Category: Digital Repositories

Digital Archive for Architecture: CDWA for DSpace

The Art Institute of Chicago has developed the Digital Archive for Architecture (DAArch) to support the use of the Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) metadata schema in DSpace. The software runs under BSD/UNIX/Linux; is written in Java, JSP, PHP; utilizes PostgreSQL, and is under a BSD License.

Muradora 1.0, a Fedora Front-End, Released

DRAMA (Digital Repository Authorization Middleware Architecture) has released Muradora 1.0, a Fedora front-end that provides identity control (via Shibboleth), authorization (via XACML), and other functions. DRAMA is a sub-project of RAMP (Research Activityflow and Middleware Priorities Project). A Live DVD image simplifies installation.

Here’s an excerpt from the fedora-commons-users posting:

  • "Out-of-the-box" or customized deployment options
  • Intuitive access control editor allows end-users to specify their own access control criteria without editing any XML.
  • Hierarchical enforcement of access control policies. Access control can be set at the collection level, object level or datastream level.
  • Metadata input and validation for any well-formed metadata schema using XForms (a W3C standard). New metadata schemas can be supported via XForms scripts (no Muradora code modification required).
  • Flexible and extensible architecture based on the well known Java Spring enterprise framework.
  • Multiple deployments of Muradora (each customized for their own specific purpose) can talk to the one instance of Fedora.
  • Freely available as open source software (Apache 2 license). All dependent software is also open source.

The Lowdown on the MITH/Rice University Our Americas Archive Project

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities has posted a description of its IMLS-funded Our Americas Archive Project.

Here's an excerpt:

Rice University, in partnership with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland has received a three-year National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in the amount of $979,578 for the Our Americas Archive Project (OAAP), with an additional $980,613 provided in cost share by the institutions. The project will develop an innovative approach to helping users search, browse, analyze, and share content from distributed online collections. OAAP will incorporate recent Web 2.0 technologies to help users discover and use relevant source materials in languages other than English and will improve users’ ability to find relevant materials using domain-specific vocabulary searches. Two online collections of materials in English and Spanish, The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA), and a new digital archive of materials to be developed at Rice, will provide an initial corpus for testing the tools. Rice principle investigators, Geneva Henry (Executive Director, Digital Library Initiative) and Caroline Levander (HRC Director), along with MITH co-PI Neil Fraistat are undertaking this innovative digital humanities project with a view to supporting scholarly inquiry into the Americas from a hemispheric perspective. As Geneva Henry says, “our goal is to develop new ways of doing research as well as new objects of study—to create a new, interactive community of scholarly inquiry.”

Two significant online collections of materials in English and Spanish supporting the interdisciplinary field of hemispheric American Studies—Maryland’s Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) [http://www.mith2.umd.edu/eada/] and a new digital archive of multilingual materials being developed at Rice [http://rudr.rice.edu/handle/1911/9219]—provide an initial corpus for developing and testing these new digital tools. The two multilingual archives illustrate the complex politics and histories that characterize the American hemisphere, but they also provide unique opportunities to further digital research in the humanities. Geographic visualization as well as new social tagging and tag cloud cluster models are just some of the new interface techniques that the Our Americas Archive Partnership will develop with the goal of creating innovative research pathways. As Caroline Levander comments, “we see this as a first step in furthering scholarly dialogue and research across borders by making hemispheric material available open access worldwide. Our goal is to further develop innovative research tools that will help generate a collaborative, transnational research community.” Ralph Bauer, MITH Fellow, general editor of the Early Americas Digital Archive, and collaborator on the project adds, “the added digital materials and tools to navigate seamlessly through these two collections is enabling new forms of scholarship. Because the OAAP makes available materials that are dispersed in different geographic locations, it facilitates collaboration and intellectual exchange among an international audience. The digital medium offers rich opportunities for multicultural exchanges and is therefore uniquely suited for a hemispheric approach to history.”

Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group Formed

Sun has formed the Sun PASIG (Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group).

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Addressing the need for better collaboration on best practices around global standards in large data set and metadata preservation, the Sun PASIG will help provide support for organizations challenged with preserving and archiving important research and cultural heritage materials. Founding members of the Sun PASIG include The Alberta Library, The British Library, Johns Hopkins University, University of Oxford, Stanford University, The Texas Digital Library, and other leading global libraries and universities. . . .

At globally located semi-annual meetings, group members will share knowledge of storage technology trends, services-oriented architecture and software code, and discuss best practices of both commercial and community-developed solutions. Working groups will hold discussions on architectures, use cases and business drivers, storage, access and security, and operating policies, with the goal of providing common case studies and solutions for digital archiving. The Sun PASIG will focus on both collaborating with leading institutions in the EPrints, Fedora, and DSpace communities to create replicable solutions and exchanging expertise on global developments around the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) architecture model.

