PRDLA

2009 ODiL Update: UCSD [PPT]

David Palmer (Hong Kong University) has published an article in Serials Review describing the development of the Pacific Rim Library and its effectiveness in revealing objects in digital collections that are hidden in the Deep Web.

The Hong Kong Memory Project (HKMP) was initiated by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government in 2002. The goal is to establish a web-based digital repository for the collection, preservation, presentation and dissemination of Hong Kong’s unique historical and cultural heritage. In 2006, the Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC) donated US$10 million to fund the project for 5 years. At the same time, HKJC also asked the Centre of Asian Studies (CAS) and Libraries of The University of Hong Kong (HKUL) to participate in the project, responsible for content development and system setup of the repository.

CAS and HKUL have been working closely together with HKJC, HKSAR Government and other stakeholders to create the digital repository since November 2006. Much has been achieved over the past two and a half years, including putting together a team of dedicated staff, drawing up copyright guidelines and contracts, seeking support from contributors and recently, issuing the tender document for procuring hardware and software of the HKMP system. A prototype website has also been created to gauge comments from target groups through running a series of usability tests. It is expected that the HKMP website would be available to the general public by 2011, before the repository is handed over to the HKSAR Government for continual maintenance and development.

Presentation [ PDF ]

The current status of University of Hawaii at Manoa Library Pacific-related image collections including the Steve Thomas Traditional Voyaging, George Grace and Margo Duggan collections, all posted to the web using the OAI harvestable Streetprint Digital Library software and the Henry P. Edmunds and William A. Bryan photographs of Rapanui and the venerable Trust Territory Archive photo collection will be discussed. The Pacific Collection future plans and wish lists for digitization of additional collections and their relationship with existing collections in the ODiL will be described.  Hawaii-related collections of images (Save our Surf) as well as text (Hawaiian Historical Society) will be highlighted and recent experiments with updating the Annexation of Hawaii web site and the UHM Library’s participation in the U.S. National Digital Newspaper Program will also be described.  Thoughts (possibly scandalous or heretical) about the ODiL portal in light of very new developments such as the World Digital Library and slightly older initiatives such as the UNESCO Memory of the World Committee for Asia/Pacific may be voiced.

Presentation [ PPT ]

In 2008, out of the increased mass digitization demands of the University, the Library established the University Digitization Center and one of the two University Data Centers. The goals are to centralize the digitization activities on the campus, to discover and preserve the institutional information resources, and to reinforce implementation of standards and as well as cooperation among different units on the campus.

After years of efforts, Peking University Library now hosts a sizable amount of digital contents. Among them are several local developed digital collections: Ancient Rare Materials Database; Beijing Historical Geography Database; PKU Scholars Database; PKU ETD; PKU Lectures Online, etc. Upon the establishment of the University Digitization Center and the Data Center Library Site, the library started several new digital projects in 2009. One of them is the Min Guo Newspapers and Journals (Newspapers and Journals of the Republic of China).

Presentation [ PPT ]

The “Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Program” (TELDAP) was officially launched on January 1, 2008. TELDAP is aimed to digitize national cultural treasures, including archaeology, archives, artifacts, calligraphy and paintings, flora and fauna, rare books, and other cultural assets, to cultivate popular e-learning culture, to encourage innovation in e-learning research, and to lay a cornerstone for Taiwan’s e-learning and digital content industries.

Presentation [ PPT ]

Being a small country of four million people at the end of the world has its advantages and disadvantages, where the six degrees of separation is often reduced to two. One positive is that “all of country” initiatives are much more manageable than in some larger countries, although budgets are considerably smaller. This presentation showcases some of those national digital and digitisation projects such as Matapihi, KRIS, Digital New Zealand and the National Digital Forum, discusses issues around heritage and indigenous content, and asks questions generally about the nature of collaboration both within the library community and across other sectors.

Presentation [ PPT ]

The libraries in China may be categorized into three types based on their superior government agencies or affiliated institutions: public, academic and special libraries . The public, academic and special libraries are usually governed and sponsored by the culture, education and sci-tech administrations at the central or local government levels respectively. For the past 10 years, dozens of digital library projects have been implemented in China, and they have been led and sponsored by different government agencies based on their administrative systems. The funds and the digital products of the DL projects are usually shared only within a type of the libraries. Therefore, the mass digitization of print collections and the software development in the different DL projects have serious duplications, and the resources are not reasonably shared among the three types of libraries, either at the national or local levels.

Ningbo is a coastal city in Zhejiang Province with a population of 5.65 million. Ningbo Digital Library (NBDL) is the first joint digital library project across the three types of libraries in the nation, cosponsored by the three local government agencies, Bureau of Education, Bureau of Culture, Radio & TV, Press and Publication, and Bureau of Science & Technology. There are 18 individual libraries, including 16 academic libraries, 1 public library system (the city library and the subordinate public libraries at county and community levels) and 1 special library (the city information institute) join the project. The goal of the project is to digitize the local cultural, sci-tech, industrial and educational resources, integrate the born digital materials of the participating institutions and local enterprises, develop several special databases with local characteristics, establish a unified portal and serve the local industries, education and research institutions, and the citizens as well. The first phase of the NBDL project was initiated in early 2007 and will be completed in 2010. Ningbo Municipal Government allocates RMB40 million yuan (US$5.85 million) to the first phase of the project. In March 2009, the NBDL portal (http://www.nbdl.gov.cn/) began to open to the local users. By the end of June 2009, 750,000 full-text documents have been viewed by the users, and 71,000 titles of different types of papers have been delivered to the patrons via the document delivery system of the portal. The digitization duplications of the project are avoided, and the digital resources are shared with different types of libraries at the city level.

Presentation [ PDF ]

This presentation analyzes the nine-year experience of an academic digital library, e-Asia, which now holds over 4,000 items. In many respects, the e-Asia library is a long-running experiment. Yet the project is mature enough to provided lessons in what to do (and what not to do) when digital text is the focus of collection building. Unlike traditional libraries where, over time, books migrate to and from their shelves, digital libraries hold content that remains relatively immobile while it is the digital “shelves” that change and migrate over time.

The issues to be highlighted in this presentation are from an “in-the-trenches” perspective. Issues include: workflows, scanning procedures and choices, software use, OCR and (cooperative) proofreading, non-Roman character recognition, ebook formats, and finished product presentation. Other sundry concerns such as storage/archiving, the mobile web, and the impact of Google books, e-ink, and Amazon.com will be discussed in the contect of the academic digital library.

Presentation [ PPT ]

The new University of Southern California Digital Library is the outcome of significant transformations in the USC Libraries’ digitization philosophy, practice, and infrastructure. The new entity unites digitization processes, collection-development strategies, metadata services, distributed content creation, and a platform for new modes of intellectual investigation and outreach. It builds upon the libraries’ previous digital archive to engage the archival and research communities through more active channels, including content-contribution tools, digital-exhibition programs, and thematic visualizations as investigative pathways through the archives.

The session presents the USC Libraries’ Basel Mission image collection—a recently completed addition to the Internet Mission Photography Archive—as an end-to-end, philosophy-to-outreach case study of the USC Digital Library. The archives, global in scope, preserve a photographic record of 19th- and 20th-century European missionary contacts—some that are among the first such interactions—with Asia and Africa. The session will cover: the digital library’s contributor module that enables global partners to create content and descriptions; a pilot program with CHNM’s open-source Omeka exhibition platform; and a REST API pilot project that encourages mash-ups, social-media experimentation, and other means of building communities and enhancing discoverability.

Presentation [ PPT ]