DigitalKoans

The Association of Research Libraries has established a Working Group on E-Science. Its members are:

• Wendy Lougee (Minnesota), Chair
• Pam Bjornson (CISTI)
• Clifford Lynch (CNI)
• Becky Lyon (NLM)
• Carol Mandel (NYU)
• Jim Mullins (Purdue)
• Gary Strong (UCLA)
• Betsy Wilson (Washington)

Read more about it at "E-News for ARL Directors, April 14, 2008."

The Open Archives Initiative's Object Reuse and Exchange project has released version 0.3 of the ORE Specification and User Guide.

Read more about it at "OAI-ORE Alpha Specifications Updated."

The Repositories Support Project has released a number of UK, other European, and North American digital repository case studies that were prepared for the Open Repositories 2008 conference.

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.

Below is a table showing the comparative rankings of state-funded Texas ARL Libraries on 18 factors. This data is from the ARL Statistics 2005-06 (see the "Summary of Rank Order Tables for University Libraries, 2005-06" table on pages 66-70).

The state-funded ARL Libraries are:

• Texas A&M University (A&M)
• Texas Tech University (TECH)
• University of Houston (UH)
• University of Texas, Austin (UT)

There are 113 university libraries in ARL. In the table below, "1" is the best possible top rank for a factor; "113" is the worst possible bottom rank. The top-ranked value for a factor within a row is shown in bold italics; the bottom-ranked value is shown in bold.

Below is a summary of the number of top and bottom rankings of state-funded ARL libraries within their peer group on 18 factors.

Below is a table that shows the overall rankings of state-funded ARL libraries using ARL's Expenditures-Focused Index.

NPR has released a digital audio interview with Harold Varmus (Noble Prize winner, President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, former Director of the National Institutes of Health, and co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Public Library of Science) about the NIH Public Access Policy and open access.

The Museum Computer Network and the Museum Software Foundation have released MuseTech Central, a searchable directory of technology-related museum projects. Searchable categories include digital asset management systems, digitization, and publishing tools among others.

JISC is funding two projects to do small-scale OAI-ORE tests:

TheOREM (Theses with ORE Metadata), at the University of Cambridge, aims to:

• Test the applicability of the ORE standard in a realistic scholarly setting—thesis description, submission and publication.
• Demonstrate the advantages of the ORE approach in complex object publication, by combining it with existing web-standards compliant technologies.
• Provide examples to fully exercise the ORE specifications in order to provide validation and future direction.

FORESITE (Functional Object Reuse and Exchange: Supporting Information Topology Experiments) will create Resource Map descriptions of JSTOR's holdings, and then ingest them into the DSpace institutional repository system via the SWORD protocol, creating external references back to the original files. The description work will be automated, and the system for achieving this implemented at the University of Liverpool. The SWORD protocol will be implemented within DSpace by HP Labs along with other extensions necessary.

For further information, see the FORESITE proposal, A Preview of the TheOREM Project, and the TheOREM proposal.