"Libraries and universities around the world face a common problem: how to best capture and archive valuable knowledge. Global discussion is the first step towards finding solutions that meet institutions' individualized preservation needs," said Michael Keller, University Librarian, Director of Academic Information Resources, Stanford University. "With the formation of Sun PASIG, we are looking forward to working with our peers to discover and create the best digital preservation options available, from infrastructure to interfaces."

DCMI Scholarly Communications Community

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has established the DCMI Scholarly Communications Community, which currently includes a mailing list and a wiki.

Here's an excerpt from the home page:

The DCMI Scholarly Communications Community is a forum for individuals and organisations to exchange information, knowledge and general discussion on issues relating to using Dublin Core for describing research papers, scholarly texts, data objects and other resources created and used within scholarly communications. This includes providing a forum for discussion around the Eprints Application Profile, also known as the Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP) and for other existing and future application profiles created to describe items of scholarly communication.

Podcasts about the Long-Term Use of Research Data

Podcasts about the Long-Term Use of Research Data

The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories has released MP3 and PDF files from its Long-lived Collections: The Future of Australia's Research Data Presentations symposium.

Here are selected MP3 files:

Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access

Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Brian Lavoie, a research scientist at OCLC, have been named co-chairs of a Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, which is being funded by the National Science Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and JISC will also be involved in the task force.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Berman and co-chair Brian Lavoie . . . will convene an international group of prominent leaders to develop actionable recommendations on economic sustainability of digital information for the science and engineering, cultural heritage, academic, public, and private sectors. The Task Force is expected to meet over the next two years and gather testimony from a broad set of thought leaders in preparation for the Task Force’s Final Report. . . .

The Task Force will bring together a group of national and international leaders who will focus attention on this critical grand challenge of the Information Age. Task Force members will represent a cross-section of fields and disciplines including information and computer sciences, economics, entertainment, library and archival sciences, government, and business. Over the next two years, the Task Force will convene a broad set of international experts from the academic, public and private sectors who will participate in quarterly panels and discussions. . . .

In its final report, the Task Force is charged with developing a comprehensive analysis of current issues, and actionable recommendations for the future to catalyze the development of sustainable resource strategies for the reliable preservation of digital information. During its tenure, the Task Force also will produce a series of articles about the challenges and opportunities of digital information preservation, for both the scholarly community and the public.

Review of the Jorum Workflow Report Released

JISC has signed off on the Review of the Jorum Workflow report, and it has been released. Jorum is a UK digital repository of learning and teaching materials.

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

The report begins by providing an overview of the original Jorum Workflow model (section 3.2) and illustrates how it was implemented into the Jorum repository software (section 3.3). A general review of the original model is then provided by discussing feedback received from major stakeholders in the Jorum Workflow process (section 3.4), and the section is concluded by exploring specific issues and modifications made to the original design (section 3.5).

Section 4 considers workflow research being undertaken by similar projects involved with learning object repositories. The projects discussed in this section are included due to their focus on learning objects repositories and similarities and relevance to Jorum. Conclusions and recommendations from these projects are then considered under potential new developments and strategies for the Jorum workflow, which is presented in the penultimate section of the report (section 5).

The final section of this report reflects on the Jorum workflow review and conclusions made by existing research. Finally, recommendations are provided to indicate potential areas of development and project monitoring.

Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive Repository Launched

The University College Dublin has launched the Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive Repository.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

VRLA is a digital archive containing a number of digitised collections from UCD’s holdings, of use and interest to Irish humanities researchers. The IVRLA has developed a sophisticated interface enabling users to browse, search, tag and cite digital objects and view or download them in a variety of file formats. This interface sits on top of an open source repository architecture that functions as the IVRLA’s base content store. An elaborate collection model has been developed ensuring all content is viewed within context and structure. This model is particularly suited for organic primary source collections and enables hierarchy and sub-division in how objects are arranged and held within collections.

Contact the Senate about the NIH Public Access Policy by 9/28/07

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access, whose membership includes major library associations, has issued a new call to action about the NIH Public Access Policy that urges interested parties to contact their Senators by Friday, September 28, 2007. You can easily contact your senators using the ALA Action Alert Web form with my cut-and-paste version of ALA/ATA text or you can fax your Senators using the fax numbers in the press release (use the below link to get to the full press release)

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

As the Senate considers Appropriations measures for the 2008 fiscal year this fall, please take a moment to remind your Senators of your strong support for public access to publicly funded research and – specifically – ensuring the success of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy by making deposit mandatory for researchers.

Earlier this summer, the House of Representatives passed legislation with language that directs the NIH to make this change (http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/media/release07-0720.html). The Senate Appropriations Committee approved a similar measure (http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/media/release07-0628.html). Now, as the Appropriations process moves forward, it is critically important that our Senators are reminded of the breadth and depth of support for enhanced public access to the results of NIH-funded research. Please take a moment to weigh in with your Senator now. . . .

