AAO members may be interested in the announcement below, reposted from the Canadian History mailing list, H-CANADA. The actions involved, and the way in which the issues are framed, raise interesting questions both for archivists and for those who use archives. Bennett McCardle <[log in to unmask]> Toronto, Ontario, Canada ------------------- From: Dr Paul S. Ell <[log in to unmask]> Dear Colleague, A new electronic discussion list has been established under mailbase. The list, history-digitisation, is concerned with the digitisation, whether as an image or a fully machine-readable document, of historical material. Particular emphasis will be placed on the application of Optical Character Recognition technology to 'difficult' material. Increasingly there are efforts to add content to the World Wide Web. In the UK government the, through the New Opportunities Fund, has recently announced a =A350,000,000 initiative to create digital resources. Much of this material will be of a historical nature. This poses unique problems - the material may be of poor quality and hence difficult to capture, it may be rare and fragile. This list aims to bring together experts in the field of digitising historical material and academics who have projects in mind. To join history-digitisation go to http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/history-digitisation/ or, alternatively, send an e-mail to [log in to unmask] with the following text in the BODY of the message join history-digitisation <FIRSTNAME> <LASTNAME> Please forward this message to any interested colleagues. Best wishes, Paul Ell ______________________________________________________________ Dr Paul S. Ell Director The Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis School of Sociology and Social Policy The Queen's University of Belfast Belfast BT7 1NN E-mail: [log in to unmask] WWW: www.qub.ac.uk/cdda/ Discussion list: www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/history-digitisation Phone: +44 (0)28 90273408 FAX: +44 (0)28 90320668 ______________________________________________________________