PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY:
Sustaining Digital Collections
DECEMBER 9-10, 2008
InterContinental Chicago Hotel
Chicago, Illinois

PRESENTED BY the Northeast Document Conservation Center
CO-SPONSORED BY Society of American Archivists, American Library Association, and Center for Research Libraries

Media in Motion: The Challenge of Preservation in the Digital Age
October 29, 2008
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

JPEG 2000 a great step forward for the archival community
The Digital Preservation Coalition has examined JPEG 2000 in a report published today. The report concludes that JPEG 2000 represents a great stride forward for the archival community. The format now allows for greater compression rates and a recompression rate that is visually lossless.

The Kodak Fellowship will be awarded each year to a student of merit who intends to pursue a career in the field of moving image archiving. The student selected as the Kodak Fellow will receive:

• A $4,000 scholarship for the upcoming academic year. Funds will be sent to the student’s educational institution and credited toward tuition and/or registration fees.
• Complementary registration to the AMIA Conference. Reimbursements and/or a per diem will also be provided to cover travel, hotel accommodations, and other reasonable costs.
• A six-week summer internship at Kodak and other film restoration facilities in Los Angeles. Transportation and housing will be provided at no cost, and the student will be paid an hourly wage to offset other living expenses. See http://www.amianet.org/events/kodak.php

AMIA Scholarship Program

Registration Open for NISO's March 14 Digital Preservation Forum

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) will host a forum on "Digital Preservation: Planning Today for Tomorrow's Resources," to be held March 14, 2008 in Washington, DC.

With the increasing number of digital objects—both those born digital and those that have been converted to digital formats to enhance access, delivery, and creative use of library collections—the need to focus on how these digital objects themselves will be preserved is paramount. Good business practices require attention to interoperability with various systems and platforms, a focus on accessibility, and use of and attention to formats that will be allow for extensibility and flexibility. By creating well-formed content at the outset and paying attention to digital preservation issues as part of the collection management plan, we can better ensure the longevity of these collections. NISO's Digital Preservation forum will provide insight and allow for further discussion of these issues.

The keynote speaker will be Evan Owens, Chief Technology Officer for Portico, a not-for-profit service that provides a permanent archive of scholarly literature. Other confirmed speakers include Lucy Nowell (National Science Foundation), Tom Clareson (PALINET), Martin Kalfatovic (Smithsonian Institution Libraries), and Deborah Thomas and David Brunton (National Digital Newspaper Program, Library of Congress).

Research Assistant (Arts and Humanities) Scale 6 (£23,002 - £24,403 per annum) plus London Allowance of £2,572 per annum, Full time, 9 month contract due to funding.

E -Curator: 3D colour scans for remote object identification and assessment

This project draws on UCL's expertise both in curatorship and in e-Science. It takes advantage of the presence at UCL of world class collections across a range of disciplines and of a state of the art colour scanner, the quality of which is unequalled in the UK. The project aims to apply e-science technologies to museum work and artefact analysis, exploring the potential to capture and share in a secure and repeatable manner very large, detailed datasets about museum artefacts, thereby enhancing international scholarship and facilitating he safe movement of artefacts. The ability to share validated 3D colour data could facilitate object-tracking and condition checking, enabling curators and conservators to compare records collected at different institutions and stored remotely, or collected over a period of time under different conditions, in order to assess and monitor change. The project is jointly funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).