Overview of content related to 'internet archive'

EMTACL12 (Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries)

lisrw — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 14:42:26 +0000

Sarah Rayner and Olivia Walsby report on a three-day conference on Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries, hosted by NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) in Trondheim, Norway over 1 - 3 October 2012.

Table of Contents

Paint-Yourself-in-the-Corner Infrastructure
Think Different

The three-day conference consisted of eight keynote presentations by invited speakers and a number of parallel sessions. The main themes set out for this year’s conference were supporting research, organisational change within the library, linked open data and other semantic web applications in the library, new literacies, and new services/old services in new clothes, along with other relevant perspectives on emerging technologies.

We attended the conference to gain an overview of organisational changes happening across the sector in relation to technological developments and to gather opinion on the relevance of the academic library within a digital society. We also wanted to explore how the future exploitation of new technologies within libraries might have a positive impact on the quality of teaching and learning together with the student experience.

This article will summarise a selection of keynote and parallel sessions from across the three days that addressed these issues.

1 October 2012: Keynotes

Paint-Yourself-in-the-Corner Infrastructure

Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA

The opening keynote presented by Herbert Van de Sompel from Los Alamos National Laboratory in the USA raised the issues brought about by changes to scholarly communication. Herbert spoke about an increase in dynamic scholarly records that are continually in flux, interdependent, and Web-based, and with which our current infrastructures are unable to cope. With the publication of interdependent and executable papers, research is now a native Web activity; supporting the re-execution of algorithms and the ability to add data at any time (i.e. PLoS Topic Pages [1] PeerJ [2]). Herbert pointed out that, as a consequence, we now need to be able to view the state of a scholarly record at certain moments in time; to track back in time to see where findings have come from, and to trace the workflow, and therein lies a challenge for academic libraries.

Herbert explained that at present the archive infrastructure is only able to deal with static, non-fluxing research output, that, when using URIs, you will always come to the current version, not prior versions, and that Web archives are not integrated into the Web. As Herbert went on to point out, the key problem is that the Web was created without motion of time; existing in the ‘perpetual now’.

Herbert believes that the challenges we face in this new environment are two-fold: archival approaches need to be changed to use a different infrastructure; and we need to reassess how we reference scholarly assets. We have CMS records, Web archives, and caches, but it would be better to trace the history or timeline of a URI. Therefore, Herbert offered some potential tools and solutions; Memento [3] (started in 2009) allows you to track back to a past version of an item in the Internet archive, bridging current URIs to old URIs from the Internet archive, using a time gate. SiteStory [4] is a tool which allows your Web server to take an active part in its own archiving; every request from a user is pushed back to an archive and stored. Therefore, every time material is accessed, it is archived, thereby providing a true history of an object in the archive.

Herbert Van de Sompel (Photo courtesy of Lukas Koster, University of Amsterdam.)

In conclusion, Herbert suggested that archiving needs to be an ongoing activity, tracing every interaction, including archiving links at the time of publication to ensure that the context and history of an evolving piece of research will never be lost.

Think Different

Karen Coyle, Berkeley, CA, USA

Karen Coyle (Photo courtesy of Lukas Koster, University of Amsterdam.)

Karen opened by raising a challenge to the way in which libraries are still holding on to outdated practices, such as the librarian’s obsession with alphabetical order, describing it as essentially only ‘an accident of language’ and questioning its continuing relevance given the now pervasive ability to cross-search. Karen continued on this theme citing bibliographic hierarchies such as Dewey as ‘knowledge prevention systems’ which only serve to lock our users into a set view of what's out there.

