Yale University has adopted an open access policy for digitized images from its museums, archives, and libraries. Yale has also launched the Discover Yale Digital Commons, which has over 250,000 images.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The goal of the new policy is to make high quality digital images of Yale's vast cultural heritage collections in the public domain openly and freely available.

As works in these collections become digitized, the museums and libraries will make those images that are in the public domain freely accessible. In a departure from established convention, no license will be required for the transmission of the images and no limitations will be imposed on their use. The result is that scholars, artists, students, and citizens the world over will be able to use these collections for study, publication, teaching and inspiration.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

The Library of Congress and Sony Music Entertainment have launched the National Jukebox.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Library of Congress and Sony Music Entertainment today unveiled a new website of over 10,000 rare historic sound recordings available to the public for the first time digitally. The site is called the "National Jukebox" (www.loc.gov/jukebox/).

Developed by the Library of Congress, with assets provided by Sony Music Entertainment, the National Jukebox offers free online access to a vast selection of music and spoken-word recordings produced in the U.S. between the years 1901 and 1925. . . .

The agreement for the National Jukebox grants the Library of Congress usage rights to Sony Music’s entire pre-1925 catalog—comprising thousands of recordings produced by Columbia Records, OKeh, and Victor Talking Machine Co. among others – and represents the largest collection of such historical recordings ever made publicly available for study and appreciation online. . . .

Visitors to the National Jukebox will be able to listen to available recordings on a streaming-only basis, as well as view thousands of label images, record-catalog illustrations, and artist and performer bios. In addition, users can further explore the catalog by accessing special interactive features, listening to playlists curated by Library staff, and creating and sharing their own playlists. . . .

The website will showcase special interactive features as well, including a digital facsimile of the 1919 edition of the famous opera guide "Victrola Book of the Opera," which describes more than 110 operas, including illustrations, plot synopses and lists of recordings offered in that year. Features include the book’s original text, a comparison of the different interpretations of the most popular arias of the period, and streamed recordings of nearly every opera referenced in the book.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

Rachel Howard of the University of Louisville Libraries' Special Collections department has released the CONTENTdm Cookbook: Recipes for Metadata Entry for UofL Digital Initiatives.

Here's an excerpt:

This document is intended as a guide to data entry and descriptive cataloging for University of Louisville (UofL) digital projects using CONTENTdm software. It will be updated as modifications in the software and/or metadata schema necessitate. CONTENTdm’s metadata is based on the Dublin Core Metadata Schema. A UofL Metadata Working Group drafted initial guidelines based on The Collaborative Digitization Program (CDP)’s Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices, which was further refined by the CONTENTdm Metadata Working Group’s Best Practices for CONTENTdm and other OAI-PMH compliant repositories creating shareable metadata (http://www.oclc.org/gateway/support/best_practices.pdf).

As we began to work with CONTENTdm, we felt it necessary to adjust CDP’s recommendations to accommodate the capabilities, limitations, and additional field properties presented by the software. We also modified some of the field labels to make more sense to the end-user, and put the fields in an order that highlighted the descriptive metadata at the top of the record and relegated the more administrative and technical information at the bottom.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and Indiana University have released the Text-Image Linking Environment (TILE) 0.9.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

We’re excited to announce the redesigned website for and public release of The Text-Image Linking Environment (TILE), a web-based tool for creating and editing image-based electronic editions and digital archives of humanities texts. This initial release of TILE 0.9 features tools for importing and exporting transcript lines and images of text, an image markup tool, a semi-automated line recognizer that tags regions of text within an image, and plugin architecture to extend the functionality of the software.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |

The Library of Congress has awarded $665,248 in funding to the Omeka + Neatline project.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia Library and the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University are pleased to announce a collaborative "Omeka + Neatline" initiative, supported by $665,248 in funding from the Library of Congress.

The Omeka + Neatline project's goal is to enable scholars, students, and library and museum professionals to create geospatial and temporal visualizations of archival collections using a Neatline toolset within CHNM's popular, open source Omeka exhibition platform. Neatline, a "contribution to interpretive humanities scholarship in the visual vernacular," is a project of the UVa Library Scholars' Lab, originally bolstered by a Start-Up Grant from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Omeka is an award-winning web-publishing platform for the display of cultural heritage and scholarly collections and exhibits, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

This two-year initiative will allow CHNM and the Scholars' Lab to expand and regularize a partnership that developed informally between the two centers over the course of the past year. Collaboration has already resulted in improvements to the core functionality of Omeka by CHNM and has led the Scholars' Lab to produce a number of prototype plugins making Omeka a more attractive and viable option for scholarly partnerships with larger libraries and cultural heritage institutions. These include: improved data import (including EAD, a common archival standard); Solr-powered searching and browsing; and Fedora-based repository services. Further development will improve existing plugins, add preservation workflows, and refine the Neatline toolset for integration and sophisticated editing and scholarly annotation of historical maps, GIS layers, and timelines. Enhancements to Omeka's core APIs, improved documentation, regular "point" releases, and a new Exhibit Builder will strengthen Omeka's already large and robust user and developer communities.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |

Opening Australia's Archives has released Open Access Principles for Australian Collecting Institutions, Version 1.

