http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-3-540-29267-8/

In English

http://thesecretmirror.com/archives/the-state-of-open-source-archival-management-software

An interesting weblog entry!

Is the German archival software ARIADNE "Open Source"? Not really. See
http://ariadne.uni-greifswald.de/images/Ariadne/download/Licence.AdnDemo.txt

License:
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/MPL-1.1.html

Commercial use is excluded!

I am not a specialist for Open Source Software but the ARIADNE license seems completely illegal because
a) no copyleft is granted
b) the Mozilla license has to be renamed (see section 6.3).

From http://www.stoa.org/?p=535

Coyle, Karen. “Mass Digitization of Books” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 32(6)(November 2006): 641-645

Excerpt:

Scoping the Mass Digitization Project

There are two assumptions that are often made about mass digitization. The first is that you can digitize everything, and the second is that you can save money by not digitizing the same item more than once. For the first assumption, libraries will find that some items are either too fragile to be put through the mass digitization process, or are too far from the norm to be suitable to that process. Some books will be too large or too small; others will have odd-sized plates or folded maps that will need special handling. So digitizing an entire library will require some mass digitization and some special digitization projects.

The other part of the “digitize everything” goal is the desire to create at least one digital copy of every book available in any library. Google and the OCA are beginning this process by focusing on some large libraries in the Western world with impressively broad collections. How much of the world's literature will be digitized in this way? A statistical study of the five original Google Book Search collections27 shows that at the end of this project Google will have digitized 33 percent of the items in OCLC's WorldCat. The most important revelation from this study is that 40 percent of the items in WorldCat are held uniquely by only one institution. The long tail of the Google Book Search project will require involving many hundreds or thousands of libraries if they really intend to create an index to all of the books on library shelves today.

The second assumption is that time and money will be saved by keeping a registry of digitized books so that the work is not duplicated by other libraries.28,29 In the arena of mass digitization, this assumption is being challenged by some with the argument that it may be more economical to scan a full shelf of books than to determine if a true duplicate exists elsewhere. This is in part because of the difficulty of defining “same” in a world with many similar but not identical editions. It is also because the mass digitization process may not produce true duplicates due to the error rate of OCR programs, and because of differences in decisions made at the time of scanning.

Conclusion

Although a significant number of large research libraries are engaging in mass digitization projects, other than the Google Book Search, which is available today, we have little idea how the digitized books will be used. There are many questions that need to be answered, such as: who does this digitized library serve? How does it serve users? How will the system respond when there are ten million books in a database and a user enters the query “civil war”? (Note that Google has not yet determined how it will create an ordering principle for books.) Will some users read these books online in spite of the relative inconvenience of their formats and the computer screen's technology? Will it be possible to use the digitized pages to produce something more e-book like?

Google has clearly stated that their book project is solely aimed at providing a searchable index to the books on library shelves. They are quite careful not to promise an online reading experience, which would increase the quality control effort of their project and possibly make rapid digitization of the libraries impossible. Library leaders are enticed by the speed of mass digitization, but seem unable to give up their desire to provide online access to the content of the books themselves. If mass digitization is the best way to bring all of the world's knowledge together in a single format, we are going to have to make some reconciliation between the economy of “mass” and the satisfaction of the needs of library users.

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/xmasherpa.html

http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/History_of_Archives%2C_Recordkeeping%2C_and_Records

A wiki page.

“The Records Manager,” the resurrected newsletter of the Society of American Archivists Records Management Roundtable, is now available at
http://archives.syr.edu/saarmrt/TRM1106.pdf

http://www.resourceshelf.com/2006/12/06/microsoft-book-search-goes-live-online/

http://science.slashdot.org/science/06/12/07/1552237.shtml

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6213260.stm

Live Search - http://search.live.com/
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=&scope=books

"Microsoft is releasing its Live Search Books, a rival to Google's
Book Search, in test, or beta, version in the US. The digital archive
will include books from the collections of the British Library, the
University of California and the University of Toronto. Books from
three other institutions will be added in January 2007. All the books
currently included in the project will be non-copyrighted but later it
will also add copyrighted work that publishers have given permission to include in the project."

http://readingarchives.blogspot.com/2006/12/selling-archives-new-wrinkle.html

R. J. Cox has written a piece on the sale of the "of the archives of Jacques Fath, a French fashion designer of the mid-twentieth century. You can purchase the archives of Fath for a cool $3.5 million, a purchase which will net you nearly 3500 illustrations for clothing design, executed between 1948 and 1956 (Fath died in 1954).

As the Times essay reports, the Fath archives are being sold by the owner of a Beverley Hills store, who had acquired them by a purchase nine years before. As Wilson reports, “There is a caveat. The new owner must keep the collection together, ideally as a donation to a museum or the basis for a research center.”"

Excerpt from the diary by Saad Eskander, Director of the National Archives and Library in Iraq at
http://www.archives.org.uk/resources/Eskander%20diary.doc

Tuesday, November 20, 2006
It was by far the worst day of the year.
As soon as my car arrived to the main building, I heard two big explosions. Sunni extremists shelled the medical city and the Ministry of Health by mortars. Both buildings 200 meters are away from our institution. The Minister of Health is a Shi I extremist. His predecessor was the same. Both men replaced the senior and minor staff of the Ministry with their loyal Shi is. The Ministry of Health is now a Shi i stronghold, while the ministry of Higher Education is the stronghold of the Sunnis. The latter was attacked by Shi i extremists last week, and 100 of its Sunni employees were taken hostage. It is the war between these two extremist camps, which threatens our lives day and night.

My secretary, Um Haitham, was a little horrified, as the two bombs landed 70 meters away from her car. Like other people, she talked about the incident for two minutes and then resumed her daily tasks.
I heard another explosion 50 minutes later. The exchange of fire continued for one hour and thirty minutes.
Nadia, a librarian who works at the Computer Department, did not show up. I was told that her father was injured yesterday. He had a bullet removed from his leg.
I met the head of the Bibliography Department, Nadhal, and her supervisor, Jamal, to talk about their works.

By 11.00 a.m. most of my Staff received their monthly salary. I toured some of the departments and talked to many of my staff. I am doing my best to keep their morale high.

At 11.00 a.m. I received devastating news. I was informed that Ali Salih was assassinated in front of his younger sister. Ali was a bright young man. I sent him to Florence in Italy to be trained as a web-designer. Upon returning, he and Nadia began to construct and run our official web-site. He was the symbol of the modernization and reform process of the National Library and Archive. I employed him in January 2004, like many other young librarians and archivists. I hoped that the new generation could lead the way.

It was a very sad day. All the people who knew Ali were weeping that day. All were depressed and morale was at its lowest. Amal, the head of the Computer Department where Ali used to work, could not control her sad feelings. When staff evacuated the building and went home, Amal was still in her office weeping silently. I was the last one to leave. But I had a strong feeling at the time that Amal was still alone in her office. So I decided to go to her. After 15 minutes talking, I was able to persuade her to go home. I did not hide from her my true feelings that I was extremely worried about the safety of the rest of my young staff.

Before leaving, I held a meeting with the heads of all departments. I suggested that for security reasons we should divide the staff into three groups, each group would work only for two days and that the main reading rooms of the Archive and the Library should, as usual, remain open to serve our university students and researchers. All voted in favor of my suggestion. Some of my staff approached me, asking me to leave the country as soon as I could. They were very worried about me that I would be killed in vain.

I returned to my home very depressed; I hugged my 6 months old son and remembered that Ali left behind him two sons, 6 months old and 3 years old.

See also
http://hangingtogether.org/?p=167

For security reasons the Archives are closed since November 22.