Karen’s introduction led nicely on to the main themes of her presentation: the current role of the library, the need to move away from the view that getting the book into the user’s hand is the end game, and the need to change our attitudes to bibliographic control and linear order. In effect, ‘the library should no longer be about volume and ownership!’. Karen talked about how we should instead focus on how resources are used and what resources should be used together, to inform how we approach provision in the future. Karen believes that the library must become connected to information on the Web, providing more context for our users and thus allowing greater information discovery. Karen argued that the library’s role is no longer simply to gather items into an inventory but to seek to organise information that until now has been inconveniently packaged. She suggested that we need to change our view, to focus on the information and its context, not the objects or books themselves. Karen noted in particular that currently we present nothing within the context of time, reiterating the theme of time travel covered in Herbert’s presentation. So, how can we do this? Karen proposed that we should be able to interrogate catalogues to provide items with context. She gave examples such as WorldCat [5], where you can view timelines on people, what they have published and what has been published about them, giving a relative image of their importance.

Karen argued that although linked data could prove to be an answer, or could certainly help, we must nonetheless seek to find a range of solutions and technologies. She warned that the pitfall of having an answer is that it stops you asking questions! Karen talked about how libraries must now recognise that bibliographic data are available everywhere, and that what libraries have that is essential and unique are the details on holdings. She proposed that on searching the Web, part of the rich snippet should include information about what the library holds and whether it's available. The Web should be used to direct readers to their library holdings, as well as making use of data such as location information, already being sourced by search engines. Karen’s concluding remarks were that libraries need to look to this new approach (using tools such as Schema.org [6]) or they will lose visitors, and that if we want to remain visible and relevant, we need to be where our users are - on the Web.

The Future of the Past of the Web

lisrw — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 12:06:52 +0000

Matthew Brack reports on the one-day international workshop 'The Future of the Past of the Web' held at the British Library Conference Centre, London on 7 October, 2011.

We have all heard at least some of the extraordinary statistics that attempt to capture the sheer size and ephemeral nature of the Web. According to the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), more than 70 new domains are registered and more than 500,000 documents are added to the Web every minute [1]. This scale, coupled with its ever-evolving use, present significant challenges to those concerned with preserving both the content and context of the Web.

Retooling Special Collections Digitisation in the Age of Mass Scanning

editor — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Constance Rinaldo, Judith Warnement, Tom Baione, Martin R. Kalfatovic and Susan Fraser describe results from a study to identify and develop a cost-effective and efficient large-scale digitisation workflow for special collections library materials.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) [1] is a consortium of 12 natural history and botanical libraries that co-operate to digitise and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global 'biodiversity commons.' [2] The participating libraries hold more than two million volumes of biodiversity literature collected over 200 years to support the work of scientists, researchers and students in their home insti

10 Cheap and Easy Ways to Amplify Your Event

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

Marieke Guy describes new tools and services that can help you get your event heard.

In 2007 Lorcan Dempsey coined the phrase 'the amplified conference' [1]. He used the term to refer to how event outputs (such as talks and presentations) were being amplified 'through a variety of network tools and collateral communications'.

Turning on the Lights for the User: NISO Discovery to Delivery Forum

editor — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Laura Akerman and Kim Durante report on Discovery to Delivery, Creating a First-Class User Experience, a NISO Forum on today's information seekers and current standards developments held in March 2010 at the Georgia Tech Global Learning Center.

Moving Targets: Web Preservation and Reference Management

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

Richard Davis discusses the role of Web preservation in reference management. This article is based on a presentation given at the Innovations in Reference Management workshop, January 2010.

It seems fair to say that the lion's share of work on developing online tools for reference and citation management by students and researchers has focused on familiar types of publication. They generally comprise resources that can be neatly and discretely bound in the covers of a book or journal, or their electronic analogues, like the Portable Document Format (PDF): objects in established library or database systems, with ISBNs and ISSNs underwritten by the authority of formal publication and legal deposit.

Yet, increasingly, native Web resources are also becoming eminently citable, and managing both the resources, and references to them, is an ongoing challenge. Moreover, the issues associated with referencing this kind of material have received comparatively little attention, beyond introducing the convention that includes the URL and the date it was accessed in bibliographies. While it may be hard to quantify the "average lifespan of a web page" [1], what is undeniable is that Web resources are highly volatile and prone to deletion or amendment without warning.

