Category: Digital Repositories

REPOMAN-L (Institutional Repository Managers' Mailing List) Launched

Richard Griscom, University of Pennsylvania, and Leah Vanderjagt, University of Alberta, have launched REPOMAN-L (Institutional Repository Managers' Mailing List).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

We have created REPOMAN-L (Institutional Repository Managers' Mailing List) as an open forum for the discussion of issues, great and small, that confront repository managers. We hope that you will subscribe and participate enthusiastically, and use this list for problem-solving and sharing of advice; for example:

  • to poll the group on practices at their institutions
  • to ask about any aspect of development from policy to outreach
  • initiatives to software evaluation
  • to share links to useful tools and references
  • to explore rationale around decisions you're making about your repository. . . .

The list is purposefully unaffiliated with any institution, initiative, repository software platform, or conceptual idea such as open access; the list would of course not exclude discussion of these areas, but we ask subscribers to consider initiating these discussions on lists set up specifically for the topics and then bring summaries of relevance to this list.

Presentations from eResearch Australasia 2007

Presentations from eResearch Australasia 2007 are now available.

Here are selected presentations:

Podcasts from Clever Collections: A National Showcase of Technical Innovations for Digital Collections

Podcasts of sessions at APSR's Clever Collections: A National Showcase of Technical Innovations for Digital Collections conference are now available.

Here are the titles of some repository-oriented presentations:

  • "Enhancing Research Collections by Harvesting Community Annotations"
  • "Integrating Repositories with Researcher Environments"
  • "Object Re-Use and Exchange (ORE): Practice and Experience in the Open Language Archives Community"
  • "The Repository Interoperability Framework"
  • "Taking Aim and (Mostly) Hitting Our Targets: from DART to ARCHER"

New Mailing Lists: JISC-SHIBBOLETH-LIBRARIES and Sword-app-tech

Two mailing lists have been recently established: JISC-SHIBBOLETH-LIBRARIES and sword-app-tech.

Excerpt from the JISC-SHIBBOLETH announcement:

Many institutions are now at the stage with their implementation of federated access management where issues directly impacting libraries are being considered and managed. This includes discovery processes for end-users, testing and changing access to federated service providers, dealing with different user definitions, managing license and resource information and changing send-user information.

To help support this process we have established a separate mailing list to enable discussion and exchange of views directly relating to library issues.

Excerpt from the Fedora-commons-users announcement:

A new mailing list has been created for discussion, bug reports, implementations questions and development ideas relating to SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit).

SWORD is a protocol for interoperable deposit between repository platforms. It was developed by a JISC project during 2007, building on earlier work to define a deposit protocol, and is based on the Atom Publishing Protocol.

Citation, Location, and Deposition in Discipline & Institutional Repositories

The JISC CLADDIER project has published Citation, Location, and Deposition in Discipline & Institutional Repositories: CLADDIER Project Report III, Recommendations for Data/Publication Linkage.

Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

A key aim of the CLADDIER project is to investigate the cross-linking and citation of resources (in particular data and their associated publications) held in institutional and subject-based repositories within the research sector. Typically traditional citations are partial in that they are "backward citations", referring to work which influenced the current research, and they only cite other formal publications, ignoring other artefacts which are the output of research, in particular research data. Online repositories storing more dynamic digital objects gives the opportunity to provide a more complete picture of the relationships between them, with backward and forward citations to data and publications being propagated between repositories.

This report motivates the cross-citations of data from the CLADDIER use case example, and considers the approaches which have been implemented to harvest and propagate citation information. Most of these existing approaches depend on centralised services, which were considered unsatisfactory in an environment where independent repositories wish to maintain control of their resources and do not wish to be dependant on third-party services. Criteria are identified for building a Citation Notification Service to propagate citation references and links between repositories, including using a peer-to-peer protocol. A number of different architectures are proposed and evaluated.

The requirement for a light-weight peer-to-peer service which is as widely applicable as possible lead to the selection of Linkback services, in particular Trackback which provides an existing simple specification which can be implemented quickly and adapted to the requirements of citation notification. A detailed description the Trackback protocol is then given, together with the design of the adaptations and extensions identified as required for citation notification. This extended Trackback protocol has been implemented in the STFC ePubs institutional repository; this implementation is described and a use case is described.

Geoffrey Bilder has commented on the report in "CLADDIER Final Report."

