DigitalKoans

The University of Michigan Libraries have released the UMich OAI Toolkit.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This toolkit contains both harvester and data provider, both written in Perl. . . .

UMHarvester is a robust tool using LWP for harvesting nigh on every OAI data provider available. It allows for incremental harvesting, has multiple re-try options, and a batch harvest tool (Batch_UMHarvest) that can automatically perform incremental harvesting.

UMProvider relies heavily on libxml (XML::LibXML) and will store the data in nearly any relational database. It functions by harvesting from a database of records, making rights determinations from a separate database, and providing the resulting set of records.

Originally, only the UMHarvester was available from UM's DLXS software site. The UMProvider tool is newly developed and takes the place of our DLXS data provider tool.

The SURFfoundation has released A Portal for Doctoral E-Theses in Europe: Lessons Learned from a Demonstrator Project by M. P. J. P. Vanderfeesten. The portal project was funded by JISC, the National Library of Sweden, and the SURFfoundation. The SURFfoundation ran the project.

Here’s an excerpt from the "Management Summary":

For the first time various repositories with doctoral e-theses have been harvested on an international scale. This report describes a small pilot project which tested the interoperability of repositories for e-theses and has set up a freely accessible European portal with over 10,000 doctoral e-theses.

Five repositories from five different countries in Europe were involved: Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) was the common protocol used to test the interoperability. Based upon earlier experiences and developed tools (harvester, search engine) of the national DAREnet service in the Netherlands, SURFfoundation could establish a prototype for this European e-theses Demonstrator relatively fast and simple.

Nevertheless, some critical issues and problems occurred. They can be categorised into the following topics:

a) Generic issues related to repositories: the language used in the metadata fields differs per repository. . . . Furthermore, the quality of the data presented differs.. . . A further issue is the semantic and syntactic differences in metadata between repositories, which means that the format and content of the information exchange requests are not unambiguously defined. . . .

b) E-theses specific issues: to be able to harvest doctoral theses, the service provider needs to be able to filter on this document type. Up to now there is no commonly agreed format, which makes semantic interoperability possible [specific Dublin core recommendations omitted]. . . .

c) Issues related to data providers and service providers: besides the use of the OAI-protocol for metadata harvesting and the use of Dublin Core it is recommended for data providers to further standardise on the semantic interoperability by using the DRIVER guidelines with an addition of the e-Theses specific recommendations described above. To be able to offer more than basic services for e-Theses, one has to change the metadata format from simple Dublin Core to a richer and e-Theses specific one. . . . We needed to fix, normalise and crosswalk the differences between every repository to get a standard syntactic and semantic metadata structure. . . . The scaling up is a big issue. To stimulate the broad take up of various services, data providers have to work on implementing standards that create interoperability on syntactic and semantic levels.

d) Cultural and educational differences: In every country the educational processes are different. . . . Not only the graduation and publication process differs, but also the duration of the research process. Therefore the quality of the results in a cross-European search of doctoral theses may vary enormously.

(Thanks to Open Access News.)

Libraries Unlimited has released Using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting by Timothy W. Cole and Muriel Foulonneau.

Here’s an excerpt from the publisher’s description:

Through a series of case studies, Cole and Foulonneau guide the reader through the process of conceiving, implementing and maintaining an OAI-compliant repository. Its applicability to both institutional archives and discipline based aggregators are covered, with equal attention paid to the technical and organizational aspects of creating and maintaining such repositories.

The Open Archives Initiative—Object Reuse and Exchange has released Compound Information Objects: An OAI-ORE Perspective by Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel.

Here’s an excerpt from the document’s "Introduction and Motivation" section:

In summary, the web architecture expresses the notion of linked URI-identified resources. Information systems can leverage this architecture to publish the components of a compound object and thereby make them available to web clients and services. But due to the absence of commonly accepted standards, the notion of an identified compound object with a distinct boundary and typed relationships among its component resources is lost.

The absence of these standards affects the functionality of a number of existing and possible web services and applications. Crawler-based search engines might be more useful if the granularity of their result sets corresponded to compound objects (a book or chapter, in this example) rather than individual resources (single pages). The ranking algorithms of these search engines might improve if the links among the components of a compound object were treated differently than links to the object as a whole, or if the number of in-links to the various component resources was accumulated to the level of the compound object instead of counted separately. Citation analysis systems would also benefit from a mechanism for citing the compound object itself, rather than arbitrary parts of the object. Finally, a standard for representing compound objects might enable a new class of "whole object" services such as "preserve a compound object".

Presentations from Wednesday’s sessions of the 5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication in Geneva are now available.

Here are a few highlights from this major conference:

• MESUR: Metrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources (PowerPoint): "The two-year MESUR project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to define and validate a range of usage-based impact metrics, and issue guidelines with regards to their characteristics and proper application. The MESUR project is constructing a large-scale semantic model of the scholarly community that seamlessly integrates a wide range of bibliographic, citation and usage data."
• OAI Object Re-Use and Exchange (PowerPoint): "In this presentation, we will give an overview of the current activities, including: defining the problem of compound documents within the web architecture, enumerating and exploring several use cases, and identifying likely adopters of OAI-ORE."
• OpenDOAR Policy Tools and Applications (RealVideo): "OpenDOAR has developed a set of policy generator tools for repository administrators and is contacting administrators to advocate policy development."
• State of OAI-PMH (PowerPoint): "The OAI-PMH was released in 2001 and stabilized at v2.0 in 2002. Since then there has been steady growth in adoption of the protocol. Support for the OAI-PMH is assumed for base-level interoperability between institutional repositories, and is also provided for many other collections of scholarly material. I will review the current landscape and reflect on some milestones and issues."

(You may want to download PowerPoint Viewer 2007 if you don’t have PowerPoint 2007).

Roderick A. MacLeod has posted a useful summary of some of the key documents and findings of the PerX (Pilot Engineering Repositories Xsearch) project on JISC-REPOSITORIES. He notes: "These documents may help to dispel possible myths concerning the ease of service provision, ease of reharvesting metadata, surfacing digital repository content in third part services, etc."

Here’s a excerpt from the project’s About page that describes it:

PerX is a two-year (June 2005-May 2007) JISC Digital Repositories Programme project, to develop a pilot service which provides subject resource discovery across a series of repositories of interest to the engineering learning and research community. This pilot will then be used as a test-bed to explore the practical issues that would be encountered when considering the possibility of a full scale subject resource discovery service.

(Prior posting about PerX.)

One of the interesting findings of my brief investigation of open access repository software by country was the heavy use of Wildfire in the Netherlands.

Wildfire was created by Henk Druiven, University of Groningen, and it is used by over 70 repositories. It runs on a PHP, MySQL, and Apache platform.

Here is a brief description from In Between.

Wildfire is the software our library uses for our OAI compatible repositories. It is a flexible system for setting up a large number of repositories that at the same time allows them to be aggregated in groups. A group acts like yet another repository with its own harvest address and user interface.

There are several descriptive documents about Wildfire, but most are not in English.

In a previous posting, I discussed the Open Archives Initiative’s Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) project. ORE is worth watching closely.

Two new documents were released this January:

• "Report of the January 2007 ORE-TC Meeting," which is: "A detailed report of the results of the meeting of OAI-ORE Technical Committee describing features and requirements of the ORE model and its context in the Web Architecture."
• "Open Repositories 2007," which is: "A presentation describing OAI-ORE and progress based on the January 2007 ORE Technical Committee Meeting."