Category: Digital Libraries

Grant Award: Improving Student Learning of Advanced Digital Technologies in an Online Laboratory

The University of Arizona's School of Information Resources and Library Science has been awarded a $539,686 grant (matching: $327,615) by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to fund its three-year "Improving Student Learning of Advanced Digital Technologies in an Online Laboratory: A Research Approach" project.

Here's an excerpt from "Library Students to Get 'Leading-Edge' Training Thanks to Federal Grant":

The UA school's partners are the UA Libraries, UA University Information and Technology Services, the Harvard University Herbaria and the Missouri Botanical Gardens.

Each of the partner institutions will provide SIRLS with information that then will be recorded and catalogued, then developed into databases—with SIRLS students responsible for these tasks. So, instead of simply having Web sites that simulate the work they would be doing as professionals, the students will have the actual software and other tools to perform more complex work.

SIRLS will use VMWare Lab Manager software—which is quite popular in industry—as the program’s platform to build a virtual online laboratory. "This grant gives us the infrastructure we need to really let us create practical and realistic exercises for students," said Botticelli, also the co-principal investigator on the grant.

Interoperability: A Key Concept for Large Scale, Persistent Digital Libraries

DigitalPreservationEurope has published a new briefing paper: Interoperability: A Key Concept for Large Scale, Persistent Digital Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

Interoperability is an essential feature for federated information architectures to work in heterogeneous settings and over time! However, use and understanding of the concept still are very heterogeneous: interoperability is conceived in an object-related or in a functional perspective, from a user's or an institutional perspective, in terms of multilingualism or of technical means and protocols. Moreover, interoperability is conceived on different abstraction levels: from the bitstream layer up to semantic interoperability. The briefing summarises some of the relevant vectors of thought, indicates related conceptual frameworks and places the issue in the strategic context of Europeana.

Kete 1.1 Released

Kete 1.1 has been released. Kete is a Ruby on Rails application. Source code can be obtained from the Downloads page.

Here'e an excerpt from the 9/1/08 ITSIG announcement:

Kete combines features from Knowledge and Content Management Systems as well as collaboration tools such as wikis, blogs, tags, and online forums to make it easy to add and relate content on a Kete site.

A more complete description can be found on Katipo’s Web site (Katipo provides fee-based support for Kete).

The Kete 1.1 Features and Bug Fixes page lists new features in this version.

Dean Krafft Named Cornell University Library’s Chief Technology Strategist

Long-term Cornell employee Dean Krafft has been named as the Cornell University Library's Chief Technology Strategist.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Dean Krafft brings a wealth of experience to this position, as well as a profound respect for the role research libraries play in the academy," said Anne R. Kenney, Cornell’s Carl A. Kroch University Librarian. "This is a brand new position for the library world, and I can't think of a better person to help us understand its full potential. . . ."

As the chief technology strategist, Krafft will serve on the Library’s senior management team, focusing his efforts on the development of a long-term vision for CUL’s technology future and assessing the IT trends and innovations that impact the Library. He will also serve as an ambassador for collaborative technology initiatives across the University and in national and international efforts.

"The very rapid changes in the information landscape and the needs and workflows of Cornell's faculty, staff and students make these challenging times," Krafft said. "I am very much looking forward to working with the Library staff and the Cornell community to help ensure that the Library remains at the intellectual heart of university life and scholarship."

Before his appointment, Krafft served as the senior research associate and director of information technology and in several positions in the Computer Science Department since 1981. He also received his Master’s and PhD degrees in computer science from Cornell.

Strategies for Sustaining Digital Libraries Published

The Emory University Libraries have published Strategies for Sustaining Digital Libraries. A PDF version of the book is freely available, and a print version is available from Amazon for $15. The book is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

Here's an excerpt from the book's home page:

The articles of this monograph provide resources for digital library stakeholders who seek to better understand how to effectively evolve such efforts from short-term projects to long-term sustainable programs. The monograph includes contributions from leaders in major digital libraries that have made such transitions or which are systematically considering the question of programmatic sustainability, including representatives from the National Digital Infrastructure and Information Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and the National Science Digital Library (NSDL).

CNI Spring 2008 Task Force Meeting Presentations

Presentations and project briefings from the CNI Spring 2008 Task Force Meeting are available. Podcast interviews with a few attendees are also available.

Here's a selection of project briefings:

BagIt: New LC/CDL Format for Transferring Digital Content between Cultural Institutions

The Library of Congress and the California Digital Library have established a new format called BagIt for transferring large data collections between cultural institutions.

Read more about it at "The BagIt File Package Format (V0.94)" and "Library Develops Format for Transferring Digital Content."

