DigitalKoans

The Greenstone Digital Library project has released an alpha version of an OAI-PHM metadata analysis tool that can be used to "generate statistics and visualisations of OAI repositories." Several sample reports are available, including one for the University of Illinois IDEAL repository.

Presentations from eResearch Australasia 2007 are now available.

Here are selected presentations:

• "Andrew Treloar: Supporting the e-Research Lifecycle from Acquisition through to Annotation: the DART/ARCHER Experience"
• "Brian Fitzgerald and Scott Kiel-Chisholm: The Legal Framework for e-Research Project"
• "Ian Johnson: Beyond Bibliographies: Integrating Research Data in a Unified Collaborative Framework"
• "Jane Hunter: Harvesting Community Tags and Annotations to Augment Institutional Repository Metadata"
• "Keith Webster: eResearch and the Future of Research Libraries"
• "Kerry Kilner: The Resource for Australian Literature"
• "Paul Arthur: Going Digital: Humanities and the eResearch Revolution"
• "Richard Levy and Austin McLean, ProQuest: Institutional Repositories: A Gateway to e-Research"
• "Ross Coleman: A Maturing Partnership: eHumanities and the Digital Library"
• "Sarah Howard and John Byron: Humanities Technologies: Research Methods and ICT Use by Humanities Researchers"
• "Toby Burrows and Elzbieta Majocha: Building Infrastructures for Web-based Collaboration in Humanities Research Networks"

As scholarly digital information has proliferated in many formats and versions on the Internet, it has become increasing difficult to identify works that are by the same author or by the same institution. Recently, Thomson Scientific has begun work on author and institution identifiers.

Here's an excerpt from "Thomson Scientific Tagging Researchers: ResearcherID.com."

Thomson Scientific (http://scientific.thomson.com) has opened up a new web service called ResearcherID.com (www.researcherid.com) that allows researchers to establish their own identities and, with some restrictions, to identify their writings. . . .

Currently, all the registrants must have authorized access to Thomson Scientific's Web of Knowledge. In addition, all the registrants on the site are there by invitation only, but Pringle expects the service will be open to all Web of Knowledge users by the end of the month. Since Thomson estimates the access to that service to be 20 million users worldwide, this restriction would still make the service broad-based, if researchers choose to use it.

Here's an excerpt from "But What About Corporate Authors? NISO Institutional Identifier Project Underway."

Thomson Scientific (http://scientific.thomson.com) has joined an effort with the National Information Standards Organization (NISO; www.niso.org) to build an open standard for identifying institutions. The initial NISO effort will focus on academic and research institutions, the kind often referred to in author affiliation or corporate author fields. . . .

The charge from the voting membership to the new working group is to study and propose an identifier that will uniquely identify institutions and describe relationships between entities within institutions. In the course of developing a proposed identifier, the group will consider the minimum set of data consistent with account privacy and security issues, as well as other data used to support different business models.

Museums and the Online Archive of California (MOAC) has released the IMLS-funded Digital Asset Management Database (DAMD), a digital asset management system.

Here's an excerpt from the MOAC homepage:

Building on previous successful work in the areas of standards and online collections access, the new MOAC software tool, the Digital Asset Management Database (DAMD), has been developed as both a utilitarian tool and as a test case for exploring more general issues of content sharing and community tool development. This tool has two primary functions that can be used together or separately: it provides basic digital asset management for simple to complex media objects and it easily transforms collections information into an extensible variety of standards-based XML formats, such as METS and OAI, to allow even small organizations without technical staff to share their collections broadly and participate in building a national network of culture. DAMD was developed as an "open solution," built on FileMaker Pro software (8.5 or above) because of the broad base of installed users of FileMaker in the museum and arts communities. DAMD is available for free to cultural organizations. The tool, and its unique export/transform functions (detailed in the documentation), are open-ended, allowing organizations to customize the tool for themselves or the community to improve the tool for all.

JISC has released Machine Services for Metadata Discovery and Aggregation—metadata+.

Here's an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

The main aim of the project is to develop an interoperability demonstrator to explore the technical aspects of providing a service-oriented infrastructure to facilitate metadata discovery and aggregation. The project developed a test bed that exposes metadata through standard search and linking protocols. Metadata mapping work was undertaken to enable the test bed to provide search response in multiple metadata schemas that are widely used in digital library and e-learning.

The core of the test bed consists of an open source digital repository—Fedora. Off-the-shelf, the repository provides web services for metadata searching and substantial content management and security features particularly suitable for real-life use scenarios. Since the search protocol considered in this project requires additional features that are not available from the repository, modifications to the repository source code were made. The modifications also involve incorporating the metadata mapping requirement such that search responses from different metadata formats can be facilitated.

