Overview of content related to 'stanford university'

Hydra UK: Flexible Repository Solutions to Meet Varied Needs

lisrw — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 19:24:07 +0000

Chris Awre reports on the Hydra UK event held on 22 November 2012 at the Library of the London School of Economics.

Hydra, as described in the opening presentation of this event, is a project initiated in 2008 by the University of Hull, Stanford University, University of Virginia, and DuraSpace to work towards a reusable framework for multi-purpose, multi-functional, multi-institutional repository-enabled solutions for the management of digital content collections [1]. An initial timeframe for the project of three years had seen all founding institutional partners successfully implement a repository demonstrating these characteristics. Key to the aims of the project has always been to generate wider interest outside the partners to foster not only sustainability in the technology, but also sustainability of the community around this open source development. Hydra has been disseminated through a range of events, particularly through the international Open Repositories conferences [2], but the sphere of interest in Hydra has now stimulated the holding of specific events in different countries: Hydra UK is one of them.

The Hydra UK event was held on 22 November 2012, kindly hosted by the Library at the London School of Economics. Representatives from institutions across the UK, but also Ireland, Austria and Switzerland, came together to learn about the Hydra Project, and to discuss how Hydra might serve their digital content collection management needs. 29 delegates from 21 institutions were present, representing mostly universities but also the archive, museum and commercial sectors. Five presentations were given on Hydra, focusing on the practical experience of using this framework and how it fits into overall system architectures, and time was also deliberately given over to discussion of more specific topics of interest and to allow delegates the opportunity to voice their requirements. The presentations were:

Introduction to Hydra
Hydra @ Hull
Hydra @ Glasgow Caledonian University
Hydra @ LSE
Hydra @ Oxford

Introduction to Hydra

Chris Awre from the University of Hull gave the opening presentation. The starting basis for Hydra was mutual recognition by all the founding partners that a repository should be an enabler for managing digital content collections, not a constraint or simply a silo of content. Digital repositories have been put forward and applied as a potential solution for a variety of use cases over the years, and been used at different stages of a content lifecycle.

Figure 1: LSE Library
(Photo courtesy of Simon Lamb, University of Hull.)

To avoid producing a landscape of multiple repositories all having to be managed to cover these use cases, the Hydra Project sought to identify a way in which one repository solution could be applied flexibly to meet the requirements of different use cases. The idea of a single repository with multiple points of interaction came into being – Hydra – and the concept of individual Hydra ‘head’ solutions.

The Hydra Project is informed by two main principles:

No single system can provide the full range of repository-based solutions for a given institution’s needs,
o …yet sustainable solutions require a common repository infrastructure.
No single institution can resource the development of a full range of solutions on its own,
o …yet each needs the flexibility to tailor solutions to local demands and workflows.

The Hydra Project has sought to provide the common infrastructure upon which flexible solutions can be built, and shared.

The recognition that no single institution can achieve everything it might want for its repository has influenced the project from the start. To quote an African proverb, ‘If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far, go together’. Working together has been vital. To organise this interaction, Hydra has structured itself through three interleaving sub-communities, the Steering Group, the Partners and Developers, as shown by Figure 2.

Figure 2: Hydra community structure

The concept of a Hydra Partner has emerged from this model of actively working together, and the project has a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) process for any institution wishing to have its use of, and contribution and commitment to Hydra recognised. Starting with the original four partners in 2008, Hydra now has 11 partners, with two more in the process of joining. All have made valuable contributions and helped to make Hydra better. Hydra partnership is not the only route to involvement, though, and there are many in the Hydra developer community who are adopters of the software, but who have not reached a stage where partnership is appropriate.

The technical implementation of Hydra was supported through early involvement in the project by MediaShelf, a commercial technical consultancy focused on repository solutions. All Hydra software is, though, open source, available under the Apache 2.0 licence, and all software code contributions are managed in this way. The technical implementation is based on a set of core principles that describe how content objects should be structured within the repository, and with an understanding that different content types can be managed using different workflows. Following these principles, Hydra could be implemented in a variety of ways: the technical direction taken by the project is simply the one that suited the partners at the time.

Hydra as currently implemented is built on existing open source components, and the project partners are committed to supporting these over time:

Fedora: one of the digital repository systems maintained through DuraSpace [3]
Apache Solr: powerful indexing software now being used in a variety of discovery solutions [4]
Blacklight: a next-generation discovery interface, which has its own community around it [5]
Hydra plugin: a collection of components that facilitate workflow in managing digital content [6]
Solrizer: a component that indexes Fedora-held content into a Solr index

These components are arranged in the architecture shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Hydra architecture

A common feature of the last three components in the list above is the use of Ruby on Rails as the coding language and its ability to package up functionality in discrete ‘gems’. This was consciously chosen for Hydra because of its agile programming capabilities, its use of the MVC (Model–View–Controller) structure, and its testing infrastructure. The choice has been validated on a number of occasions as Hydra has developed. However, it was noted that other coding languages and systems could be used to implement Hydra where appropriate. This applies to all the main components, even Fedora. Whilst a powerful and flexible repository solution in its own right, Fedora has proved to be complex to use: Hydra has sought in part to tap this capability through simpler interfaces and interactions.

