The Sound Directions project at Harvard University and Indiana University announces the publication of Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation available to download as PDF from their web site. This 168-page publication presents the results of two years of research and development funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in the United States. This work was carried out by project and permanent staff at both institutions in consultation with an advisory board of experts in audio engineering, audio preservation, and digital libraries.

Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation establishes best practices in many areas where they did not previously exist. This work also explores the testing and use of existing and emerging standards. It includes chapters on personnel and equipment for preservation transfer, digital files, metadata, storage, preservation packages and interchange, and audio preservation systems and workflows. Each chapter is divided into two major parts: a preservation overview that summarizes key concepts for collection managers and curators, followed by a section that presents recommended technical practices for audio engineers, digital librarians, and other technical staff. This latter section includes a detailed look at the inner workings of the audio preservation systems at both Harvard and Indiana.

This first phase of the Sound Directions project produced four key results: the publication of findings and best practices, the development of much needed software tools for audio preservation, the creation or further development of audio preservation systems at each institution, and the preservation of a large number of critically endangered and highly valuable recordings. All of these are detailed in this publication, which provides solid grounding for institutions pursuing audio preservation either in-house or in collaboration with an outside vendor.

For further information on the Sound Directions project: soundir@indiana.edu

The British Library is working with Microsoft and imaging company Content Conversion Specialists (CCS) on a massive book digitisation project.

Over a period of two years, around 100,000 books from the British Library’s nineteenth century literature collection will be made available on its online catalogue and Microsoft’s Live Search Books.

Approximately 30 terabytes of storage will be required to accommodate the project’s output.

The first 25 million pages are expected to take two years to complete. Texts which are hard to get hold of will particularly benefit from the digitisation. For example, authors who were only ever published outside the great centres of literary life have tended not to remain in print and have often been forgotten.

Now, these authors will have a second chance to reach a readership.

“By digitising the whole collection, we give access to the books without the filter of later judgments, whether based on taste or on the economics of printing and publishing,” Dr Jensen said.

Read the full article here.

This is somewhat old news but extremely interesting to us:

Copyright deal clears way for European Digital Library

EUOBERVER / BRUSSELS – An EU expert group on digital libraries has agreed to a basic model for handling copyrights for digitalised cultural publications in libraries.

The break-through deal is part of the European Digital Library initiative, launched in June 2005, to preserve European cultural and scientific heritage and make it available online in closed networks.

The deal takes the form of a flat-rate license, payable to publishers of orphaned or out of print works, and the resulting digitised copies may be made available to libraries across Europe. The licensee library would also be responsible for collecting revenue for use from other libraries.

The International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations (IFRRO) welcomed the deal. “I am pleased with this break-through, in particular it is positive that the deal is based on a license model”, said Tarja Koskinen-Olsson, honorary president of the IFRRO.

The exact level for remuneration of rights-holders is not part of the deal, but €1 is considered as a likely payment each time a piece of work is used, according to sources close to the expert group.

Insiders estimate this to be a fairly good payment of rights-holders. In comparison, online downloads of commercial music typically cost one dollar. The exact payment would depend on negotiations of the individual licenses.

The bill would end up with the cultural institutions, which are in many cases funded by public funds.

It is hoped that the libraries could also save some money if they co-operate on digitalising publications and avoiding duplication.

Read more

On 13th March 2007 David and Iain of the Spoken Word joined David Jordan from the BBC’s ‘Future Media and Technology’ department at the JISC Conference 2007 in Birmingham.

The JISC conference provided an excellent opportunity to showcase the Spoken Word’s work alongside the other projects involved in the digital libraries in the classroom programme including DialogPlus (University of Southampton and Penn State University), DART (London School of Economics) and DIDET (University of Strathclyde and Stanford University).

All those inviolved in the digital libraries in the classroom programme shared a stand, answered questions and handed out leaflets to others present at the conference.

The conference also provided the backdrop for a 15 minute JISC funded film promoting the work of the digital libraries in the classroom programmes that includes David and Iain of Spoken Word, Alan Hutton, Douglas Chalmers, various Caledonian University students and the Saltire Centre…by popular demand the film will appear on the Spoken Word site shortly!

