Category: Digital Repositories

Center for Research Libraries to Assess and Certify Portico and HathiTrust

The Center for Research Libraries will conduct detailed assessments of Portico and HathiTrust with the objective of certifying them as trustworthy digital repositories.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Portico has agreed to cooperate with the CRL audit, with the goal of certification as a trustworthy digital repository. HathiTrust has asked CRL to assess its digital repository, which includes not only Google Books digitization content but a considerable amount of non-Google content as well.

Concurrently CRL is working with LOCKSS to assess the capabilities of the LOCKSS system for harvesting and archiving digitized primary source materials and related metadata. CRL is also gathering information about regional efforts to host licensed digital content locally. . . .

The general metrics to be used in the assessments will be the Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification checklist (TRAC).  CRL has formed a panel of advisors who represent the various sectors of its membership, to further inform the assessment process.  The Certification Advisory Panel will ensure that the certification process addresses the interests of the entire CRL community, and will include leaders in collection development, preservation, and information technology.

Penn State’s Digital Library Infrastructure Unit and HP Collaborate on eXtensible Access Method Tests

Penn State's Digital Library Infrastructure unit and HP are collaborating to test the use of the eXtensible Access Method interface standard for mass data storage. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)

Here's an excerpt from "Penn State Launches Digital Library Archive Initiative with HP":

[Mark] Saussure and his team have recently been collaborating with HP to test digital tools that can be used across all of Penn State's many repository platforms. Primary among these tools is eXtensible Access Method (XAM), a new interface standard created by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) that is expected to help the University cohesively manage and provide access to its diverse digital library collections, electronic record archives, e-science and e-research data repositories.

"We're talking about hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of information from many sources,” said Saussure. XAM is the digital glue that brings all these data repositories together.

As part of its collaboration with HP, Penn State aims to develop a "tiered" electronic storage architecture to meet data discovery, corporate governance and regulatory compliance requirements for many years to come. The approach is part of the SNIA initiative to seek innovative applications for XAM through the efforts of global companies such as HP, EMC and Sun Microsystems. The initiative encourages universities, businesses and institutions to collaborate with one another to use the power of XAM to better manage the exploding demand for online storage.

Read more about it at "XAM and Penn State's Use of HP's Integrated Archive Platform."

National Science Digital Library Releases EduPak Version 1.0

The National Science Digital Library has released EduPak version 1.0.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

EduPak version 1.0 is a lightweight version of the NCore open-source digital library platform specifically designed to meet the needs of national educational organizations and institutions focused on establishing specialized digital collections, conducting educational research, or providing students, teachers and instructors with discipline-oriented pedagogical products and tools that require basic technology for educational digital repositories. Built with NCore components, EduPak is an all-in-one, educational digital repository solution that provides a general platform for building digital libraries united by a common data model and interoperable applications.

“Using OAI-ORE to Transform Digital Repositories into Interoperable Storage and Services Applications”

The latest issue of The Code4Lib Journal includes "Using OAI-ORE to Transform Digital Repositories into Interoperable Storage and Services Applications."

Here's an excerpt:

In the digital age libraries are required to manage large numbers of diverse objects. One advantage of digital objects over fixed physical objects is the flexibility of ‘binding’ them into publications or other useful aggregated intellectual entities while retaining the ability to reuse them independently in other contexts. An emerging framework for managing flexible aggregations of digital objects is provided by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) with its work on Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE). This paper will show how OAI-ORE is being used to manage content in digital repositories, in particular institutional repositories, and has the potential ultimately to transform the conception of digital repositories.

Special Issue of Library Trends on Institutional Repositories

The latest issue of Library Trends (57, no. 2, Fall 2008) is about institutional repositories.