Digital Library Federation Releases ILS Discovery Interfaces Recommendation

The Digital Library Federation has released DLF ILS Discovery Interface Task Group (ILS-DI) Technical Recommendation: An API for Effective Interoperation between Integrated Library Systems and External Discovery Applications.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This document recommends standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System (ILS) with new applications supporting user discovery. Such standard interfaces will allow libraries to deploy new discovery services to meet ever-growing user expectations in the Web 2.0 era, take full advantage of advanced ILS data management and services, and encourage a strong, innovative community and marketplace in next-generation library management and discovery applications.

A group of eight professionals from major North American research libraries prepared the recommendation during late 2007 and early 2008. Members of the group surveyed the library community about their needs, made presentations, and held open discussions face to face and online with librarians, developers, and vendors. The group made multiple recommendation drafts and other background information publicly available on the task group's Wiki, and invited comments and suggestions from interested parties.

In March, the DLF convened a meeting that brought together Task Group members and representatives of library system vendors and developers, and produced the "Berkeley Accord", an agreement about the most essential and feasible interfaces to include in an initial set of interfaces. This set of interfaces, called the "Basic Discovery Interfaces", is described in detail in the new ILS-DI recommendation. The recommendation also describes and recommends a variety of other functions to support higher levels of interoperability.

Digital Library Federation Spring Forum 2008 Presentations

The Digital Library Federation has released presentations from its Spring Forum 2008.

Here's a selection of the presentations:

Two JISC Debates: E-Textbooks and the Library of the Future

A series of postings on the JISC Libraries of the Future Weblog document two debates: Revolution or Evolution: The JISC National E Textbook Debate and From eLib to the Library of the Future.

Here are the postings in chronological order:

Metadata for Digital Libraries: State of the Art and Future Directions Published

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.

Open Access to Knowledge and Information: Scholarly Literature and Digital Library Initiatives—The South Asian Scenario Published

UNESCO has published Open Access to Knowledge and Information: Scholarly Literature and Digital Library Initiatives—The South Asian Scenario.

Here's the abstract from the dLIST record for the book:

The South Asia sub-region is now in the forefront of the Open Access movement within developing countries in the world, with India being the most prominent partner in terms of its successful Open Access and Digital Library initiatives. Institutional and policy frameworks in India also facilitate innovative solutions for increasing international visibility and accessibility of scholarly literature and documentary heritage in this country. This publication has its genesis in the recommendations and proceedings of UNESCO-supported international conferences and workshops including the 4th International Conference of Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL2001, Bangalore); the International Conferences on Digital Libraries (ICDL2004 & ICDL2006, New Delhi); and the International Workshop on Greenstone Digital Library Software (2006, Kozhikode), where many information professionals of this sub-region demonstrated their Digital Library and Open Access initiatives. This book describes successful digital library and open access initiatives in the South Asia sub-region that are available in the forms of open courseware, open access journals, metadata harvesting services, national-level open access repositories and institutional repositories. This book may be considered an authoritative Source-book on Open Access development in this sub-region.

National Science Digital Library NCore Team Releases NSDL Search, MediaWiki Extensions, and WordPress MU Plug-Ins

The National Science Digital Library NCore team has released three applications:

Ball State University Libraries Move Ahead with Ambitious Digital Initiative Program

The Ball State Libraries have nurtured an ambitious digital initatives program that has established an institutional repository, a CONTENTdm system for managing digital assets, a Digital Media Repository with over 102,000 digital objects, a Digitization Center and Mobile Digitization Unit, an e-Archives for university records, and a virtual press (among other initiatives). Future goals are equally ambitious.

Read more about it at "Goals for Ball State University Libraries' Digital Initiative."

Preserving Mixed Analog/Digital AV Archives: PrestoSpace Project Case Study

The Digital Curation Centre has published DCC Case Study—PrestoSpace: Preservation towards Storage and Access. Standardised Practices for Audiovisual Contents in Europe.

Here's the "Executive Summary":

Explicit strategies are needed to manage 'mixed' audio visual (AV) archives that contain both analogue and digital materials. The PrestoSpace Project brings together industry leaders, research institutes, and other stakeholders at a European level, to provide products and services for effective automated preservation and access solutions for diverse AV collections. The Project’s main objective is to develop and promote flexible, integrated and affordable services for AV preservation, restoration, and storage with a view to enabling migration to digital formats in AV archives.

Essays from the Core Functions of the Research Library in the 21st Century Meeting

The Council on Library and Information Resources has released essays from its recent Core Functions of the Research Library in the 21st Century meeting.