Here's an excerpt:

The internet, digital recording devices and the ready availability of content production software have together drastically changed the creative landscape. As a result, linear models of knowledge and cultural production are rapidly being supplanted by more distributed, collaborative, user-generated and open networking models. Yet Australians wishing to participate in this new digital culture have great difficulty gaining access to quality content from their own culture and history that can be legally and safely reused. This limits our ability to access the full benefits that could be provided by new technologies to fields such as education, the creative industries and business innovation.

The Opening Australia's Archives project aims to address this problem by working with Australia's collecting institutions to increase the public's ability to access and reuse our national collections. Run by the Innovation Law program of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology the project encourages the adoption of open access approaches through coordinated policy, implementation and advocacy initiatives across the collecting sector.

Opening Australia's Archives: Open Access Principles for Australian Collecting Institutions were prepared in consultation with representatives of the Australian collecting sector commencing with a series of meetings held nationally during 2009. For more information on the meetings, principles and project see the Opening Australia's Archives website.

| Digital Scholarship |

ARL and Ithaka S+R have received a $464,286 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grants Program “to study how libraries, archives, and museums are sustaining digitized special collections.”

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Our examination of digital resources through our case studies work showed us that project leaders need practical tools to help them ensure their project's long-term sustainability," says Laura Brown, Managing Director, Ithaka S+R. "This collaborative study will respond to that need by providing actionable recommendations, best practices, and planning tools to help project leaders in higher education, public libraries, museums, historical societies, and other organizations plan for sustaining their own special collections digitization projects."

Project activities under this cooperative agreement will include a survey of digitized special collections and focused interviews with leaders and project staff in selected cultural heritage organizations who manage those collections. The study’s final report of lessons learned, recommendations, and case studies will be freely shared through the partners’ websites, through a webcast, and conference presentations.

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities has released presentations from the Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections meeting.

Here's an excerpt from the meeting's background document:

While such [computer forensics] activities may seem (happily) far removed from the concerns of the cultural heritage sector, the methods and tools developed by forensics experts represent a novel approach to key issues and challenges in the archives community. Libraries, special collections, and other repositories increasingly receive computer storage media (and sometimes entire computers) as part of their acquisition of "papers" from contemporary artists, writers, musicians, government officials, politicians, scholars, and other public figures. Cell phones, e-readers, and other data-rich devices will surely follow. The same forensics software that indexes a criminal suspect's hard drive allows the archivist to prepare a comprehensive manifest of the electronic files a donor has turned over for accession; the same hardware that allows the forensics specialist to create an algorithmically authenticated "image" of a file system allows the archivist to ensure the integrity of digital content once committed to an institutional repository; the same data recovery procedures that allow the specialist to discover, recover, and present as trial evidence an "erased" file may allow a scholar to reconstruct a lost or inadvertently deleted version of an electronic manuscript—and do so with enough confidence to stake reputation and career.

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions has released A Primer on Codecs for Moving Image and Sound Archives: 10 Recommendations for Codec Selection and Management.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

One area of great concern for the integrity and persistence of digital audio and video files is the selection of file formats and codecs… Though this is also an area where there is a great lack of certainty and clarity on the issue.

This paper by Chris Lacinak lays out a clear explanation of what codecs are, how they are used, and what their selection and application means to archives. Also provided are 10 recommendations that will help you in the selection and management of codecs in an archival setting.

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has released Omeka 1.2.

Here's an excerpt from the download page

Omeka version 1.2 includes following features and plug-ins:

• Four themes that are easy to adapt with simple CSS changes and theme configuration
• Exhibit Builder plugin with 12 page layouts and 5 exhibit themes
• Tagging for items and exhibits
• RSS feeds for items
• COinS plug-in making items readable by Zotero
• SimplePages plugin for easily making static pages

Here's a brief description of Omeka from Omeka: Serious Web Publishing.

Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Its "five-minute setup" makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. Omeka is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural websites to foster user interaction and participation. It makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible templating system. Its robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite Omeka’s stability and sustainability.

Read more about it at "Configurable Themes in 1.2."