Web Preservation is one field of endeavour which attempts to counter the Web's transient tendency, and a variety of approaches continue to be explored. The aim of this article is to convey the fairly simple message that many themes and concerns of Web preservation are equally relevant in the quest for effective reference management in academic research, particularly given the rate at which our dependence on Web-delivered resources is growing.

Digital preservation is, naturally, a strong theme in the work of the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC)'s Digital Archives Department, and Web preservation has featured particularly strongly in recent years. This article will draw upon several initiatives with which we have been involved recently. These include: the 2008 JISC Preservation of Web Resources Project (JISC-PoWR) [2], on which we worked with Brian Kelly and Marieke Guy of UKOLN; our work for the UK Web Archiving Consortium; and the ongoing JISC ArchivePress Project [3] (itself, in many ways, a sequel to JISC-PoWR).

Another perspective that I bring is as a part-time student myself, on the MSc E-Learning programme at Edinburgh University. As a consequence I have papers to read, and write, and a dissertation imminent. So for this reason too I have a stake in making it easier to keep track of information for reading lists, footnotes and bibliographies, whether with desktop tools or Web-based tools, or through features in online VLEs, databases and repositories.

Abstract Modelling of Digital Identifiers

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

Nick Nicholas, Nigel Ward and Kerry Blinco present an information model of digital identifiers, to help bring clarity to the vocabulary debates from which this field has suffered.

Discussion of digital identifiers, and persistent identifiers in particular, has often been confused by differences in underlying assumptions and approaches. To bring more clarity to such discussions, the PILIN Project has devised an abstract model of identifiers and identifier services, which is presented here in summary. Given such an abstract model, it is possible to compare different identifier schemes, despite variations in terminology; and policies and strategies can be formulated for persistence without committing to particular systems. The abstract model is formal and layered; in this article, we give an overview of the distinctions made in the model. This presentation is not exhaustive, but it presents some of the key concepts represented, and some of the insights that result.

The main goal of the Persistent Identifier Linking Infrastructure (PILIN) project [1] has been to scope the infrastructure necessary for a national persistent identifier service. There are a variety of approaches and technologies already on offer for persistent digital identification of objects. But true identity persistence cannot be bound to particular technologies, domain policies, or information models: any formulation of a persistent identifier strategy needs to outlast current technologies, if the identifiers are to remain persistent in the long term.

For that reason, PILIN has modelled the digital identifier space in the abstract. It has arrived at an ontology [2] and a service model [3] for digital identifiers, and for how they are used and managed, building on previous work in the identifier field [4] (including the thinking behind URI [5], DOI [6], XRI [7] and ARK [8]), as well as semiotic theory [9]. The ontology, as an abstract model, addresses the question 'what is (and isn't) an identifier?' and 'what does an identifier management system do?'. This more abstract view also brings clarity to the ongoing conversation of whether URIs can be (and should be) universal persistent identifiers.

Identifier Model

For the identifier model to be abstract, it cannot commit to a particular information model. The notion of an identifier depends crucially on the understanding that an identifier only identifies one distinct thing. But different domains will have different understandings of what things are distinct from each other, and what can legitimately count as a single thing. (This includes aggregations of objects, and different versions or snapshots of objects.) In order for the abstract identifier model to be applicable to all those domains, it cannot impose its own definitions of what things are distinct: it must rely on the distinctions specific to the domain.

This means that information modelling is a critical prerequisite to introducing identifiers to a domain, as we discuss elsewhere [10]: identifier users should be able to tell whether any changes in a thing's content, presentation, or location mean it is no longer identified by the same identifier (i.e. whether the identifier is restricted to a particular version, format, or copy).

