Prospero is a mostly-gone-but-not-forgotten ILL/DD toolkit that ran into, um, *ahem* problems with its 2.0 release. If you sift through the history of posts here about Prospero, you'll find more details about how it evolved, but not a copy of the software. Attached to this post is a copy of the 1.40 release, for the completist library hacker in your ilfe.

From the site:

"Digital Asset Factory (DAF) v2.0 provides all the necessary tools required to manage the whole process of a digitization workflow, including its various Phases, User management, file movement and archiving. It provides the flexibility to manage multiple simultaneous projects with a diversity of materials, covering books, journals, newspapers, manuscripts, unbound materials, audio, video, and slides.

The system allows easy integration of any tool used to perform functions of the workflow, such as the OCR, image processing, etc. It can be integrated with the current tools used at your organization.

DAF v2.0 is highly reliable and can be configured for large and challenging digitization projects. The system is fully deployed in BA digitization laboratory and has been working smoothly for over a year."

The latest source zip is attached.

It's been a really long time since I've written about g3data, the excellent tool for extracting data from graphs. It has seen many updates, and the latest version is 1.5.1.

A copy is attached.

from freshmeat: "This version ported g3data to GTK+ 2.2. All deprecated functions were removed."

Jean-Daniel wrote: "The Free version of the Deja Vu format, DjVuLibre, has been advertised a few days ago. DjVu is a format meant for managing large image documents. I think it is currently the best option for distribution manuscripts through Internet so oss4lib readers might be interested." Saw a presentation on this at MIT a while back, it's nice stuff and having gpl'd commandline tools is a major boon. Interesting that there are only *nix builds available at present.

from freshmeat: "This release uses gdk-pixbuf instead of Imlib for image manipulation. The ability to scale and image with command line parameters has been added." Find it at the g3data site.

This came out about a month ago, must have missed it. From the g3data site: "g3data is used for extracting data from graphs. In publications graphs often are included, but the actual data is missing. g3data makes the extracting process much easier." Very, very slick, and while it's a niche application there will likely be a moment each of you will need this upon encountering a frustrated researcher on deadline at the reference desk. Reminds me of registering datapoints on old maps using GIS.

Eric writes: "Prospero 1.36 includes modified server side scripts. In addition to merging the login.pl and getdoc.pl files, the program now uses session cookies to keep track of authentication. This eliminates the insecure combination of the GET method and usage of crypt() in login.pl. Problems with IE not being able to view documents have been fixed. Conversion of Ariel documents that don't include the NMPG GEDI tag (ie. CISTI documents) has also been fixed."

from freshmeat: "g3data is a program for extracting data from graphs (i.e., scanned graphs from scientific publications). It can read many different image formats and outputs the extracted data through stdout." Way cool; any sense of how many researchers are doing this kind of data reanimation?

to excerpt Eric: "Features of 1.2 include: moved staff module from a Perl codebase to C codebase... This will enable us to make a future release an Ariel "plug-in"; added ability to attach pdf documents to an email message rather than posting them to the Web; added Alphabetical sorting to user list database; fixed bugs in TIFF/PDF conversion and other interface problems; [many] changes in server scripts." check it out yourself at the Prospero page at the Prior Health Sciences Library. Very cool; now I can reimplement it here.