By:
On:
In: ChroniclingAmerica, digitalarchive, DigitalCuration, google, LibraryofCongress, news, newspapers

According to a blog story from the Boston Phoenix, “Google abandons master-plan to archive the world’s newspapers“: Google told partners in its News Archive project that it would cease accepting, scanning, and indexing microfilm and other archival material from newspapers, and was instead focusing its energies on “newer projects that help the industry, such as Google One Pass, a platform that enables publishers to sell content and subscriptions directly from their own sites.” While the ending of any innovative project, especially one that shares historical information with the public is always sad news, there is a positive side to this. The positives mentioned in theRead More →

By:
On:
In: LibraryofCongress, LinkedData, LOC, standards

A MADS/RDF ontology developed at the Library of Congress is available for a public review period until Jan. 14, 2011.  The MADS/RDF (Metadata Authority Description Schema in RDF) vocabulary is a data model for authority and vocabulary data used within the library and information science (LIS) community, which is inclusive of museums, archives, and other cultural institutions. It is presented as an OWL ontology. Documentation and the ontology are available at: http://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/rdf/ Based on the MADS/XML schema, MADS/RDF provides a means to record data from the Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) Authorities format in RDF for use in semantic applications and Linked Data projects. MADS/RDF isRead More →

By:
On:
In: LibraryofCongress, LOC, standards

Press Release – The Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) has just released a new planning document, DIGITIZATION ACTIVITIES – Project Planning and Management Outline. The aim of this document is to define activities relating to the digitization of original cultural materials, and to outline general steps for planning and management of this process. The activities described in this document address library/archival issues, imaging and conversion work, and IT infrastructure issues in particular, and were identified using project management outlines from several organizations with significant experience working with cultural materials. This document defines “digitization” as a complete process, and covers all project components from contentRead More →

By:
On:
In: ChroniclingAmerica, FDNL, FloridaDigitalNewspaperLibrary, LibraryofCongress, LOC, NEH, news, newspapers

Chronicling America, the amazing historical newspaper digital collection from the Library of Congress and NEH, has added “Topics“. With over a million pages of historical newspapers online, “Topics” are an essential need–helping users who aren’t sure what they’re looking for find a way into so much content and helping to showcase some of the highlights of so much great content for all users. Some of the topics that include Florida content (as the Interim Director for the University of Florida Digital Library Center, which supports the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, the ones with Florida content are those of greatest interest to me): Baseball’s Modern WorldRead More →

By:
On:
In: flickr, LibraryofCongress, LOC, video, web 2.0, youtube

The Library of Congress has announced that they’re now loading videos to YouTube. They’ve already loaded a ton of videos and they plan to load many more, seeing YouTube as a parallel to their successful and ongoing Flickr project. Check out their wonderful and ever-increasing number of videos here: http://www.youtube.com/user/LibraryOfCongress. Everyone benefits from greater access and greater opportunities for serendipity. Imagine all the people who will be browsing or searching YouTube for one video and finding others from the Library of Congress! This is a great learning, teaching, and sharing opportunity and that’s also why the UF Libraries also have YouTube and Flickr accounts. EvenRead More →

By:
On:
In: Florida, LibraryofCongress, LOC, NEH, news, newspapers

On Dec. 11, the National Digital Newspaper Program added 183,698 historic newspaper pages (including 14 new titles) to the Chronicling America Web site, hosted by the Library of Congress. The site now provides free and open access to 864,509 pages from 108 titles, that were published in 9 states (CA, FL, KY, MN, NE, NY, TX, UT, VA) and the District of Columbia between 1880 and 1910. Six additional states–Arizona, Hawaii, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington–will be contributing content in 2009. Chronicling America is a project of the National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library ofRead More →

By:
On:
In: Digital Library, digitalarchive, digitalcollections, LibraryofCongress, LOC, standards, technologies

LOC Press Release: The Library of Congress is among a dozen federal agencies launching an initiative to establish a common set of guidelines for digitizing historical materials. Basing its efforts on a combination of collaborative research and combined experience, the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative will address a variety of issues related to the complex activities involved in the digitization of cultural heritage items. Two working groups have been formed, one addressing content that can be captured in still images, the other involved with content categorizing sound, video, or motion-picture film. The initiative includes a just-launched Web site, www.digitizationguidelines.gov. The Federal Agencies Still Image DigitizationRead More →

By:
On:
In: LibraryofCongress, LOC, NEH, newspapers, UFDC

UF’s Digital Library Center is currently loading more historic newspapers into UFDC (the University of Florida Digital Collections) and they look incredible! The newspaper here is The Weekly Miami Metropolis from June 26, 1908. Even though it’s over 100 years old, it’s one of the more recent issues from the historic papers being loaded. Like many of the historic papers, it features a political cartoon prominently on the first page. This and many other newspapers were digitized through the “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers” joint program by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress. I’m still only beginning to explore theseRead More →