Europeana has released The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid: A Business Model Perspective on Open Metadata

Here's an excerpt:

Europeana's extensive consultation with the heritage sector, including dozens of workshops, has explored in detail the risks and rewards of open data from different perspectives. The most helpful way of framing this discussion has proven to be around the business model of cultural heritage organisations. The findings in this white paper are drawn from a July 2011 workshop in which key actors from museums, libraries and archives evaluated their metadata within the context of their own business model. Placing metadata within their business models gave workshop participants the opportunity to assess the monetary and reputational utility of metadata to their respective cultural organisations.

| Digital Scholarship's Digital/Print Books | Digital Scholarship |

The Association for Recorded Sound Collections has released A Study of Embedded Metadata Support in Audio Recording Software: Summary of Findings and Conclusions.

Here's an excerpt:

In 2010, the ARSC Technical Committee (TC) completed a study of support for embedded metadata within and across a variety of audio recording software applications. The study was coordinated, and much of it carried out, by AudioVisual Preservation Solutions. This work addressed two primary questions: How well does embedded metadata persist, and is its integrity maintained, within any given file as it is handled by various applications over time? How well is embedded metadata handled during the process of creating a derivative?

| Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

The Library of Congress has released A Bibliographic Framework for the Digital Age.

Here's an excerpt:

Although the MARC-based infrastructure is extensive, and MARC has been adapted to changing technologies, a major effort to create a comparable exchange vehicle that is grounded in the current and expected future shape of data interchange is needed. To assure a new environment will allow reuse of valuable data and remain supportive of the current one, in addition to advancing it, the following requirements provide a basis for this work. Discussion with colleagues in the community has informed these requirements for beginning the transition to a "new bibliographic framework". Bibliographic framework is intended to indicate an environment rather than a "format".

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

The Conference of European National Librarians members will use open licensing for their data.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Meeting at the Royal Library of Denmark, the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), has voted overwhelmingly to support the open licensing of their data. CENL represents Europe's national libraries, and is responsible for the massive collection of publications that represent the accumulated knowledge of Europe. . . .

It means that the datasets describing all the millions of books and texts ever published in Europe—the title, author, date, imprint, place of publication and so on, which exists in the vast library catalogues of Europe—will become increasingly accessible for anybody to re-use for whatever purpose they want.

It will mean that Wikipedia can use the metadata, linking it to all sorts of articles; it will mean that apps developers can embed it in new mobile tools for tourism or teaching. Crucially, for information scientists, it will mean that vast quantities of trustworthy data are available for Linked Open Data developments, creating relationships between elements of information that's never been possible before. . . .

The first outcome of the open licence agreement is that the metadata provided by national libraries to Europeana.eu, Europe's digital library, museum and archive, via the CENL service The European Library, will have a Creative Commons Universal Public Domain Dedication, or CC0 licence.

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

JISC has issued a calls for support of Discovery Open Metadata Principles.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Twelve national organisations have signed up to a new set of open metadata principles and now JISC is inviting all publicly funded organisations including universities, colleges, libraries, museums and archives to make the same commitment. . . .

The organisations that have already signed up are: British Library, BUFVC, Collections Trust, Digital Curation Centre, Edina, JISC, Mimas, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Owen Stephens Consultancy, RIN, RLUK, Royal Holloway University of London, SCONUL, The National Archives, UKOLN, University College London, and University of Southampton.

| Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 | Institutional Repository Bibliography | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

The Library of Congress has released "Response of the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, and the National Library of Medicine to the RDA Test Coordinating Committee."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, and the National Library of Medicine are pleased to issue a statement from the Executives of the three libraries regarding the Report and Recommendations of the U.S. RDA Test Coordinating Committee on the implementation of RDA—Resource Description & Access. This statement and the Executive Summary of the Committee's Report and Recommendations are being issued to allow interested parties sufficient time to review prior to the upcoming Annual Conference of the American Library Association in New Orleans, June 23 -28.

Read more about it at "Report and Recommendations of the U.S. RDA Test Coordinating Committee: Executive Summary."

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography |

The Library of Congress has issued "Transforming Our Bibliographic Framework: A Statement from the Library of Congress (May 13, 2011)."

Here's an excerpt:

The Associate Librarian of Congress for Library Services, Deanna Marcum, is leading an initiative at the Library to analyze the present and future environment, identify the components of the framework to support our users, and plan for the evolution from our present framework to the future—not just for the Library of Congress, but for all institutions that depend on bibliographic data shared by the Library and its partners. The Library of Congress has invested considerable resources in the development of broadly implemented encoding standards such as MARC 21, as well as cataloging standards and vocabularies such as the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd Edition (AACR2), RDA, and the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). Spontaneous comments from participants in the US RDA Test show that a broad cross-section of the community feels budgetary pressures but nevertheless considers it necessary to replace MARC 21 in order to reap the full benefit of new and emerging content standards. The Library now seeks to evaluate how its resources for the creation and exchange of metadata are currently being used and how they should be directed in an era of diminishing budgets and heightened expectations in the broader library community. . . .