Feel free to draw upon the following talking points:

  • American taxpayers are entitled to open access on the Internet to the peer-reviewed scientific articles on research funded by the U.S. government. Widespread access to the information contained in these articles is an essential, inseparable component of our nation's investment in science.
  • The Fiscal Year 2008 Labor/HHS Appropriations Bill reported out of committee contains language directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to change its Public Access Policy so that it requires NIH-funded researchers to deposit copies of agency-funded research articles into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive.
  • Over the more than two years since its implementation, the NIH's current voluntary policy has failed to achieve any of the agency's stated goals, attaining a deposit rate of less than 5% by individual researchers. A mandate is required to ensure deposit in NIH’s online archive of articles describing findings of all research funded by the agency.
  • We urge the Senate to support the inclusion of language put forth in the Labor/HHS Appropriations bill directing the NIH to implement a mandatory policy and ensuring free, timely access to all research articles stemming from NIH-funded research – without change – in any appropriate vehicle.

(We’ll be making additional resources for patient advocates – including the recording of our August 30 Web cast and specific talking points – available shortly as well.

Leslie Carr on What to Do with Dead Repositories

In his "Decommissioning Repositories" posting, EPrints guru Leslie Carr grapples with the issue of what to do with repositories that have served their purpose and that no one wants to maintain.

Here's an excerpt:

But now the party's over, there is no more funding, and none of the partner institutions has offered to keep the repository going in perpetuity. Not even the hosting institution or the ex-manager wants to keep their repositories going. We know that even if we don't turn them off their hosting hardware will fail in a few of years. That sounds like very bad news because a repository is supposed to be forever! Was it irresponsible to create these repositories in the first place? Should it be forbidden to create a public repository whose life is guaranteed to be less than a decade? Or perhaps that should be factored into the original policy-making—"this repository and all its contents are guaranteed up to 31st December 2017 but not after." If that were machine readable then the community could have decided whether they want to mirror the collection, or selected bits of it.

Source: Carr, Leslie. "Decommissioning Repositories." RepositoryMan, 10 September 2007.

Peter Murray-Rust Presentation on the Scientific E-Thesis

Peter Murray-Rust's presentation at Caltech on "The Power of the Scientific eThesis" is now available. (You may be asked to install an ActiveX control by MediaSite; you can run the presentation without it.)

Source: Smart, Laura J. "Peter Murray-Rust at Caltech." Repositories for the Rest of Us, 7 September 2007.

AONS: Scanning Repositories for Obsolete Digital Formats

The APSR AONS II project has released a beta version of the Automatic Obsolescence Notification System (AONS).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement on apsr_announcements:

Users can register with the service by providing a URL to a repository's format scan summary. The AONS service will display the summary and allow a repository manager to compare the formats of items in their repository with information from format registries such as PRONOM and Library of Congress. These registries flag any formats that are likely to become obsolete. Repository managers can then make curation decisions about any items at risk, such as upgrading their formats.

By downloading and installing an AONS locally, an institution can also take advantage of a pilot risk metrics implementation. . . .

The AONS software is the result of the AONS II project funded under APSR and developed by David Pearson, David Levy and Matthew Walker from the National Library of Australia (NLA) with an administrative user interface developed by David Berriman at ANU.

The software is able to be downloaded from Sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/aons and a mailing list is also available for support and feedback. As this is a beta release we welcome feedback to the Sourceforge mailing list to inform our testing which will continue until mid-September.

Please try out the pilot service by sending an email to cosi@apsr.edu.au to register with the service, and tell us which institution you are from. . . .

Portico Studying E-Book Preservation

Portico is launching a e-Book preservation study, which will last the rest of the year.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

In response to several requests from publishers and libraries, Portico is conducting a study in order to assess how to extend its archival infrastructure and service to respond to the emerging need to preserve e-books. During the study we will analyze the structure and preservation needs of e-books and determine what adjustments to Portico's existing, operational and technological infrastructure and the economic model developed to support e-journal preservation might be required in order to respond to this new genre. Portico's e-journal archiving service was developed through a pilot project that drew heavily upon engagement with publisher and library pilot participants. We anticipate that a similar process will be essential in understanding how best to respond to the challenges of e-book preservation. . . .

The current participants in the E-Book Preservation study include:

Publishers

  • American Math Society
  • Elsevier
  • Morgan Claypool
  • Taylor and Francis

Libraries

  • Case Western Reserve University
  • Cornell University Library
  • McGill University
  • SOLINET
  • Texas University Libraries
  • University College of London
  • Yale University Library

Institutional Repositories: Staff and Skills Requirements

SHEPRA has released Institutional Repositories: Staff and Skills Requirements.

