Software

Unique opportunity for recent PhD recipients from the Council on Library and Information Resources

The MIT Libraries will host a Software Curation Postdoctoral Fellow as part of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. CLIR Fellows work on projects that forge and strengthen connections among library collections, educational technologies, and current research.

The Processing Foundation was founded in 2012 with the two-fold mission to promote software literacy within the visual arts, and visual literacy within technology-related fields. Our primary goal is to empower people of all interests and backgrounds to learn how to program, so as to facilitate a sophisticated way of thinking about and creating media at a time when such knowledge is crucial. We do this by developing and distributing a group of related software projects, which includes Processing (Java), p5.js (Javascript), and Processing.py (Python).

Being able to copy, modify, and share image files on the Internet is something we take for granted now, but the standards body in charge of JPEG is looking to change that.

Tools for the programming archivist: ead manipulation with python and lxml

LJ: What needs or challenges do your customers report as their current priorities, and how are you helping to meet them?

GC: Our library customers have been concerned about two major aspects:

Europeana Newspapers is a project funded by the European Commission's ICT Policy Support Programme as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation framework Programme (CIP).
The total project budget comprised €5.2 million, with a max. EC contribution of €4.1 million. The project consortium brought together a total of 18 partners, coordinated by the Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin).
Over a duration of 38 months, starting in February 2012 and running until March 2015, the project strove for:

Since the PREFORMA project awarded prototype phase funding to the veraPDF consortium in April 2015, the focus has been on initial targets; producing a prototype validator for PDF/A-1b files while establishing software delivery practices.

The German research project EMiL (Emulation of Multimedia objects in Libraries) aims at an emulation-based access framework for multimedia objects in libraries and museums. The project consortium consists of the German National Library, the Bavarian State Library, Karlsruhe University of Art and Design, and the University of Freiburg. The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) until 2016.

In many areas of research, virtual research environments (VREs) have become an essential part of modern research processes. The providers of VREs need to respond to this growing importance with functioning and efficient processes for the development, operation and quality assurance of VREs. We have developed a life-cycle model for VREs, which focuses in particular on the success-critical points for the transition to a VRE's sustainable operation.

The ePADD open-source email archiving and processing platform developed by Stanford University Libraries was awarded a $685,000 National Leadership Grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) on August 31. The software “supports archival processes around the appraisal, ingest, processing, discovery, and delivery of email archives,” according to the project site.