Here are the articles (links are to article preprints):

  • "Introduction: Institutional Repositories: Current State and Future"
  • "Innkeeper at the Roach Motel"
  • "Institutional Repositories in the UK: The JISC Approach"
  • "Strategies for Institutional Repository Development: A Case Study of Three Evolving Initiatives"
  • "Perceptions and Experiences of Staff in the Planning and Implementation of Institutional Repositories"
  • "Institutional Repositories and Research Data Curation in a Distributed Environment"
  • "At the Watershed: Preparing for Research Data Management and Stewardship at the University of Minnesota Libraries"
  • "Case Study in Data Curation at Johns Hopkins University"
  • "Describing Scholarly Works with Dublin Core: A Functional Approach"
  • "The 'Wealth of Networks' and Institutional Repositories: MIT, DSpace, and the Future of the Scholarly Commons"
  • "Leveraging Short-term Opportunities to Address Long-term Obligations: A Perspective on Institutional Repositories and Digital Preservation Programs"
  • "Shedding Light on the Dark Data in the Long Tail of Science"

“Repository Software Survey, March 2009”

The Repositories Support Project has released the "Repository Software Survey, March 2009," which analyzes the CONTENTdm, Digital Commons, DigiTool, DSpace, EPrints, EQUELLA, Fedora, intraLibrary, Research-Output Repository Platform, Open Repository, and VITAL digital repository systems.

DSpace Statistics Add-on Version 2.1 Released

The RepositóriUM team at Minho University has released version 2.1 of the DSpace Statistics Add-on.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Statistics System is an add-on to the DSpace platform that allows gathering, processing and presenting usage, content and administrative statistics. Despite the fact that its development was done to meet the specific needs of RepositóriUM, the system is completely adjustable to other environments as its components can easily be configured, changed or extended, to respond to different information needs.

With the release of the current version 2.1 of the Stats System the main focus was solving some architectural issues of version 2.0, primarily:

  • Adapting the add-on to the new build and deploy mechanism of DSpace 1.5.1;
  • New mechanism for gathering the events on DSpace, avoiding DSpace logging mechanism and log4j JDBC Appender (replaced by Mark H. Wood UsageEvent plug-in);
  • New mechanism for aggregating the stats. Ported from pl/pgsql to Java;
  • Eliminate the pl/java language as a requirement;
  • Improvements on spider detection mechanism.

eXtensible Catalog (XC) OAI Toolkit Released

The eXtensible Catalog project has released the eXtensible Catalog (XC) OAI Toolkit.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The OAI Toolkit is used to make data stored in an institution's ILS or other repository available for harvesting via OAI-PMH, including other eXtensible Catalog applications. For an ILS, this is accomplished by exporting ILS metadata, converting it from MARC to MARCXML, and loading it into an OAI-PMH compliant repository. The repository (embedded in the OAI Toolkit) makes the data available for harvesting by other XC components.

The OAI Toolkit can be used as part of the XC system, or on its own to enable OAI-PMH harvestability of an existing repository. It is a server application written in Java and is only needed for ILS's and other repositories that do not already have the ability to be act as OAI-PMH Repositories (OAI Servers).

Repositories Support Project Podcasts Launched

The Repositories Support Project Podcasts has launched a podcast series.

Here are titles of the initial podcasts:

  • Digital Preservation: Are Repositories Doing Enough for Preservation?
  • DRIVER: Promoting Digital Repositories across Europe
  • EPrints: Repository Software of the Future or of the Past?
  • Fedora: Optimum Repository Software or Overkill?

CLASM: Copyright Licensing Application with SWORD for Moodle

Richard M. Davis has announced that JISC has funded the CLASM (Copyright Licensing Application with SWORD for Moodle) project. (Moodle is an open source course management system.)

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This will be a six-month project with a double-edged purpose: to develop a SWORD plugin for Moodle, so that it can interact, platform independently, with common repository applications like EPrints and DSpace; and to explore and demonstrate the use of that plugin for managing Copyright Licensed materials in Moodle courses.

Digital Archiving of Audio Content Using WINISIS and Greenstone Software: A Manual for Community Radio Managers

UNESCO has released Digital Archiving of Audio Content Using WINISIS and Greenstone Software: A Manual for Community Radio Managers.

Here's an excerpt:

This self-instructional Manual describes:

  1. the method of creation of digital archive with WINISIS software,
  2. the creation of a web front-end for the above archives to make it easily usable and accessible over a local area network with GenIsisWeb software,
  3. the creation of a CD-ROM library with WINISIS and GenIsisCD software,
  4. the creation of a digital library of audio documents with Greenstone digital library software. . . .

The mechanisms described in this Manual can be used for managing not only audio documents, but also other types of digital documents such as text, PDF, HTML and video.

