RESOURCE: 2020 NDSA Agenda for Digital Stewardship

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Agenda Working Group has recently announced the publication of the 2020 NDSA Agenda for Digital Stewardship. According to the Working Group, made up of Micah Altman (MIT Libraries), Karen Cariani (WGBH Media Library and Archives), Bradley Daigle (Academic Preservation Trust), Christie Moffatt (National Library of Medicine (NLM)), Sibyl Schaefer ...

RESOURCE: Free Access to Digital Records

The National Archives are currently making digital records available on their website at no cost to registered users. Registration is free, and as long as they abide by the terms of fair use, users can add up to ten items at a time to their baskets, with a maximum of 50 items over 30 days. ...

RESOURCE: Finding Our Way: A Snapshot of Scholarly Communication Practitioners’ Duties & Training

Maria Bonn (UIUC), Will Cross (NC State), and Josh Bolick (University of Kansas) have published “Finding Our Way: A Snapshot of Scholarly Communication Practitioners’ Duties & Training” in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.  From the abstract: INTRODUCTION Scholarly communication has arisen as a core academic librarianship competency, but formal training on scholarly communication ...

RESOURCE: 2020 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report

EDUCAUSE, a community of IT leaders and professionals working together to tackle challenges and leverage opportunities that are constantly evolving within higher education, released its 2020 Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition. As the announcement explains, “This report profiles key trends and emerging technologies and practices shaping the future of teaching and learning and envisions ...

RESOURCE: Smithsonian Open Access

The Smithsonian Institute has released almost 3 million digital objects through its Open Access portal, most of which are in the public domain under the Creative Commons 0 (CC0) license. This collection includes both 2D and 3D items from the Smithsonian’s collections in addition to 173-years of staff-created data, and spans the Institute’s 19 museums, ...

RESOURCE: Persistent identifiers for heritage objects

Code4Lib Journal has published a piece by Lukas Koster (University of Amsterdam), “Persistent identifiers for heritage objects.” From the abstract: Persistent identifiers (PID’s) are essential for getting access and referring to library, archive and museum (LAM) collection objects in a sustainable and unambiguous way, both internally and externally. Heritage institutions need a universal policy for ...

RESOURCE: Digital Technology and the Practices of Humanities Research

The Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU) just released a new open access book, “Digital Technology and the Practices of Humanities Research,” edited by Jennifer Edmond. From the announcement: How does technology impact research practices in the humanities? How does digitisation shape scholarly identity? How do we negotiate trust in the digital ...

RESOURCE: Developing the Librarian Workforce for Data Science and Open Science

In April 2019, National Library of Medicine’s Office of Strategic Initiatives held a workshop to explore how librarians can become more deeply involved in data and open science, and to identify the skills needed to do so successfully. The workshop convened library practitioners with experience working on DS/OS issues from a range of scientific disciplines, ...

RESOURCE: Using Kraken to Train Your Own OCR Models

Christine Roughan, PhD student at NYU, has created a guide on how to train and implement OCR models using Kraken. Kraken is open-source command line software for performing OCR on text, and offers both pre-trained OCR models and the ability to produce artificial training data from a text provided by the user. This guide is ...

RESOURCE: Teaching with Digital Primary Sources: Literacies, Finding and Evaluating, Citing, Ethics, and Existing Models

Brianna Gormly (Franklin & Marshall College), Maura Seale (University of Michigan), Hannah Alpert-Abrams (University of Texas), Andi Gustavson (University of Texas), Angie Kemp (University of Mary Washington), Thea Lindquist (University of Colorado Boulder), and Alexis Logsdon (University of Minnesota) have released a whitepaper entitled “Teaching with Digital Primary Sources: Literacies, Finding and Evaluating, Citing, Ethics, ...

RESOURCE: Digital Collections Management Compendium

The Library of Congress has announced the launch of its Digital Collections Management Compendium (DCMC). The DCMC is a comprehensive set of guidelines and policies for LoC’s digital collection management. The DCMC is intended to promote “enduring access to the Library’s vast digital collections.” Senior Digital Collections Specialist Jesse Johnston writes, “This resource is primarily ...