A basic demonstrator (project website) has been created to exemplify how the search protocol can be used for discovering and aggregating metadata, as well as presenting them in coherent formats relevant to the intended presentation contexts. The metadata sources include publisher and digital libraries providing both bibliographic and user-generated (enrichment) metadata such as reviews and recommendations. In addition, the project demonstrated a novel use of the search protocol to dynamically create e-learning content packages, digital library metadata collection and news feeds.

Several digital libraries initiatives have evaluated the test bed infrastructure for real use scenarios. These libraries are an extended form of the test bed demonstrator and provide relevant facilities such metadata wiki (editor) and annotation services for gauging enrichment metadata (review, rating and recommendation) from users. They will continue the objectives of this project particularly on improving the test bed infrastructure and exploring the aggregated use of enrichment metadata, to enable the academic and research user communities to add values to bibliographic metadata from the publishers and libraries communities.

The Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange has released an alpha version of the ORE Specification and User Guide. Comments can be made on the OAI-ORE discussion group or via email to ore@openarchives.org.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

The World Wide Web is built upon the notion of atomic units of information called resources that are identified with URIs such as http://www.openarchives.org/ore/0.1/toc (this page). In addition to these atomic units, aggregations of resources are often units of information in their own right. . . .

A mechanism to associate identities with these aggregations and describe them in a machine-readable manner would make them visible to Web agents, both humans and machines. This could be useful for a number of applications and contexts. For example:

• Crawler-based search engines could use such descriptions to index information and provide search results sets at the granularity of the aggregations rather than their individual parts.
• Browsers could leverage them to provide users with navigation aids for the aggregated resources, in the same manner that machine-readable site maps provide navigation clues for crawlers.
• Other automated agents such as preservation systems could use these descriptions as guides to understand a "whole document" and determine the best preservation strategy.
• Systems that mine and analyze networked information for citation analysis/bibliometrics could achieve better accuracy with knowledge of aggregation structure contained in these descriptions.
• These machine-readable descriptions could provide the foundation for advanced scholarly communication systems that allow the flexible reuse and refactoring of rich scholarly artifacts and their components [Value Chains].

The Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) has updated the following documents that deal with digital imaging issues:

• Establishing a Digital Preservation Strategy
• How Should You Store Your Digital Data?
• Image Tagging: Embedding Metadata in Image Files
• An Introduction to Digital Preservation
• Using Optical Media for Digital Preservation

The Library of Congress has released a draft of the Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control for comment. Comments should be received by December 15.

Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":

The recommendations fall into five general areas:

1. Increase the efficiency of bibliographic production for all libraries through increased cooperation and increased sharing of bibliographic records, and by maximizing the use of data produced throughout the entire “supply chain” for information resources.
2. Transfer effort into higher-value activity. In particular, expand the possibilities for knowledge creation by “exposing” rare and unique materials held by libraries that are currently hidden from view and, thus, underused.
3. Position our technology for the future by recognizing that the World Wide Web is both our technology platform and the appropriate platform for the delivery of our standards. Recognize that people are not the only users of the data we produce in the name of bibliographic control, but so too are machine applications that interact with those data in a variety of ways.
4. Position our community for the future by facilitating the incorporation of evaluative and other user-supplied information into our resource descriptions. Work to realize the potential of the FRBR framework for revealing and capitalizing on the various relationships that exist among information resources.
5. Strengthen the library profession through education and the development of metrics that will inform decision-making now and in the future.

RLG Programs has published RLG Programs Descriptive Metadata Practices Survey Results and RLG Programs Descriptive Metadata Practices Survey Results: Data Supplement.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

We conducted this survey in July and August 2007 among 18 RLG partners in the United States and the United Kingdom, selected because they had "multiple metadata creation centers" on campus that included libraries, archives, and museums and had some interaction among them. Our objective was to gain a baseline understanding of current descriptive metadata practices and dependencies, the first project in our program to change metadata creation processes.

The report summarizes the descriptive practices used across a variety of applications, the data structure and data content standards followed, the audiences for the metadata created, and some organization patterns. The data from the 89 respondents is reported in a series of charts and graphs that are open to interpretation. RLG Programs offers its own interpretation in the prefatory narrative, flagging questions for follow up and goals for future projects. Although we saw some expected variations in practice across libraries, archives and museums, we were struck by the high levels of customization and local tool development, the limited extent to which tools and practices are, or can be, shared (both within and across institutions), the lack of confidence institutions have in the effectiveness of their tools, and the disconnect between their interest in creating metadata to serve their primary audiences and the inability to serve that audience within the most commonly used discovery systems (such as Google, Yahoo, etc.).