Digital Repository Software: VTLS Releases VITAL 4.0

VTLS has released VITAL 4.0, which utilizes the Fedora repository software.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

VITAL provides functions to allow easy access of digital resources by individuals, while enforcing proper curation and management policies for digital resources. Authentication and access control are an integral part of the capabilities of Release 4.0 of VITAL. These capabilities grant access where needed and restrict access where appropriate.

Some new features in Release 4.0 of VITAL include:

  • Access management for users and groups: The VITAL software provides an interface for creating users and groups, assigning users to one or more groups, defining the permissions for each group, and defining the permissions for each object and datastream.
  • Integration with QuikBib (TM): QuikBib (TM) provides researchers with the ability to select from 1000+ citation styles for formatting citations for bibliographies.
  • Authority lists: VITAL functionality has been expanded to include the ability to define certain metadata elements present in the repository as "authorities." This allows repository staff to ensure data consistency.
  • Support for consortia: VITAL functionality has been enhanced to support multiple institutions using a single VITAL instance. In this implementation, support has been added for a single copy of Fedora and a single VITAL Access Portal and allows for different skin modifications and configurations for each individual site.

PIRUS—Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics: Final Report

JISC has released PIRUS—Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The four main outputs of the project are:

a. A proof-of-concept COUNTER-compliant XML prototype for an individual article usage report, Article Report 1: Number of successful full-text article downloads, that can be used by both repositories and publishers. In principle this report could be provided for individual authors and for institutions. In practice, the individual author reports are much easier to generate and are a realistic short-term objective, while the reports for institutions and other entities, such as funding agencies, will be more complex and should be regarded as a longer term objective.

b. A tracker code, to be implemented by repositories, that sends a message either to an external party that is responsible for creating and consolidating the usage statistics and for forwarding them to the relevant publisher for consolidation or to the local repository server.

c. A range of Scenarios for the creation, recording and consolidation of individual article usage statistics that will cover the majority of current repository installations. Each repository may select the scenario that corresponds to their technology and implementation.

d. Specifying criteria for a central facility that will create the usage statistics where required (for some categories of repository) and collect and consolidate the usage statistics for others.

Andy Powell on Persistent URIs and Digital Repositories

In “How Uncool? Repository URIs. . .,” Andy Powell analyzes URI structure in 107 repositories to determine whether their items’ URIs are likely to be persistent..

Here's an excerpt:

So what is an uncool URI? An uncool URI is one that is unlikely to be persistent, typically because the person who first assigned it didn’t think hard enough about likely changes in organisational structure, policy or technology and the impact that changes in those areas might have on the persistence of the URI into the future.

University of Rochester Releases New Institutional Repository System, IR Plus

The University of Rochester has released version alpha 0.1 of its new open source institutional repository system, IR Plus. A test version of the system is available, and a discussion group has been established on Google.

Here are the documentation links:

Lirolem. A Virtual Studio/Institutional Repository for the University of Lincoln

JISC has released Lirolem. A Virtual Studio/Institutional Repository for the University of Lincoln: Final Project Report.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The primary aim of the Lirolem project was initially to build a repository capable of handling the material that was generated by the students of the Lincoln School of Architecture, with a view to using it as teaching material in future years. A second aim was to provide an Institutional Repository that was capable of handling research materials in a variety of formats. . . .

The principal output of the project has been the establishment of the Lincoln Institutional Repository (http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk) in which all members of the University are able to deposit material. A review process is in place, whereby members of the project team can assess the quality of submissions and either make them live in the Repository, or return them to the original author with suggestions for improvement. The Repository facilitates the deposit of full text material, or metadata only records. The public release of full text material can be embargoed for public release for a period of time to comply with publishers’ requirements, or if preferred this material can be made available to registered users of the Repository

Other outputs have been the production of Service Usage Model Document, which describes the services that the Repository uses, the production of user guides and the production of a conference paper, which was delivered at the MACE conference in Venice, 20-21 September 2008, briefing papers for management on Open Access, interim and completion reports to JISC and a project wiki that contains all these documents which is available at http://learninglab.lincoln.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Institutional_Repository.