The CLIF Project: The Repository as Part of a Content Lifecycle

lisrw — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:06:59 +0000

Richard Green, Chris Awre and Simon Waddington describe how a digital repository can become part of the technical landscape within an institution and support digital content lifecycle management across systems.

At the heart of meeting institutional requirements for managing digital content is the need to understand the different operations through which content goes, from planning and creation through to disposal or preservation. Digital content is created using a variety of authoring tools. Once created, the content is often stored somewhere different, made accessible in possibly more than one way, altered as required, and then moved for deletion or preservation at an appropriate point.

IMPACT Final Conference 2011

lisrw — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 13:36:33 +0000

Marieke Guy reports on the two-day conference looking at the results of the IMPACT Project in making digitisation and OCR better, faster and cheaper.

The IMPACT Project (Improving Access to Text) [1] was funded by the European Commission back in 2007 to look at significantly advancing access to historical text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) methods. As the project reaches its conclusion, one of its key objectives is sharing project outputs.

10 Years of Zetoc

editor — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Jane Ronson looks at how Zetoc has developed and what the future holds for the service.

Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, Zetoc [1] provides quality-assured, comprehensive journal table of contents data for resource discovery that users can search and have delivered straight to their in-box or desktop. In a nutshell, Zetoc is all about convenience, current awareness and comprehensive coverage. In a recent survey, one academic commented: 'This is a "one-stop shop" for relevant literature'. What is Zetoc, what has it achieved and where is it going? In this article I will look at the history of the service and how it has developed over the past decade.

Fedora UK & Ireland / EU Joint User Group Meeting

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Chris Awre reports on the first coming together of two regional user groups for the Fedora digital repository system, hosted by the University of Oxford in December 2009.

The Fedora digital repository system [1] (as opposed to the Fedora Linux distribution, with which there is no connection) is an open source solution for the management of all types of digital content. Its development is managed through DuraSpace [2], the same organisation that now oversees DSpace, and carried out by developers around the world. The developers, alongside the extensive body of Fedora users, form the community that sustains Fedora.

The REMAP Project: Steps Towards a Repository-enabled Information Environment

editor — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Richard Green and Chris Awre investigate what role a repository can play in enabling and supporting the management and preservation of its own digital content.

This article describes the recently completed REMAP Project undertaken at the University of Hull, which has been a key step toward realising a larger vision of the role a repository can play in supporting digital content management for an institution. The first step was the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-funded RepoMMan Project that the team undertook between 2005 and 2007 [1].

Time to Change Our Thinking: Dismantling the Silo Model of Digital Scholarship

editor — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Stephen G. Nichols argues that humanists need to replace the silo model of digital scholarship with collaborative ventures based on interoperability and critical comparison of content.

There is no longer anything exotic about digital humanities projects. Almost every humanities faculty has at least one. But like humanities disciplines themselves, digital projects too often exist in lonely splendour, each in its own sub-disciplinary silo. Classicists have their project(s), Middle English scholars post Chaucer and Langland manuscripts, while French medievalists have sites for major genres or authors from the troubadours to Christine de Pizan, and beyond. The situation is not appreciably different for digital humanities projects dealing with modern topics.

Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) Fall Meeting

editor — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Walk reports on the Sun-PASIG winter meeting held in Baltimore, USA on 18-20 November 2008.

I had managed to miss the previous two PASIG (Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group)[1] meetings, so was delighted to find myself finally able to participate by attending the Fall meeting. Conveniently the event was arranged to follow immediately the SPARC Digital Repositories meeting [2], also held in Baltimore, and which I also attended.

News and Events

editor — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.

JISC Digital Media (formerly TASI) Training Schedule

Four brand new courses are on offer for the 2009 season dealing with:

Finding free images online
Editing and managing images using Photoshop Lightroom 2
Audio Production (recording lectures, seminars, interviews and podcasts)
Digitising analogue video recordings.

Courses are already filling up fast and several courses now have multiple dates to accommodate demand.

Sun Preservation and Archive Special Interest Group: May 2008 Meeting

editor — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:00:00 +0000

Vicky Mays and Ian Dolphin review the Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) meeting held in San Francisco in May 2008.

The third meeting of Sun's Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group took place in San Francisco in May. The event, the third PASIG meeting in the last year, drew around 180 participants from Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America to discuss a broad range of issues surrounding digital repositories. Presentations ranged from geographically or community-themed high-level perspectives of repository- related activity, through to detailed technical analysis and reports of development activity at an institutional or project level.