Draft Curation Lifecycle Model Released by the Digital Curation Centre

The Digital Curation Centre has released the Draft DCC Curation Lifecycle Model for comment by February 29, 2008. Further information about the model can be found in "Draft DCC Curation Lifecycle Model" from the latest issue of the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The model provides a generic graphical high-level overview of the stages required for successful curation and preservation of digital material from initial conceptualisation. The Digital Curation Centre will shortly start to use this draft model to ensure that information, services and advisory material cover all areas of the lifecycle.

Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives' Strategic Plan FY 2008-2013

The Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives has published its Strategic Plan FY 2008-2013. This is a large color PDF file (about 34 MB).

Here are three brief excerpts:

By 2013 we expect to have in place:

  • Increased digital content holdings
  • Capability to produce and receive sustainable digital content from multiple sources
  • A stewardship network of collaborative partners
  • Recommendations on digital content information architecture, preservation and access
  • Recommendations on public policy for digital content preservation and access

Through 2013, we expect to:

  • Increase use and awareness of content and services by target user communities
  • Improve integrated search and discovery
  • Secure delivery of digital content and services
  • Enable multiple ways/methods of access to digital content and services
  • Facilitate integration of the Library’s primary sources into K–12 educational settings
  • and networks

Key outcomes associated with our technology infrastructure objective include:

  • Secured, available and scalable technology infrastructure
  • Defined Library of Congress technical infrastructure for shared tools and services
  • among networked entities
  • Defined future institution-wide architecture and support for a national networked
  • digital information architectural framework
  • Specialized institutional digital media repository services
  • Preserved authentic digital content over time.

Report on Library of Congress/San Diego Supercomputer Center Data Transfer and Storage Tests

The Library of Congress has published Data Center for Library of Congress Digital Holdings: A Pilot Project; Final Report.

Here an excerpt from the "Introduction":

Between May 2006 and October 2007, the Library of Congress (LC) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) conducted data-transfer and storage tests. At the heart of the project was the issue of trust, specifically how the LC could trust SDSC to reliably store several terabytes of the LC’s data. By what means could SDSC prove to the LC that the data was intact, preserved, and well-cared for? What tests could the LC devise, and what metrics could SDSC produce, to guarantee the integrity of their remotely stored data?

The two main objectives of the project were:

  • For SDSC to host LC content reliably and return it intact at the end of the project
  • For LC to be able to remotely access, process, analyze, and manage that content . . . .

Inspired by SDSC’s staggering technological potential, the LC had devised several scenarios for the data tests. But ultimately, as the project progressed, the LC opted to keep its goals simple: data transfer, storage, and file manipulation. In the end, both partners were happy with the project’s success. The project also produced lessons and unexpected results, some of which will have deep implications for all cultural institutions regarding transfer and storage of their digital assets.

Machine Services for Metadata Discovery and Aggregation—metadata+ Report

JISC has released Machine Services for Metadata Discovery and Aggregation—metadata+.

Here's an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

The main aim of the project is to develop an interoperability demonstrator to explore the technical aspects of providing a service-oriented infrastructure to facilitate metadata discovery and aggregation. The project developed a test bed that exposes metadata through standard search and linking protocols. Metadata mapping work was undertaken to enable the test bed to provide search response in multiple metadata schemas that are widely used in digital library and e-learning.

The core of the test bed consists of an open source digital repository—Fedora. Off-the-shelf, the repository provides web services for metadata searching and substantial content management and security features particularly suitable for real-life use scenarios. Since the search protocol considered in this project requires additional features that are not available from the repository, modifications to the repository source code were made. The modifications also involve incorporating the metadata mapping requirement such that search responses from different metadata formats can be facilitated.

A basic demonstrator (project website) has been created to exemplify how the search protocol can be used for discovering and aggregating metadata, as well as presenting them in coherent formats relevant to the intended presentation contexts. The metadata sources include publisher and digital libraries providing both bibliographic and user-generated (enrichment) metadata such as reviews and recommendations. In addition, the project demonstrated a novel use of the search protocol to dynamically create e-learning content packages, digital library metadata collection and news feeds.

Several digital libraries initiatives have evaluated the test bed infrastructure for real use scenarios. These libraries are an extended form of the test bed demonstrator and provide relevant facilities such metadata wiki (editor) and annotation services for gauging enrichment metadata (review, rating and recommendation) from users. They will continue the objectives of this project particularly on improving the test bed infrastructure and exploring the aggregated use of enrichment metadata, to enable the academic and research user communities to add values to bibliographic metadata from the publishers and libraries communities.

Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite

Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite, the latest Digital Scholarship publication, is designed to give the reader a very quick introduction to key aspects of institutional repositories and to foster further exploration of this topic through liberal use of relevant references to online documents and links to pertinent websites. It is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, and it can be freely used for any noncommercial purpose in accordance with the license.

