The 4th ongoing edition of Polish Digital Libraries Federation e-learning courses ended in June. We received lots of important opinions about content and quality of courses through questionnaires filled by users at the end of each subject. “Digital repositories for small memory institutions” had 82 participants; 30 people registered for the shorter one, “Cooperation with Europeana”. Similarly to previous editions, participants who passed all tests and filled the questionnaires, had a possibility to gain a certificate confirming completion of the course and the note they have reached.

“Cooperation with Europeana” was averagely rated for 4,6 (in 5 grades scale), which is almost the same as in previous editions. Most of participants acknowledged that presented subjects will be useful for their profession and that they are satisfied with the course. We asked participants where did they get to know about the course and it came out that most of them heard about it from their boss or tutor. We got to know also that librarian is the most often profession among participants.

The second one, longer course “Digital repositories for small memory institutions” got also an average rate of 4,6. As far as the source of knowledge about course is concerned, most people got it from various websites, some participants also knew it from their boss/tutor or facebook. As in the Europeana course, librarian is the most often profession.

We received quite a few remarks about content and quality of courses, sometimes they were inconsistent. Lots of participants insist on more practical examples and more accurate review of some issues, but on the other hand, some opinions were about that there is too much knowledge and unnecessary subjects in courses for the work of given participants. It is very difficult to strike a happy medium and make the course suitable for everyone. However, we will consider all valuable comments and we will try to implement new, flexible solutions in the next training course.

Registration for new users was closed and we do not give certificates till the beginning of the next scholarship cycle.

Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) joins the Open Planets Foundation (OPF) as an affiliate member.

‘PSNC brings new expertise and tools to the OPF membership’, explained Ed Fay, Executive Director of OPF. ‘They have developed dArceo, a long-term preservation system (http://dingo.psnc.pl/darceo/) which is already used by a number of institutions in Poland to preserve their digital content. As part of their membership contribution they will publicise the service as an open source package. In addition, PSNC will submit improvements to the FITS (http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/fits) code base, a tool which is widely used by both OPF members and the wider community’.

‘As we speak about long-term preservation, our long-term goal is to improve PSNC’s excellence in the field and share our expertise and tools with the preservation community’ said Tomasz Parkoła, long-term preservation specialist, and member of PSNC’s Digital Libraries Team. ‘We believe that OPF can help us bring this to reality, by providing an excellent collaboration and networking environment. We are especially looking forward to sharing knowledge, creating new initiatives, investigating new ideas and running new projects. Our main focus is obviously on research and development activities.”

The Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center is a public ICT research and development institution working on broad range of topics, including network, storage, computing, applications and network services. It has been active in the long-term preservation and archiving domain for several years.

PSNC becomes the 19th member of Open Planets joining libraries, archives, research institutions, universities, and service providers collaborating on shared approaches to digital preservation.

Just to introduce Succeed Awards, those prizes are to recognise the successful implementation of a digitisation programme, especially those exploiting the latest technology and the output of research for the digitisation of historical text. The decision for the Succeed Awards has been published at http://succeed-project.eu/succeed-awards/awards-2014. Two main prizes went to the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library and Centre d’Études Supérieurs de la Renaissance. There was also a category ‘Commendations of Merit‘ in which Tecnilógica and London Metropolitan Archives – University College London were appreciated.

Candidates have been selected among 19 nominations world-wide. Succeed Awards will be delivered during the Digitisation Days (http://www.succeed-project.eu/digitisation-days), on the 20th of May in Madrid. The ceremony will be chaired by the President of the Fundación Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes and the Nobel-prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa. Many very relevant personalities of the digitisation field and high-level representatives of the European Commission and the Government have confirmed their participation.

On the 10th and 11th of April 2014, the Succeed project will hold a hackathon at the University of Alicante. Its aim is to look for ways of improving state-of-the-art open-source tools for digitisation of textual content such as books and newspapers.

Over two days, developers will work together in small groups to discuss, roadmap and plan the future development of existing tools. Some of the topics up for discussion are:

• How to train the Tesseract OCR engine.
• Creation of XSLT stylesheets for format conversion, e.g. hOCR, PAGE, FRXML.
• Debian package generation.

This hackathon provides a unique opportunity to meet developers involved in digitisation projects from all over Europe. The PSNC representative will take part in the workshop. Participation in the event is free of charge, but to ensure it, you should reserve your place. Participants are also encouraged to take a look at last year’s hackathon’s outcomes and background information.