DigitalKoans

JISC has published Metadata for Digital Libraries: State of the Art and Future Directions.

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":

At a time when digitization technology has become well established in library operations, the need for a degree of standardization of metadata practices has become more acute, in order to ensure digital libraries the degree of interoperability long established in traditional libraries. The complex metadata requirements of digital objects, which include descriptive, administrative and structural metadata, have so far mitigated against the emergence of a single standard. However, a set of already existing standards, all based on XML architectures, can be combined to produce a coherent, integrated metadata strategy.

An overall framework for a digital object's metadata can be provided by either METS or DIDL, although the wider acceptance of the former within the library community makes it the preferred choice. Descriptive metadata can be handled by either Dublin Core or the more sophisticated MODS standard. Technical metadata, which is contingent on the type of files that make up a digital object, is covered by such standards as MIX (still images), AUDIOMD (audio files), VIDEOMD or PBCORE (video) and TEI Headers (texts). Rights management may be handled by the METS Rights schema or by more complex schemes such as XrML or ODRL. Preservation metadata is best handled by the four schemas that make up the PREMIS standard.

Integrating these standards using the XML namespace mechanism is straightforward technically although some problems can arise with namespaces that are defined with different URIs, or as a result of duplications and consequent redundancies between schemas: these are best resolved by best practice guidelines, several of which are currently under construction.

The next ten years are likely to see further degrees of metadata integration, probably with the consolidation of these multiple standards into a single schema. The digital library community will also work towards firmer standards for metadata content (analogous to AACR2), and software developers will increasingly adopt these standards. The digital library user will benefit from developments in enhanced federated searching and consolidated digital collections. The same developments are likely to take place in the archives and museums sectors, although the different metadata traditions that apply here are likely to make the form they take somewhat different.

The PREMIS Editorial Committee has released PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata, Version 2.0. A draft XML schema, which will be reviewed for a month before being released in final form, is also available.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

This document is a revision of Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata: Final report of the PREMIS Working Group, issued in May 2005. The PREMIS Data Dictionary and its supporting documentation is a comprehensive, practical resource for implementing preservation metadata in digital archiving systems. Preservation metadata is defined as information that preservation repositories need to know to support digital materials over the long term.

This document is a specification that emphasizes metadata that may be implemented in a wide range of repositories, supported by guidelines for creation, management and use, and oriented toward automated workflows. It is technically neutral in that no assumptions are made about preservation technologies, strategies, syntaxes, or metadata storage and management. Members of the PREMIS Editorial Committee revised the original data dictionary based on comments and experience from implementers and potential implementers since its release. The Editorial Committee kept the preservation community informed about issues being discussed, solicited comments on proposed revisions, and consulted outside experts where appropriate. . . .

Major changes in this revision include:

• Expanded rights metadata
• More extensive significant properties and preservation level information
• Mechanism for extensibility for a number of metadata units

At a March 3rd meeting at the Johns Hopkins University, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) introduced the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) specifications. The ORE Specification and User Guide was released the prior day.

Here's an excerpt from the press release about the meeting:

The ORE specifications are developed in response to a significant challenge that has emerged in eScholarship. In contrast to the paper publications of traditional scholarship, or even their digital counterparts, the artifacts of eScholarship are complex aggregations. These aggregations consist of multiple resources with varying media types, semantics types, network locations, and intra- and inter-relationships. The future scholarly communication, research, and higher education infrastructure requires standardized approaches to identify, describe, and exchange these new outputs of scholarship.

The ORE specifications address this challenge with the ORE data model that defines how to associate an identifier, a URI, with aggregations of web resources. By referring to these identifiers, aggregations can then be linked to, cited, and described with metadata, in the same manner as any web resource. The ORE data model also makes it possible to describe the structure and semantics of these aggregations. The ORE specifications define how these descriptions can then be packaged in the XML-based Atom syndication format or in RDF/XML, making them available to a variety of applications.

In addition to their utility in eScholarship, the ORE specifications also apply to our everyday web use where we often encounter aggregations such as multi-page HTML documents, and collections of multi-format images on sites like flickr. OAI-ORE descriptions of these aggregations can be used to improve search engine behavior, provide input for browser-based navigation tools, and develop automated web services to analyze and preserve this information.

Read more about it at "The Vision of ORE."

