Tag Archives: ACCESS IT

New schooling cycle of DLF e-learning courses

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Next schooling cycle of Polish e-learning courses „Digital repositories for small memory institutions” and „Introduction to Europeana” has begun on February 6th 2014. Courses are available by the e-learning part of Digital Libraries Federation. As it was before, this cycle will last 3 months from February until May. After successful finishing each of those free courses and fulfilling questionnaires at the end of each lesson, participants can receive electronic certificates (separate for each course).

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“Digital repositories for small memory institutions” one was enriched with new examples of digital libraries and collections, the lesson about digitization equipment was expanded and also some practical hints about preparing objects to scanning were added. Changes mentioned above are a result of last schooling cycle users feedback, we hope that they will have a positive impact on courese quality.

PSNC trainings gain professional accreditation PLA

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Professional Accreditation of Polish Librarian Association is the evaluation of educational programs directed to librarians and information scientists, made by independent experts pointed by the Polish Librarian Association (PLA, pol. Stowarzyszenia Bibliotekarzy Polskich). Experiences and solutions practiced by acclaimed Anglo-Saxon LIS organizations (eg. ALA, ALIA, CILIP) are the inspiration. On the accreditation’s website there is an information that libraries, universities, continuing education agencies and training companies can apply for it. Grading system and standards worked out by PLA relate to short educational forms generally defined as “training service” such as eg. internship, seminary or training course.

PSNC is known for initiatives which aim to promote knowledge about digital libraries. An example of such activity is a “Digital Libraries” workshop which is organized since 2004. Apart from mentioned workshop, PSNC accomplishes also some trainings for dLibra software users and provides two e-learning courses: “Digital repositories for small memory institutions” and “Cooperation with Europeana”. All of three mentioned services were reported to the accreditation process. On the 4th July 2013 a session of the Professional Accreditation Committee PLA took place under the leadership of Ewa Kobierska-Maciuszko. During the debate, reports from the training services evaluation were examined. With great pleasure we inform that all 3 services received accreditations what is bound with gaining a 3-years valid certificate confirming high quality of those services.

ACCESS IT plus course in Bosnia and Herzegovina

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Another good news from Balkans ;-). “Digital Repositories for small memory institutions” and “Cooperation with Europeana” e-learning courses developed by PSNC in the AccessIT and Access IT plus projects (funded under the EU Culture Programme) are now available in Serbian, thanks to the joint effort of National and University Library of Republica Srpska (NULRS, our Bosnian partner) and Belgrade City Library (Serbian partner of ACCESS IT). A few days ago NULRS has just released both courses in their e-learning portal.

Exactly the same as in Poland, Greece, Croatia, Serbia and Turkey, courses are free for anyone who is interested in digitisation, digital libraries and Europeana. Congratulations to our colleagues from Bosnia and Herzegovina, you did a great job! 😉

Summary of 2nd edition of FBC e-learning courses

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The ongoing edition of Polish Digital Libraries Federation’s e-learning courses was available since October 2012 and it has ended along with the end of January. Courses “Cooperation with Europeana” and “Digital repositories for small memory institutions” met with quite big interest. The Europeana course attracted exactly 100 participants and the second one concerning subjects related to digitisation and digital libraries had 128 participants registered. Every participant could gain – apart from knowledge,
Keene High School (old) Graduating Class of 1875, Keene, New Hampshire
also a certificate confirming the participation in the course and the given note. Passing the tests was a condition for which a participant could gain a certificate; together, courses include 11 tests and 255 questions (57 in first and 198 in second). We certificated 78 people: 27 for Europeana course participants and 51 for digital repositories course participants (31 in this 2. edition). W congratulate everybody who has managed to finish all tests ;-).

People who have finished the course were asked to grade the course. Each subject of the course was rated in 1 to 5 scale, we received also personal comments about courses content.

As for the “Cooperation with Europeana” course, the first topic “Overview of Europeana” obtained the average note of 4.71 and the second “Technical aspects of Europeana” has 4.24. Some critical notes concerned mostly the technical aspect mentioned in the course, participants asked for more practical examples. We promise to amend 😉 Nonetheless most notes were positive, participants wrote that courses improved their skills which have a use in everyday work.

As far as the course “Digital repositories for small memory institutions” is concerned, the highest note was given to the subject “Introduction to digitisation” (4.77) and “Building digital collections” got the lowest one (4.57). There was a critical note about standardizing the grading of quizes. A few participants complained about minuteness of instructions related to usage of particular software packages but this was also one of biggest advantages mentioned by other graduates.

With the end of the second edition of the courses we will close the enrollment for courses till the late March. We are planning to start another edition of the courses at that time.