Automatic Metadata Generation for Repositories: MetaTools: Final Report

JISC has released MetaTools: Final Report .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Automatic metadata generation has sometimes been posited as a solution to the 'metadata bottleneck' that repositories and portals are facing as they struggle to provide resource discovery metadata for a rapidly growing number of new digital resources. Unfortunately there is no registry or trusted body of documentation that rates the quality of metadata generation tools or identifies the most effective tool(s) for any given task.

The aim of the first stage of the project was to remedy this situation by developing a framework for evaluating tools used for the purpose of generating Dublin Core metadata. . . .

A test program was then implemented using metrics from the framework. It evaluated the quality of metadata generated from 1) Web pages (html) and 2) scholarly works (pdf) by four of the more widely-known metadata generation tools—Data Fountains, DC-dot, SamgI, and the Yahoo! Term Extractor. . . .

It was found that the output from Data Fountains was generally superior to that of the other tools that the project tested. But the output from all of the tools was considered to be disappointing and markedly inferior to the quality of metadata that Tonkin and Muller report that PaperBase has extracted from scholarly works. Over all, the prospects for generating high-quality metadata for scholarly works appear to be brighter because of their more predictable layout. . . .

In the third stage of the project SOAP and RESTful Web Service interfaces were developed for three metadata generation tools—Data Fountains, SamgI and Kea. This had a dual purpose. Firstly, the creation of an optimal metadata record usually requires the merging of output from several tools each of which, until now, had to be invoked separately because of the ad hoc nature of their interfaces. As Web services, they will be available for use in a network such as the Web with well-defined interfaces that are implementation-independent. These services will be exposed for use by clients without them having to be concerned with how the service will execute their requests. Repositories should be able to plug them into their own cataloguing environments and experiment with automatic metadata generation under more 'real-life' circumstances than hitherto. Secondly, and more importantly (in view of the relatively poor quality of current tools) they enabled the project to experiment with the use of a high-level ontology for describing metadata generation tools.

Cloud Computing: DuraSpace Report to Mellon Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has released a progress report from the DuraSpace project, a joint project of the DSpace Foundation and the Fedora Commons. (Thanks to RepositoryMan.)

Here's an excerpt from "DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons Receive Grant from the Mellon Foundation for DuraSpace" that describes the project:

Over the next six months funding from the planning grant will allow the organizations to jointly specify and design "DuraSpace," a new web-based service that will allow institutions to easily distribute content to multiple storage providers, both "cloud-based" and institution-based. The idea behind DuraSpace is to provide a trusted, value-added service layer to augment the capabilities of generic storage providers by making stored digital content more durable, manageable, accessible and sharable.

SPARC Releases Digital Repository Videos

SPARC has released a series of videos about digital repositories.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The video series was taped at the November 2008 SPARC repositories meeting, and underscores the central role of repositories across library services. Particular emphasis is placed on the added value they contribute to the institution and on the importance of funding repository development even in lean economic times. The clips feature three full-length plenary addresses plus seven short interviews with leading-edge repository implementers, including:

  • Ernie Ingles, Vice Provost and Chief Librarian at University of Alberta
  • Michelle Kimpton, Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation
  • Bonnie Klein, Information Collection/Copyright Specialist at the US Defense Technical Information Center
  • Catherine Mitchell, Director of the eScholarship Publishing Group at California Digital Library (CDL)
  • Sarah Shreeves, IDEALS Coordinator at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • David Shulenburger, Vice President for Academic Affairs of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC)
  • John Wilbanks, Vice President for Science at Creative Commons
  • Bob Witeck, CEO of Witeck-Combs Communications Inc.

Welsh Repository Network Launched

The Welsh Repository Network has been launched.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Welsh Repository Network (WRN), a network of twelve institutional repositories within each of the higher education institutions (HEI) within Wales, was launched at the National Library of Wales on Thursday 19th February, 2009. The launch celebrated the success of the WRN Project; a project funded by the JISC in association with the Wales Higher Education Library Forum (WHELF), to provide each HEI in Wales with the resources and support needed to establish and operate effective, individual institutional repositories. Each HEI was provided with funding to purchase repository hardware or to purchase a hosted repository system, along with support and assistance via the Welsh arm of the Repositories Support Project (RSP) based at Aberystwyth University.

The WRN launch celebrated the fact that the principality of Wales now has 100% coverage with respect to universities and repositories. This will allow the universities in Wales to not only preserve and protect their research, but also make available cutting edge research to the world, enabling more open dissemination of the ground breaking and world leading research undertaken across Wales through the Open Access movement.