Columbia University Libraries and Bavarian State Library Become Google Book Search Library Partners

Both the Columbia University Libraries and Bavarian State Library have joined the Google Book Search Library Project.

Here are the announcements:

Zotero/Internet Archive Alliance to Create Zotero Commons

Dan Cohen has announced a partnership between the Center for History and New Media's Zotero project and the Internet Archive that will create the Zotero Commons, a repository for scholarly materials, as well as personal, restricted-access storage for scholars. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is supporting the project.

University of Michigan Libraries Make over 100,000 Records for Digitized Books Available for Harvesting

The University of Michigan Libraries have made over 100,000 metadata records from its MBooks collection available for OAI-PMH harvesting. The records are for digitized books in the public domain.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The University of Michigan Library is pleased to announce that records from our MBooks collection are available for OAI harvesting. The MBooks collection consists of materials digitized by Google in partnership with the University of Michigan.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/o/oai/oai?verb=Identify

Only records for MBooks available in the public domain are exposed. We have split these into sets containing public domain items according to U.S. copyright law, and public domain items worldwide. There are currently over 100,000 records available for harvesting. We anticipate having 1 million records available when the entire U-M collection has been digitized by Google.

University of Michigan Libraries Release the UMich OAI Toolkit

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.

Stable Version of SPECTRa Released: Software for Depositing Chemical Data into Repositories

A stable version of SPECTRa has been released. SPECTRa is designed to facilitate the deposit of chemical data into digital repositories.

The JISC-funded SPECTRa (Submission, Preservation and Exposure of Chemistry Teaching and Research Data a Digital Repository for the Chemical Community) project's final report is also available.

University of Maryland Libraries Digital Collections Launched

The University of Maryland Libraries has launched its Digital Collections repository.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This release marks two and a half years of work in the creation of a repository that serves the teaching and research mission of the University of Maryland Libraries. Many of the objects are digital versions from Maryland's Special Collections (such as A Treasury of World's Fairs Art and Architecture) or are new virtual collections (The Jim Henson Works). Other collections (such as Films@UM) support the teaching mission of the Libraries. This release also marks the integration of electronically available finding aids, ArchivesUM, into the repository architecture, creating a framework for digital objects to be dynamically discovered from finding aids.

The repository is based on the Fedora platform, uses Lucene for indexing, and Helix for streaming video. The repository features almost 2500 digital objects, with new objects added monthly. Object types currently delivered include full text (both TEI and EAD), video, and images. Objects can be discovered within a collection context or via a search across multiple collections. Cross-collection discovery is achieved through a common metadata scheme and controlled vocabulary. This metadata scheme also provides for individual collections to have more granular domain-specific metadata.

An FAQ for the repository is available.

National Science Digital Library Releases Initial Fedora-based NCore Components

The National Science Digital Library Core Integration team at Cornell University has released a partial version of NCore, a "general platform for building semantic and virtual digital libraries united by a common data model and interoperable applications," which is built upon Fedora.

Here's an excerpt from the NSDL posting:

The NCore platform consists of a central repository built on top of Fedora, a data model, an API, and a number of fundamental services such as full-text search or OAI-PMH. Innovative NSDL services and tools that empower users as content creators are now built on, or transitioning to, the NCore platform. These include: the Expert Voices blogging system (http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/);the NSDL Wiki (http://wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/NSDL_Wiki); the NSDL OAI-PMH metadata ingest aggregation system; the OAI-PMH service for distributing public NSDL metadata; the NSDL Collection System (NCS), derived from the DLESE Collection system (DCS); the NSDL Search service, and the OnRamp content management and distribution system (http://onramp.nsdl.org).

Because NCore is a general Fedora-based open source platform useful beyond NSDL, Core Integration developers at Cornell University have made the repository and API code components of NCore available for download at the NCore project on Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nsdl-core). Over the next six months, NSDL will release the code for major tools and services that comprise the full NCore suite on SourceForge.

For further information, see the NCore presentation.

Towards the Australian Data Commons: A Proposal for an Australian National Data Service

The Australian eResearch Infrastructure Council has released Towards the Australian Data Commons: A Proposal for an Australian National Data Service.

Here's an excerpt from the "Overview":

This paper is designed to encourage, inform and ultimately summarise the discussions around the appropriate strategic and technical descriptions of the Australian National Data Service; to fill in the outline in the Platforms for Collaboration investment plan.