Authors: Bogna Wróż, Adam Dudczak

ACCESS IT plus course in Croatian

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View on Rijeka

“Digital Repositories for small memory institutions” and “Cooperation with Europeana” e-learning courses developed by PSNC under the AccessIT and Access IT plus projects (funded under the EU Culture Programme) were released in Croatian versions by City Library in Rijeka. 

Exactly the same as in Poland, Greece, Serbia and Turkey, courses are free for anyone who is interested in digitisation, digital libraries and Europeana. With a maximum duration of 3 months, upon completion of a course there is the possibility of gaining certification which is provided in cooperation with CSSU (Center for permanent education of librarians) at the National and University Library in Zagreb.

More information can be found at Access It Plus project website.

Digitlab

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Digitlab is an especially adapted operational system based on Linux Ubuntu. The main aim of its creation was to create a complete system which can be used for collections digitization with the usage of free and widely available tools. The system was based on Ubuntu in version 12.04 LTS and prepared with a tool called Remastersys. It can be downloaded as an ISO image and tried by recording it on pendrive or DVD without the necessity of installation on the computer.

Digitlab is an element of work results of project ACCESS IT Plus. ACCESS IT Plus. Among installed programs there can be found inter alia: ScanTailor (a tool for processing scanning results), gscan2pdf (scanning, creation of PDF&DjVu files with a support for Tesseract), magicktiler (tool enabling the creation of Zoomify images), the engine of OCR Tesseract with a support for Polish language, German Gothic fonts and much more. Apart from utility tools mentioned above, users will also find exemplary digital libraries created on base of DSpace, GreenStone and dLibra software. The full list of software installed in Digitlab system is published here.

In order to check the Digitlab possibilities , the usage of at least 4GB carrier and software such as Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator (Linux) or Universal USB Installer (Windows) or any other tool enabling to create a bootable carrier from downloaded ISO image is indispensable. In both those programs, apart form recording the image of the system, there can be created a disc space in which all changes made by the user will be saved if the system turn on with pendrive. While creating this space, it should be remembered that the bigger the space, the longer the time of system starting with pendrive is. Except turning on with pendrive, Digitlab may also be installed on computer and use it in work as a basic operational system.

The default language of the system is English. Additionally there are some other languages installed: Croatian, Serbian, Greek, Albanian, Turkish and Polish. All applications which were not installed from system packages, were placed in the catalog “/usr/apps/”. System can be successfully used for scholarships and daily work. The ISO image can be downloaded here.

Image which was used in this post comes from Missye Katolickie journal. It was published in 1882 and is available in Digital Library of Greater Poland.

E-learning course in DLF portal

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“Digital repositories for small memory institutions” – this free e-learning course has been gradually released since June 2011 within the portal of Digital Libraries Federation (DLF).

It contains information about organizing and leading the digitisation of different kinds of documents. One of its main aims is to help to create high-quality digital libraries and enable their promotion by sharing information about available resources with services like Europeana.

This course is first of all (but not only) directed to people working in small memory institutions such as public libraries and regional museums. It can also be a source of knowledge for students of specialisations such as librarianship and scientific information which are naturally related to branches of digitisation of resources and creation of digital libraries. Participants will have an opportunity to familiarise themselves with a series of instructions discussing the way of implementation of typical digital librarian tasks, step by step. These are, i.e.: creation of descriptions for digitized objects; preparation of digital contents for web publication or promotion of digital objects on the Internet.

In the end of each subject, there is a quiz allowing participants to check their knowledge. Eventually, the course will contain several dozen modules grouped in 9 subjects;

By the end of the year 2011 participation in the course will not be encompassed with any strict time frames. Participants may choose any accessible subject, familiarize with it and check their knowledge in a quiz. According to the plan systematic training courses will be organized since 2012.

Information about the way of subscribing to the course can be found on Digital Libraries Federation portal: http://fbc.pionier.net.pl/elearning/. 

ACCESS IT – Final project conference

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On the 21st of March in Istanbul (Turkey) a summary conference of the two years long Access IT project was held.
As a part of this project PSNC Digital Libraries Team prepared e-learning courses (available at http://dl.psnc.pl/moodle) for small memory institutions about creation of digital libraries and cooperation with Europeana. During the project this course was widely implemented and used in Serbia, Greece and Turkey, as we informed earlier on our site.

The conference programme is available at the project website. PSNC Team on the conference was presenting Europeana and EuropeanaLocal project. We also showed the e-learning course and described the rules of its reuse and development. Here you can find few photos from the conference.

During the conference the Access IT Plus project was also shortly described. This project will be a continuation of the current project and should start in the first half of 2011. During this project we will extend existing e-learning course and develop basic software packages useful for small memory institutions in the process of digitisation and creation of digital libraries. This time the target countries for educational activities will be Croatia, Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina. More information on the project coming soon…