Category — Digital Archives

I made it to newark airport… My only hangup of course is that is did something to my back yesterday afternoon and basically haven’t slept much, but eh, that only caused me to walk up and down 34th street for 10-15 minutes wondering where the heck the penn station door was, because I’d never been in before, eventually i just decided to walk against traffic and voila, it was at the end of stream of people. Beyond that, the symposium looks interesting, I’m really happy that I was invited even though… it means flying across the u.s. 2 times in 48 hours so that i can be back in time for the digital archives class.

Governance and conflict resolution in probably a better construct for the Linden Lab meeting, but I think that I’ll easily fit in, and make some of my points. The symposium is all day tomorrow. Tonight I’m trying to meet up with my friend and colleague David Silver, whose teaching until 8pm.

Google Code – Updates: Announcing Tesseract OCR:
We wanted to let you all know that a few months ago we quietly released – or actually re-released – an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine into open source. You might wonder why Google is interested in OCR? In a nutshell, we are all about making information available to users, and when this information is in a paper document, OCR is the process by which we can convert the pages of this document into text that can then be used for indexing.This particular OCR engine, called Tesseract, was in fact not originally developed at Google!
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tesseract is a new open source ocr tool by google.

Open-ILS.org | Home of the Evergreen ILS.:
This is information central for the development effort of an open source Integrated Library System (ILS), named Evergreen.
This software is being developed and maintained by the Georgia Public Library Service for
use by the Georgia Library PINES Program, a consortium
of 252 public libraries. This software can be downloaded for free, and anyone can contribute to development efforts.

The PINES-Evergreen production system is located at gapines.org.

A public demo of Evergreen’s online catalog is located at demo.gapines.org. A
bleeding edge online catalog, with all of the latest, greatest features we’re working on, is located at
dev.gapines.org (note the development site may be unstable). The staff client is available from the
downloads section.

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pines evergreen is a ILS of the open source variety.

EC calls on Member States to contribute to the European digital library:
The European Commission urged EU Member States on 25 August to set up large-scale digitisation facilities, so as to accelerate the process of getting Europe’s cultural heritage on line via the European digital library. In a Recommendation on digitisation and digital preservation, it calls on Member States to act in various areas, ranging from copyright questions to the systematic preservation of digital content in order to ensure long term access to the material.
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yet another point of resistance in google’s ‘all your book belong to us’ campaign. oh… and… it means that citizens get access to books instead of consumers… same people, different perspective.

ONLamp.com — What Is OpenDocument:
The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an emerging file format standard for electronic office documents. Representing a triumph of common sense over the methods conceived before the rise of the Internet, ODF’s goals are both exciting and controversial. Early adopters of the format include state and municipal governments in some near- and far-flung places, and this makes the format’s progress a thing to watch. Yet innovation theory tells us there are some hurdles we all must overcome before ODF becomes a regular topic of conversation at the ballpark. Those in the know, however, recognize that we’re in about the second inning of a barn-burner. So, grab a hot dog and a beer, and settle in for a classic.

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Here’s something infrastructural that could change several business models….

The Journal of Electronic Publishing:


The Journal of Electronic Publishing – Summer 2006 edition now available
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some of these articles are interesting.

DAC 2007: Perth:

The call for papers for perthDAC 2007 is out. The theme of the 2007 Digital Arts and Culture Conference will be “The Future of Digital Media Culture” which, I presume, leaves plenty of room for electronic literature and other GTxA type interests. The conference will be held from 15 – 18th September 2007, during the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth. There will be a double blind peer review process for papers. The deadline for 500 word abstracts is 14th August 2006, and the deadline for full papers is 4th December 2006. Although it’s a long, expensive way to go from just about anywhere else, Perth is a great city in a fantastic part of Western Australia, with great culture, food, wine, beaches, parrots, and Aussies. I was there for a couple of weeks last winter/summer and I’m looking forward to going back.

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I’ll probably submit something, they’ll probably reject it. but who knows, it really depends on what i submit. i suspect that i’ll submit something along the lines of my archives and situationism discussion, but … i might go for something more art oriented.