Here's an excerpt from the meeting home page that lists the essays:

"The Future of the Library in the Research University," by Paul Courant

"Accelerating Learning and Discovery: Refining the Role of Academic Librarians," by Andrew Dillon

"A New Value Equation Challenge: The Emergence of eResearch and Roles for Research Libraries," by Richard E. Luce

"Co-teaching: The Library and Me," by Stephen G. Nichols

"Groundskeepers to Gatekeepers: How to Change Faculty Perceptions of Librarians and Ensure the Future of the Research Library," by Daphnee Rentfrow

"The Research Library in the 21st Century: Collecting, Preserving, and Making Accessible Resources for Scholarship," by Abby Smith

"The Role of the Library in 21st Century Scholarly Publishing," by Kate Wittenberg

"Leveraging Digital Technologies in Service to Culture and Society: The Role of Libraries as Collaborators," by Lee Zia

SEASR (Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research)

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded SEASR (Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research) project is building digital humanities cyberinfrastructure.

Here's an excerpt about the project from its home page:

What can SEASR do for scholars?

  • help scholars to access existing large data stores more readily
  • provide scholars with enhanced data synthesis and query analysis: from focused data retrieval and data integration, to intelligent human-computer interactions for knowledge access, to semantic data enrichment, to entity and relationship discovery, to knowledge discovery and hypothesis generation
  • empower collaboration among scholars by enhancing and innovating virtual research environments

What kind of innovations does SEASR provide for the humanities?

  • a complete, fully integrated, state-of-the-art software environment for managing structured and unstructured data and analyzing digital libraries, repositories and archives, as well as educational platforms
  • an open source, end-to-end software system that enables researchers to develop, evolve, and maintain data interoperability, evaluation, analysis, and visualization

Read more about it at "Placing SEASR within the Digital Library Movement."

Sun Centre of Excellence for Libraries to Be Created in Alberta

Sun Microsystems has announced that it is partnering with the University of Alberta Libraries and the Alberta Library to create the Sun Centre of Excellence for Libraries.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc., the University of Alberta Libraries (UAL) and The Alberta Library (TAL) today announced the creation of a new Sun Centre of Excellence for Libraries (COE). The initiative will enhance and support respective organizational projects, as well as an extensive, province-wide, multi-faceted digital library. As part of the COE the participants intend to provide a seamless search and retrieval experience resulting in unprecedented access to information for students, faculty and the public, as well as creating an enduring preservation environment.

"This initiative will facilitate new levels of access to a tremendous amount of unique information that hasn’t been widely available," said Ernie Ingles, Vice Provost and Chief Librarian, University of Alberta. "It will further our goal to act as a trusted regional repository for digital materials by facilitating approaches to the discovery, storage, and archival preservation of digital resources that will benefit all Canadians." The University of Alberta Libraries, the second largest academic library system in Canada, has more than one million unique digitized pages of content in four major collections to contribute to the new digital library.

Using a range of Sun systems, software and thin client technologies, The Alberta Library (TAL) will integrate current digital collections and electronic information resources from the Lois Hole Campus Alberta Digital Library, an Alberta Government initiative that is providing post-secondary students, faculty and researchers in every corner of the province with access to vast holdings of digital resources. The digital library currently contains more than 4.5 million licensed items, including academic journals, encyclopedias, magazine and newspaper articles, literary criticisms and video clips from 35 post-secondary institutions. The COE will also help TAL improve province-wide access to library catalogues and secure information-sharing. . . .

The COE will support distance learning and research within e-learning environments by providing access to digital collections preserved by Alberta university libraries, archives and museums. It will also yield solutions for long-term archiving of digital resources, and digital rights management. The support and technology provided by Sun will ensure the infrastructure can evolve to meet future needs and continue to support research, collaborative learning and general discovery. . . .

The Centre of Excellence for Libraries is expected to be operational by summer 2008.

JHOVE 1.1 Released: Identification, Validation, and Characterization of Digital Objects

Version 1.1 of the open-source JHOVE (JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment) software has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the project home page that describes JHOVE:

JHOVE provides functions to perform format-specific identification, validation, and characterization of digital objects.

  • Format identification is the process of determining the format to which a digital object conforms; in other words, it answers the question: "I have a digital object; what format is it?"
  • Format validation is the process of determining the level of compliance of a digital object to the specification for its purported format, e.g.: "I have an object purportedly of format F; is it? . . . ."
  • Format characterization is the process of determining the format-specific significant properties of an object of a given format, e.g.: "I have an object of format F; what are its salient properties?"

Omeka 0.9.0 Released: Software for Digital Collections and Exhibits

Version 0.9.0 of Omeka has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the About page that describes Omeka:

Omeka is a web platform for publishing collections and exhibitions online. Designed for cultural institutions, enthusiasts, and educators, Omeka is easy to install and modify and facilitates community-building around collections and exhibits. It is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content rather than programming.