A further deliverable of the project is the production of a suite of twelve case studies, documenting the hardware purchases of each institution (available from http://hdl.handle.net/2160/1881). As the HEIs in Wales are diverse in size and type, ranging from large research-led institutions to smaller liberal arts or specialist institutions, a variety of hardware and software solutions were required to fit with their existing infrastructures. It was hoped that creating these case studies would assist other universities to allow them to compare their profile with a case study of an institution with a similar background and infrastructure plan, and to gauge their hardware needs for repository support accordingly.

Leslie Carr on Repositories and Cloud Computing

In "The Cloud, the Researcher and the Repository," Leslie Carr discusses repositories and cloud computing, especially the problem of large file deposit.

Here's an excerpt from:

The solution that Tim [Brody] has come up with is to allow the researcher's desktop environment to directly use EPrints as a file system—you can 'mount' the repository as a network drive on your Windows/Mac/Linux desktop using services like WebDAV or FTP. As far as the user is concerned, they can just drag and drop a whole bunch of files from their documents folders, home directories or DVD-ROMs onto the repository disk, and EPrints will automatically deposit them into a new entry or entries. Of course, you can also do the reverse—copy documents from the repository back onto your desktop, open them directly in applications, or attach them to an email.

Public Knowledge Releases Open Archives Harvester 2.3.0

The Public Knowledge Project has released Open Archives Harvester, an open source OAI-PMH harvester.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This is a major rewrite of numerous parts of the Harvester code, including metadata storage and indexing. It increases indexing flexibility to support plugin-based indexing, including Lucene/SOLR support. It also adds OAI Data Provider support, including the potential to convert between metadata formats (currently from various formats into Dublin Core).

UK's Intute Repository Search Project Releases Two Search Engines for Testing

Supported by JISC funding, the Intute Repository Search project is developing increasingly sophisticated search capabilities for document discovery in UK repositories, and it has released two search engines for testing (conceptual search and text mining based search).

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Search services harvest the metadata and full-text out-put from institutional repositories, making the aggregated content searchable and browsable via a single interface. Intute Repository Search currently searches over 95 UK institutional repositories that are taken from the Directory of Open Access Repositories, OpenDOAR.

The development path of this project involves simple metadata search, full-text indexing of documents, text-mining of full-text documents, automatic subject classification, term-based document classification, query expansion, clustering of results and browsing/visualisation of the search results. User group requirements have been integrated into the project's development iterations to ensure that the project adequately reflects what researchers want from a service such as Intute Repository Search.

Two complementary advanced search and browse services have been developed for user testing. One is Autonomy IDOL (www.autonomy.com/content/Products/products-idol-server/index.en.html) and the other is using components developed by NaCTeM (www.nactem.ac.uk).

Autonomy IDOL relates to the conceptual feature of the service. This allows users to search for documents most closely matched to their query, read the overview and abstract of those documents and also have the opportunity to view documents relating to the query's search results. The result is a richer contextual search facility for users who want to view documents that are ranked according to their relation to the query.

NaCTeM has developed the text mining component. This allows users to take advantage of the TerMine service (www.nactem.ac.uk/software/termine/) among others, to automatically discover term associations within texts that are harvested from UK HE institutional repositories. By extracting information that would have otherwise been difficult or impossible to identify in a large number of documents, users can view documents that are linked with each other via salient concepts in a way that may lead to the answer of existing research questions or the creation of new ones. This then allows for a more meaningful and personalised search facility for users who are looking for specific patterns and connections between terms, within the collective resource of Intute Repository Search.

Metadata Tool under Development: Update on Duke's Project Trident

Will Sexton has posted an update about Duke University Libraries' Project Trident, which is developing a metadata tool for use with its digital repository.

Here's an excerpt:

Our specifications essentially treat the Editor as a client of the Repository, and the Repository not as an implementation, but as an API with RESTful bindings. . . .

We took this approach to promote the modularity of the Editor tool. Other organizations or institutions may choose to implement the RESTful API “on top of” their local repository implementation, and adopt the Trident Editor for their own needs. We intend to implement our Repository module using Fedora, but the Editor module should be reusable with a variety of repository platforms.