Here’s an excerpt from the document:

This document began in response to requests received by the core SHERPA team for examples of job descriptions for repository posts. Its development has been greatly assisted by contributions from the SHERPA partners and UKCORR members.

This document will be revised annually (July/August) to reflect changing needs and requirements. Input from the repository community will be sought at this time.

Official Release of the kopal Library for Retrieval and Ingest

The German National Library and SUB Göttingen have announced the official release of the kopal Library for Retrieval and Ingest on diglib.

Here's an excerpt from the message:

The kopal project (Co-operative Development of a Long-term Digital Information Archive) was dedicated to find a solution to providing not only bitstream preservation but long-term accessibility as well in the form of a cooperatively developed and operated long-term archive for digital data. The German National Library, the Goettingen State and University Library, the Gesellschaft fuer wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Goettingen, and IBM Germany have been working in close cooperation on a technological solution. The now released software tools mark the successful development of such an archiving solution.

The Open-Source-Software koLibRI is a framework to integrate a long term preservation system as the IBM Digital Information Archiving System (DIAS) into the infrastructure of any institution. In particular, koLibRi organizes the creation and the import of Archival Information Packages into DIAS, and offers functions to retrieve and to govern them. Preservation methods like data customization and migration of data are part of the tasks of long term preservation. koLibRi Version 1.0 provides modules that manage future migration procedures. koLibRI Version 1.0 provides a completely functional and stable condition. Nevertheless, in the context of connecting new partners to the existing long term preservation system, the software will be constantly adjusted to the needs of different partners.

A documentation has been published with the conclusive release that describes the installation and the adjustment of a functional koLibRi-system and the basic internal layout to make individual development possible. The described release is offered for free download. . . .

Fedora Commons Website Launches

The Fedora Commons Website has gone live.

Here's an excerpt from the About Fedora Commons page:

Fedora Commons is a non-profit organization providing sustainable technologies to create, manage, publish, share and preserve digital content as a basis for intellectual, organizational, scientific and cultural heritage by bringing two communities together.

Communities of practice that include scholars, artists, educators, Web innovators, publishers, scientists, librarians, archivists, publishers, records managers, museum curators or anyone who presents, accesses, or preserves digital content.

Software developers who work on the cutting edge of open source Web and enterprise content technologies to ensure that collaboratively created knowledge is available now and in the future.

Fedora Commons is the home of the unique Fedora open source software, a robust integrated repository-centered platform that enables the storage, access and management of virtually any kind of digital content.

Here's an excerpt from the press release about the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant that helps fund the Fedora Commons:

Fedora Commons today announced the award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the organizational and technical frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations. Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization that will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful open-source software collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Virginia. The Fedora Project evolved from the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) developed by researchers at Cornell Computing and Information Science.

With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an open community to support the development and deployment of open source software, which facilitates open collaboration and open access to scholarly, scientific, cultural, and educational materials in digital form. The software platform developed by Fedora Commons with Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funding will support a networked model of intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars, teachers, and students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new ideas, and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues worldwide. With its roots in the Fedora open-source repository system, developed since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the new software will continue to focus on the integrity and longevity of the intellectual products that underlie this new form of knowledge work. The result will be an open source software platform that both enables collaborative models of information creation and sharing, and provides sustainable repositories to secure the digital materials that constitute our intellectual, scientific, and cultural history.

Berkeley Electronic Press Acquires Digital Commons IR Software

The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) has acquired the Digital Commons institutional repository software from ProQuest. bepress was the original creator of the software.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

ProQuest and The Berkeley Electronic Press ("bepress") today announced that they have reached an agreement for bepress to purchase ownership of Digital Commons, the world's leading hosted institutional repository solution. Bepress will be adding sales and marketing staff and augmenting its existing customer support and services in addition to the hosting and technology services that it has always provided Digital Commons customers.

Bepress Chairman, Aaron Edlin, said "Institutional Repositories are core to the bepress mission of furthering scholarly communication and thus bepress is excited at the opportunity to build a close relationship with Digital Commons customers. Developing successful and vibrant Institutional Repositories will be bepress's central focus."

A Portal for Doctoral E-Theses in Europe

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.)

Using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

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.

Australian Framework and Action Plan for Digital Heritage Collections

The Collections Council of Australia Ltd. has released Australian Framework and Action Plan for Digital Heritage Collections, Version 0.C3 for comment.

Here's an excerpt from the document:

This is the Collections Council of Australia's plan to prepare an Australian framework for digital heritage collections. It brings together information shared by people working in archives, galleries, libraries and museums at a Summit on Digital Collections held in 2006. It proposes an Action Plan to address issues shared by the Australian collections sector in relation to current and future management of digital heritage collections.