Omeka will come loaded with the following features:

  • Dublin Core metadata structure and standards-based design that is fully accessible and interoperable
  • Professional-looking exhibit sites that showcase collections without hiring outside designers
  • Theme-switching for changing the look and feel of an exhibit in a few clicks
  • Plug-ins for geolocation, bi-lingual sites, and a host of other possibilities
  • Web 2.0 Technologies, including:
    • Tagging: Allow users to add keywords to items in a collection or exhibit
    • Blogging: Keep in touch with users through timely postings about collections and events
    • Syndicating: Update your users about your content with RSS feeds

Read more about it at "Introducing Omeka" and "New Tool for Online Collections."

Kete 1.0, Web 2.0 Digital Library Software, Released

Version 1.0 (stable release branch) of the Kete digital library software has been released.

Here's an excerpt about Kete from Katipo Communications' "Kete is Open Source Digital Library and Archiving Software":

Kete is an Open Source application written in Ruby on Rails, released under the GPL. Initial development has been a partnership between the Horowhenua Library Trust and Katipo Communications Ltd. funded as part of the Community Partnership Fund in 2006.

Kete stores, organises, indexes and retrieves all sorts of digital files including Office documents, PDF's, images, videos, audio such as spoken word and music, website links, and html pages/text.

Kete encourages you to make links between different items that enable users to browse your collection. It also faciltates discussion about items and topics, so you can build understanding and foster collaboration.

Read more about it at "Kete 1.0 Release Branch and Upgraded Kete.net.nz."

National Center for Learning Science and Technology Trust Fund Included in Bill Passed By House

The College Opportunity and Affordability Act, recently passed by the House, included funding for Digital Promise's National Center for Learning Science and Technology Trust Fund. One of Digital Promise's goals is to: "Digitize America’s collected memory stored in our nation's universities, libraries, museums and public television archives to make these materials available anytime and anywhere."

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

We are thrilled to report that legislation embracing the Digital Promise proposal to establish the National Center for Learning Science and Technology Trust Fund as a pilot program (we had originally labeled the Center "DO IT," the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust) was passed by the House of Representatives by a wide margin on Thursday evening, February 7.

The College Opportunity and Affordability Act (HR 4137), authorizes the establishment of the Center as an independent nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation within the Department of Education. Under the legislation, the Center will have its own distinguished nine member board of directors. It will administer a trust fund for precompetitive basic and applied research to help transform education, skills training and lifelong learning for the digital age. It will assess and research prototypes for innovative digital learning and information technologies; support pilot testing and evaluation, encourage their widespread adoption and use, and introduce digital media education programs for parents, teachers, and children to build technology literacy. To carry out its activities the Center will award contracts and grants to colleges and universities, museums, libraries, public broadcasting entities and similar nonprofit organizations and public institutions, as well as to for-profit organizations.

iRODS Version 1.0: Data Grids, Digital Libraries, Persistent Archives, and Real-Time Data Systems

The Data-Intensive Computing Environments group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center has released version 1.0 of the open-source iRODS (Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) system, which can be used to support data grids, digital libraries, persistent archives, and real-time data systems.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"iRODS is an innovative data grid system that incorporates and moves beyond ten years of experience in developing the widely used Storage Resource Broker (SRB) technology," said Reagan Moore, director of the DICE group at SDSC. "iRODS equips users to handle the full range of distributed data management needs, from extracting descriptive metadata and managing their data to moving it efficiently, sharing data securely with collaborators, publishing it in digital libraries, and finally archiving data for long-term preservation. . . ."

"You can start using it as a single user who only needs to manage a small stand-alone data collection," said Arcot Rajasekar, who leads the iRODS development team. "The same system lets you grow into a very large federated collaborative system that can span dozens of sites around the world, with hundreds or thousands of users and numerous data collections containing millions of files and petabytes of data—it’s a true full-scale distributed data system." A petabyte is one million gigabytes, about the storage capacity of 10,000 of today’s PCs. . . .

Version 1.0 of iRODS is supported on Linux, Solaris, Macintosh, and AIX platforms, with Windows coming soon. The iRODS Metadata Catalog (iCAT) will run on either the open source PostgreSQL database (which can be installed via the iRODS install package) or Oracle. And iRODS is easy to install—just answer a few questions and the install package automatically sets up the system.

Under the hood, the iRODS architecture stores data on one or more servers, which may be widely separated geographically; keeps track of system and user-defined information describing the data with the iRODS Metadata Catalog (iCAT); and offers users access through clients (currently a command line interface and Web client, with more to come). As directed by iRODS rules, the system can process data where it is stored using applications called "micro-services" executed on the remote server, making possible smaller and more targeted data transfers.