The conference was also useful for meeting with people that the project had previously collaborated with. Notably David met with Chris Awre from the University of Hull who, like ourselves, is currently part of the Fedora users group. Recently we have started a new collaboration with the University of Hull in the form of the JISC REMAP project.

However the most notable meeting took place with Tom Loosemore who is project director of BBC 2.0 at JISC. He has played a key role in the BBC’s New Media strategy over the past few years and so the meeting was of great interest. The meeting took place after Tom had presented to the conference about the 15 web development principles that the BBC are currently using as a structure to develop their web services and reach out to even more users. A brief outline of his presentation can be found by clicking here. In the coming months we hope to visit the BBC to talk to staff in the Future Media and Technology department and carry out a presentation about the work of the Spoken Word project.

Photo Courtesy of: ClickCLickElectric

A conference attendee has set up this del.icio.us page with tags linking to content discussed and presented at the Open Repositories Conference in Texas. There is a particularly interesting tag leading to an article by Paul Miller, ‘The Technology Evangelist’, on library 2.0. The del.icio.us page can be found by clicking here.

The 3rd International Conference on Open Repositories takes place in Southampton between the 1st - 4th April 2008. The Conference will be hosted by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, which has a long history of research into the technological aspects of open repositories. The conference will provide focused workshops and tutorials and will also use general conference sessions as a platform to debate and bring together all the issues raised over the four days.

The second international conference on open repositories is being held as I type between the 23rd and 26th January in San Antonio, Texas. The conference aims to encourage discussion and promotion of it’s goal of achieving repository interoperability . The conference is sponsored by many global organisations including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett Packard, which illustrates the importance and scale of the event.

The Spoken Word did have plans to attend the conference but unfortunately these plans were never realised. However, it is my intention to keep up to date with the developments at the conference, including discussion surrounding Fedora, by trawling through various blogs and message boards and to report them here, on the Spoken Word Blog.

On 12th February David and Iain go to the DELOS Conference on Digital Libraries in Tirrenia, a beach resort near Pisa. Benito Mussolini transformed this formerly swampy city into what he called ‘The Pearl of the Mediterranean Sea’. Tirrenia is now a major Italian tourist spot and is popular with young clubbers-so David and Iain are sure to have a good time.

DELOS is a network of excellence on digital libraries and is committed to a vision that digital libraries should ‘enable any citizen to access all human knowledge any time and anywhere, in a friendly, multi-modal, efficient and effective way, by overcoming barriers of distance, language, and culture and by using multiple Internet-connected devices’.

The conference aims to present the latest research and technology in the field of digital libraries and to promote discussion and ‘exchange of ideas’ through various formal and informal satellite meetings.

Clearly this is an ideal conference for promoting and speaking about the Spoken Word, with key figures from around the global digital libraries community in attendance. The Spoken Word’s colleagues, Maureen Lister, from the Universita Di Bologna and Jerry Goldman of Northwestern University in Chicago also have plans to visit the conference, which will be beneficial to continuing and furthering our ties and work with these institutions.

Spoken Word Services and the Academic Liaison Librarians met on Tuesday 16th January to discuss the issue of podcasting. This posting is an update to a previous post by Iain Wallace that outlined the agenda of the meeting and his general thoughts on podcasting in the setting of the library and can be found by clicking here. Iain started off the meeting by giving a brief introduction about what ingredients were needed to make a podcast and gave some examples of the work that other libraries have done with podcasting such as Glasgow University and Glasgow Metropolitan College. However, it was agreed in the meeting that the Caledonian University Library podcasts would steer clear of the irritating electro music that seems to grace the podcasts of other higher educational institutions in Glasgow.

Aidan Johnston and Ewan MacPhee of Spoken Word then showed the group of librarians the set of Hospitality Video Podcasts that they had made on behalf of the Higher Education Academy.

The Academic Liaison Librarians raised many interesting issues and questions regarding podcasting. They are keen to continue with plans to create a podcast based around using journals and finding appropriate articles in the library. It is thought that this will cut the time that staff have to spend showing students how to use library services without being any less informative or helpful.

The librarians seemed to be very positive about creating a podcast and a follow up meeting has been planned to discuss the issue further.