The Library of Congress's process will be fully collaborative. We will consult our partners and customers in the metadata community, standards experts in and out of libraries, and designers and builders of systems that make use of library metadata. We intend to host meetings during conferences of the American Library Association, specialized library associations, and international organizations, as well as special “town hall” meetings open to the metadata community, to gather input from all interested parties. We plan to establish an electronic discussion group for constant communication during the effort of reshaping our bibliographic framework, and we expect to host a series of invitational meetings of experts and stakeholders in 2012 and 2013.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

Gail Steinhart has published "DataStaR: A Data Sharing and Publication Infrastructure to Support Research" in AgInfo Worldwide.

Here's an excerpt:

DataStaR, a Data Staging Repository (http://datastar.mannlib.cornell.edu/) in development at Cornell University's Albert R. Mann Library (Ithaca, New York USA), is intended to support collaboration and data sharing among researchers during the research process, and to promote publishing or archiving data and high-quality metadata to discipline-specific data centers and/or institutional repositories. Researchers may store and share data with selected colleagues, select a repository for data publication, create high quality metadata in the formats required by external repositories and Cornell's institutional repository, and obtain help from data librarians with any of these tasks. To facilitate cross-domain interoperability and flexibility in metadata management, we employ semantic web technologies as part of DataStaR's metadata infrastructure. This paper describes the overall design of the system, the work to date with Cornell researchers and their data sets, and possibilities for extending DataStaR for use in international agriculture research.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

Rachel Howard of the University of Louisville Libraries' Special Collections department has released the CONTENTdm Cookbook: Recipes for Metadata Entry for UofL Digital Initiatives.

Here's an excerpt:

This document is intended as a guide to data entry and descriptive cataloging for University of Louisville (UofL) digital projects using CONTENTdm software. It will be updated as modifications in the software and/or metadata schema necessitate. CONTENTdm’s metadata is based on the Dublin Core Metadata Schema. A UofL Metadata Working Group drafted initial guidelines based on The Collaborative Digitization Program (CDP)’s Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices, which was further refined by the CONTENTdm Metadata Working Group’s Best Practices for CONTENTdm and other OAI-PMH compliant repositories creating shareable metadata (http://www.oclc.org/gateway/support/best_practices.pdf).

As we began to work with CONTENTdm, we felt it necessary to adjust CDP’s recommendations to accommodate the capabilities, limitations, and additional field properties presented by the software. We also modified some of the field labels to make more sense to the end-user, and put the fields in an order that highlighted the descriptive metadata at the top of the record and relegated the more administrative and technical information at the bottom.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

The National Research Foundation has released Managing Digital Collections: A Collaborative Initiative on the South African Framework.

Here's an excerpt:

The objective of this Framework is to provide high-level principles for planning and managing the full digital collection life cycle. It aims to

• provide an overview of some of the major components and activities involved in creating good digital collections
• provide a sense of the landscape of digital collections management
• identify existing resources that support the development of sound local practices
• encourage community participation in the ongoing development of best practices for digital collection building
• contribute to the benefits of sound data management practices, as well as the goals of data sharing and long term access
• introduce data management and curation issues
• assist cultural heritage organisations to create and manage complex digital collections
• assist funding organisations who wish to encourage and support the development of good digital collections
• advocate the use of internationally-created appropriate open community standards to ensure quality and to increase global interoperability for better exchange and re-use of data and digital content.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |

DataCite has released the DataCite Metadata Scheme for the Publication and Citation of Research Data, Version 2.0.

Here's an excerpt:

The DataCite Metadata Scheme is a list of core metadata properties chosen for the accurate and consistent identification of data for citation and retrieval purposes, along with recommended use instructions. At a minimum, the mandatory metadata scheme properties must be provided at the time of identifier registration. Data centres and other submitters may also choose to use the optional properties to identify their data more clearly. This metadata scheme can fulfill several key functions in support of the larger goals of DataCite. Primarily these are:

• recommending a standard citation format for datasets, based on a small number of properties required for identifier registration;
• providing the basis for interoperability with other data management schemas;
• promoting dataset discovery with optional properties allowing for flexible description of the resource, including its relationship to other resources;
• and, laying the groundwork for future services (e.g., discovery) through the use of controlled terms from both a DataCite vocabulary and external vocabularies as applicable. The DataCite vocabularies will be administered by the DataCite Metadata Supervisor who will establish and publicize procedures for submitting changes.

| Digital Scholarship |

OCLC has released MARCView and MARConvert as open source software.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

OCLC and Systems Planning are pleased to announce the donation of MARCView and MARConvert to OCLC, and OCLC’s release of MARCView and MARConvert as open source software under the Apache 2.0 license.

MARCView and MARConvert software, developed by Systems Planning of Bethesda, Maryland, USA, are widely-used applications designed to assist librarians and developers working with MARC records. MARCView provides a user-friendly interface to navigate and display individual MARC, MARCXML and UNIMARC records. MARConvert™ supports the conversion of bibliographic or authority records into or out of MARC21, UNIMARC or MARCXML and can also convert MARC records from one character set to another.