To do so, the paper:

  • introduces the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) and the driving forces behind its creation;
  • provides a rationale for the services that ANDS will provide, and the programs through which the services will be offered; and
  • describes in detail the ANDS programs.

Part One (Background) provides a brief summary of the reasons to focus on data management, as well as an overview of ANDS, and identifies some issues associated with implementation.

Part Two (Rationale) sets out the systemic issues associated with achieving a research data commons, and provides the resultant rationale for the services that ANDS will offer the programs that they will be delivered through.

Part Three (Detailed Descriptions of ANDS Programs) sets out in detail the Aim, Focus, Service Beneficiaries, Products and Community Engagement activities for each of the ANDS Programs.

Fedora Meets Web 2.0: Repository Redux Presentation from Access 2007

A digital video of Mark Leggott's (University Librarian, University of Prince Edward Island) presentation from Access 2007 is now available.

Here's an excerpt from the program that describes the talk:

The University of Prince Edward Island has embarked on a substantial project to support the institutions Administrative, Learning and Research communities using a Web 2.0/3.0 framework and the Fedora/Drupal/Moodle systems as the foundation. The session will describe the architecture and demo some of the core systems, such as Learn@UPEI, UPEI VRE (Virtual Research Environment) and some sample digital library collections.

Primary Research Group Publishes International Institutional Repository Survey

The Primary Research Group has published The International Survey of Institutional Digital Repositories. Paper and PDF versions are available at $89.50 each.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The study presents data from 56 institutional digital repositories from eleven countries, including the USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, South Africa, India, Turkey and other countries. The 121-page study presents more than 300 tables of data and commentary and is based on data from higher education libraries and other institutions involved in institutional digital repository development. . . .

Close to 41% of survey participants purchased software to develop their digital repositories. US-based institutions were much more likely than others to purchase software for this purpose. . . .

On average, a drop more than 12% of the content in the repositories came from pre-existing repositories maintained by academic departments or some other institutional unit.

A sixth of the libraries in the sample used Digital Commons software, and 28% of US-based repositories used this product. . . .

Those repositories in the sample that required less than 500 hours of labor per year had budgets of just less than $9,000 US. The largest repositories, those requiring 3,600 hours or more annually, had budgets averaging $145,444. 5.21% of the overall labor required to run the digital repositories in the sample came from academic departments not connected to the library. . . .

The mean number of journal articles held by the repositories in the sample was 772 with a mean of 162. . . .

15.56% of the repositories in the sample were funded largely through grants.

Version 1.0 of SWORD, A Smart Deposit Tool for Repositories, Has Been Released

Version 1.0 of SWORD has been released The release includes DSpace (1.5 only) and Fedora implementations, GUI/CLI clients, and the common Java library.

Here's an excerpt from the SWORD Wiki that describes the project:

SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) will take forward the Deposit protocol developed by a small working group as part of the JISC Digital Repositories Programme by implementing it as a lightweight web-service in four major repository software platforms: EPrints, DSpace, Fedora and IntraLibrary. The existing protocol documentation will be finalised by project partners and a prototype 'smart deposit' tool will be developed to facilitate easier and more effective population of repositories. The project intends to take an iterative approach to developing and revising the protocol, web-services and client implementation through evaluative testing and feedback mechanisms. Community acceptance and take-up will be sought through dissemination activities. The project is led by UKOLN, University of Bath, with partners at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, the University of Southampton and Intrallect Ltd. The project aims to improve the efficiency and quality of repository deposit and to diversity and expedite the options for timely population of repositories with content whilst promoting a common deposit interface and supporting the Information Environment principles of interoperability.

Development Pack about Managing Intellectual Property Rights for Digital Learning Materials in Repositories

The TrustDR (Trust in Digital Repositories) Digital Repository Project's Managing Intellectual Property Rights in Digital Learning Materials: A Development Pack for Institutional Repositories is available. The publication, which was the final output of the JISC-funded project, is under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Introduction and Summary":

What is this pack for?

  • To help clarify and update IPR policy for the management and use of digital learning materials created within institutions and develop a sustainable infrastructure (human, technical, educational and organisational) for the effective use of e-learning particularly in support of delivering a more flexible curriculum.

Who is this pack aimed at?

  • Senior management with responsibilities in this area and those supporting them, individuals and teams tasked with overhauling institutional IPR policy, managers and consultants etc who are interested in developing viable e-learning infrastructures, managers of e-learning projects and those involved in planning for projects, partnerships and collaborations, people with a general interest in this increasingly important aspect of e-learning.