Ancient Cultures Inside Modern Universes

editor — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Edgardo Civallero writes on preservation and dissemination of intangible South American indigenous heritage and updating information using Web-based tools.

Cultural Heritage

Heritage can be defined as a heterogeneous ensemble of environmental and cultural elements - material or otherwise - that are transmitted from generation to generation, creating the foundations on which people build and orientate their identity and vision of the world. According to the definition reached during the UNESCO Experts´ Round Table in Turin (Italy, 2001), heritage includes:

News and Events

editor — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.

Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) Training Programme

Either: Birmingham, Bristol or London, 8 February to 27 April 2007
http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/

The TASI programme of practical hands-on training includes three brand new workshops:

E-Archiving: An Overview of Some Repository Management Software Tools

editor — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000

Marion Prudlo discusses LOCKSS, EPrints, and DSpace in terms of who uses them, their cost, underlying technology, the required know-how, and functionalities.

In recent years initiatives to create software packages for electronic repository management have mushroomed all over the world. Some institutions engage in these activities in order to preserve content that might otherwise be lost, others in order to provide greater access to material that might otherwise be too obscure to be widely used such as grey literature. The open access movement has also been an important factor in this development. Digital initiatives such as pre-print, post-print, and document servers are being created to come up with new ways of publishing.

EuroCAMP 2005

editor — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000

Masha Garibyan and Ann Borda report on the first Campus Architecture Middleware Planning workshop in Europe hosted by the Politecnico di Torino.

The rapid expansion of the Web and Internet in recent years has brought many benefits. It has never been easier to access scholarly information from anywhere in the world in real time. However, this information is often held in disparate systems and is protected by a variety of access control mechanisms, such as usernames and passwords. Many users have to struggle with increasingly complicated access control systems in order to access information they require. This is especially the case in Higher and Further Education.

News and Events

editor — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.

Seminar Invitation from DEF - Danish Electronic Research Library

The DEF XML Web Services project invites you to participate in the seminar: Building Digital Libraries with XML Web Services on Friday 27 August 2004 from 9:30 to 16:00 at the Technical University of Denmark, Building 303, DK-2800 Lyngby.

The headlines of the seminar are:

Metadata: Preservation 2000

editor — Wed, 10 Jan 2001 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Day reports on the Digital Preservation conference held in York in December 2000.

The Cedars conference, "Preservation 2000: an International Conference on the Preservation and Long Term Accessibility of Digital Materials," was held at the Viking Moat House Hotel in York on 7-8 December 2000. There were over 150 participants, about one half from outside the UK. As a prelude to the conference proper, a one-day workshop entitled "Information Infrastructures for Digital Preservation" was held at the same venue on the 6 December. This workshop mostly concerned preservation metadata and attracted over 70 participants.

How the Oxford English Dictionary Went Online

editor — Thu, 22 Jun 2000 23:00:00 +0000

Laura Elliot explains the use of SGML in the management of the OED text.

Ariadne has already described the long-term task of revising the Oxford English Dictionary and reviewed OED Online at its launch in March this year, but the editor judged, rightly, that there must be a hidden story on the making of the web site.

The World's Greatest Dictionary' Goes Online

editor — Thu, 23 Mar 2000 00:00:00 +0000

Juliet New explains the background to the electronic version of the Oxford English Dictionary, launched on the 14 March 2000.

Metadiversity

editor — Sat, 19 Dec 1998 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Day on a Biodiversity conference in the States interested in Metadata.

Introduction and context

First, we simply need to be moving faster to coordinate the information that already exists, on file cards and computers, scattered around the world's major and minor museums and other collections. ... Second these databases must be widely available and 'customer friendly'. We need to accelerate current efforts for international cooperation and coordination, so that common formats are increasingly agreed and used.
Robert M. May (1994) [1].

Digital Libraries '97

editor — Thu, 18 Sep 1997 23:00:00 +0000

David Nichols reports on the important international conference: Digital Libraries '97.

The ACM conference on Digital Libraries is, despite its short life, the premier conference for the field. This year the computer scientists, librarians and all those in-between travelled to Philadelphia in Pennsylvania for ACM Digital Libraries '97 [1]. The conference, from 23-26 July, took place in the Doubletree Hotel [2] in downtown Philly and was co-located with the more technical SIGIR '97 [3].

INFOMINE

editor — Wed, 19 Mar 1997 00:00:00 +0000

Steve Mitchell describes INFOMINE, an impressive attempt to build a Web-based virtual library for the academic community.

SETIS: Electronic Texts at the University of Sydney Library

editor — Wed, 19 Mar 1997 00:00:00 +0000

Creagh Cole describes a project dedicated to providing in-house access to a large number of electronic texts on CD-ROM.