CETIS (Centre for Educational Technology & Interoperability Standards) has released presentations from its Metadata and Digital Repository Special Interest Group's February 12, 2008 meeting, which featured talks about selected projects in the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme. SlideShare presentations and MP3 files are available.

The projects covered were Becta Vocabulary Management Services, DC-Education application profile, EnTag (Enhanced Tagging for Discovery), FeedForward, OAI-ORE, and SWORD.

JISC’s DataShare project has released The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) and Institutional Repositories.

Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":

One of the key issues present in IRs is dealing with the description of items held in the repository. Data are not different from other digital materials and need to be described not just for discovery but also for preservation and reuse. The social science data archiving community has been working for many years on a metadata standard to describe datasets, and a new version is about to be published, the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) 3.0.

This document reports back from the DDI 3 workshop "Using DDI 3.0 to Support Preservation, Management, Access and Dissemination Systems for Social Science Data" held at the Schloss Dagstuhl in Germany in November 2007. It intends to present the DDI standard to repository managers, data librarians and data managers and provide background information to help them to examine how the DDI fits with developments in their institutional repositories for research-generated data. The report discusses the appropriateness of using the different DDI versions to address the requirements of research data in IRs. It brings together some of the key questions of the DataShare project with regards to access management, linking to other materials and versioning of datasets.

A beta version of the MODS Editor, which uses the Cocoon Forms framework, has been released by Peter Binkley of the University of Alberta Libraries. (See MODS: Uses and Features for a description of MODS.)

Read more about it at "MODS Editor at Last."

The Digital Library Federation has been given a $18,000 by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation grant to investigate the use of metadata tools to improve access to cultural heritage materials.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The assessment will be done within DLF Aquifer, a Digital Library Federation initiative focused on making digital content—especially cultural heritage materials pertinent to American culture and life—easier for scholars to find and use. The grant will enable a metadata librarian and a library school intern to identify tools that could be used to improve metadata for digital material that is difficult to find and use . . . .

DLF Aquifer has developed a set of implementation guidelines designed to make metadata more effective in aggregations. To assist libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage organizations in meeting the guidelines, DLF Aquifer proposes to offer a range of mapping and remediation services. Although a number of discrete prototypes such as date normalization and topical clustering tools have been developed, these tools are not yet robust enough to be used in production for reliable results. DLF proposes to inventory existing tools and examine the feasibility of developing these tools into production services.

The ‹daofind+› project has released enhancements, including a new Macintosh version, to MEX (Midosa Editor for XML-Standards), a finding aid tool set that supports EAD, EAC, and METS.

Here's an excerpt from an announcement of an upcoming meeting about MEX:

The MEX tool set (MidosaEditor for XML standards) is available at SourceForge in English and German for Windows and MAC. It was developed by the two projects ‹daofind› and ‹daofind+› with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New York. MEX can be used for capturing and editing EAD, EAC and METS files and for producing complete integrated HTML presentations of online finding aids with digitised records in one step.

PROLEARN has released Harmonization of Metadata Standards.

Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":

Today there is a plethora of metadata specifications (such as IEEE LOM, Dublin Core, METS, MODS, MPEG-7, etc.), many of which are useful in whole or part for activities related to teaching and learning. While each specification in itself is designed to increase system interoperability, we are increasingly seeing systems that need to work with more than one of these specifications. Adding support for an additional specification generally presents a significant amount of added complexity in implementation. The reason for this is a lack of harmonization between specifications. . . .

Existing solutions to the metadata harmonization issue are few—systems are either limited to a single specification, or implement ad-hoc solutions that only work in that particular environment. There are many examples of "mappings" between specifications that provide partial solutions to the problem, but generally fail due to low-fidelity translations and lack of generality (i.e. the mapping only works for limited parts of specifications). Another solution is to create a top-level data model that encompasses the common aspects of all the specifications. This has proven to be feasible in relatively well-constrained domains such as resource aggregation. . . In the field of general metadata, where there is no such common ground, such an approach is substantially less likely to be successful. . . .

The deliverable begins with a short introduction to metadata in Section 3. Section 4 discusses a set of metadata specifications that are highly relevant to learning and teaching. Section 5 forms the core of the deliverable and analyses the harmonization issues among a chosen set of specifications. Section 6 generalizes the analysis in Section 5 and makes a deeper analysis of the relationship between IEEE LOM and Dublin Core. Section 7, finally, points to possible ways to address the identified harmonization issues.