythingEver is digitized and available online already. This is of course frustrating because, 1) when presented with the reality there is often a negative reaction from the public, primarily that archives are lazy and behind the times, but also, 2) the perception is often trotted out as a reason why preservation efforts are frivolous or don’t need to be funded, especially if the citation is in reference to commercial assets that are widely torrented. “There are a million copies online,” the argument goes, “Why should we care about archives or pay attention to their uptight rules?”, little aware that the bulk of cultural material in existence does not consist of Hollywood films, studio albums, and published works (or student websites from 15 years ago).

Scientists are embarking on data rescue missions all over the world to find and digitize old climate information. 

In late June, a minor brouhaha erupted when the library at the University of Arkansas suspended reporters from the Washington Free Beacon, an online newspaper, from using its special collections. The reason given by library administrators was that on multiple occasions the newspaper's reporters had published content from those collections without asking permission, as library policy requires. Much has been made in the right-wing press about the politics supposedly surrounding this conflict. I want to focus on a different issue: the practice of making patrons request library permission before republishing content drawn from documents in our special collections.

The following is a guest post by Chris Adams from the Repository Development Center at the Library of Congress, the technical lead for the World Digital Library. We live in an age of cheap bits: scanning objects en masse has never been easier, storage has never been cheaper and large-scale digitization has become routine for […]

If you regularly read the Europeana Pro blog, you have probably already heard of the open access policy of the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands. Europeana …

D-Lib Magazine

Ever since the National Archives and Record Administration launched the Open Government Plan in 2010, it has increasingly been uploading content to Wikipedia to digitize and gain a wider reach for its holdings. But all this time, uploading its digitized holdings to the Wikimedia Commons was a side project. Now, as mentioned in the 2014 Open Government Plan published earlier this month, the project is a core part of the NARA.

Following up on Jackie’s post on the RBMS 2014 Preconference, and Michelle Light’s #bestplenaryever* I asked Michelle to give me a list of the various reproduction, permissions, and copyright policies …

In Enclosing the public domain: The restriction of public domain books in a digital environment, a paper in First Monday, researchers from the Victoria University of Wellington document the widespr…

Download Book Scan Wizard for free.  A utility to help with Book scanning using cameras as a scanner. It will automate things such as cropping, rotating, fixing keystoning, fixing the DPI, and outputing it to tiff files that can be changed into PDF's or ebooks.

Penny Dreadfuls, kids' imaginings, and other fun in a new archive.

What are the most commonly accessed digitised items from heritage organisations? Even asking the question leads to further understanding ab...

These videos are designed to walk you through how to use the DIY book scanner located in the SLIS Library at UW-Madison. This book scanner is made by SLIS st...