The abstract identifier model also cannot commit to any particular protocols or service models. In fact, the abstract identifier model should not even presume the Internet as a medium. A sufficiently abstract model of identifiers should apply just as much to URLs as it does to ISBNs, or names of sheep; the model should not be inherently digital, in order to avoid restricting our understanding of identifiers to the current state of digital technologies. This means that our model of identifiers comes close to the understanding in semiotics of signs, as our definitions below make clear.

There are two important distinctions between digital identifiers and other signs which we needed to capture. First, identifiers are managed through some system, in order to guarantee the stability of certain properties of the identifier. This is different to other signs, whose meaning is constantly renegotiated in a community. Those identifier properties requiring guarantees include the accountability and persistence of various facets of the identifier—most crucially, what is being identified. For digital identifiers, the identifier management system involves registries, accessed through defined services. An HTTP server, a PURL [11] registry, and an XRI registry are all instances of identifier management systems.

Second, digital identifiers are straightforwardly actionable: actions can be made to happen in connection with the identifier. Those actions involve interacting with computers, rather than other people: the computer consistently does what the system specifies is to be done with the identifier, and has no latitude for subjective interpretation. This is in contrast with human language, which can involve complex processes of interpretation, and where there can be considerable disconnect between what a speaker intends and how a listener reacts. Because the interactions involved are much simpler, the model can concentrate on two actions which are core to digital identifiers, but which are only part of the picture in human communication: working out what is being identified (resolution), and accessing a representation of what is identified (retrieval).

So to model managing and acting on digital identifiers, we need a concept of things that can be identified, names for things, and the relations between them. (Semiotics already gives us such concepts.) We also need a model of the systems through which identifiers are managed and acted on; what those systems do, and who requests them to do so; and what aspects of identifiers the systems manage.

Our identifier model (as an ontology) thus encompasses:

Entities - including actors and identifier systems;
Relations between entities;
Qualities, as desirable properties of entities. Actions are typically undertaken in order to make qualities apply to entities.
Actions, as the processes carried out on entities (and corresponding to services in implementations);

An individual identifier system can be modelled using concepts from the ontology, with an identifier system model.

In the remainder of this article, we go through the various concepts introduced in the model under these classes. We present the concept definitions under each section, before discussing issues that arise out of them. Resolution and Retrieval are crucial actions for identifiers, whose definition involves distinct issues; they are discussed separately from other Actions. We briefly discuss the standing of HTTP URIs in the model at the end.

News and Events

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

Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.

UKeiG Intranet's Forum: ERM's Knowledge Sharing Platform – February 2010

UKeiG Intranet's Forum: ERM's Knowledge Sharing Platform:
A chance to see one of the world's top 10 best intranets
Free informal Intranets Forum meeting for UKeiG members

ERM, 2/F Exchequer Court, 33 St. Mary Axe, London EC3A 8AA
Friday 26 February 2010, 4.00 - 5.30 p.m.
http://www.ukeig.org.uk/

Missing Links: The Enduring Web

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

Alexandra Eveleigh reports on a workshop on Web archiving, organised by the DPC, JISC and UKWAC at the British Library on 21 July 2009.

This workshop, jointly sponsored by the DPC [1], JISC [2] and UKWAC [3], aimed to bring together content creators and tool developers with key stakeholders from the library and archives domains, in the quest for a technically feasible, socially and historically acceptable, legacy for the World Wide Web.

JISC Digital Content Conference 2009

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

Michelle Pauli reports on a two-day conference on digital content held by JISC in South Cerney over 30 June - 1 July 2009.

IMPACT Conference: Optical Character Recognition in Mass Digitisation

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

Lieke Ploeger, Yola Park, Jeanna Nikolov-Ramirez Gaviria, Clemens Neudecker, Fedor Bochow and Michael Day report from the first IMPACT Conference, held in The Hague, Netherlands on 6-7 April, 2009.

Get Tooled Up: Staying Connected: Technologies Supporting Remote Workers

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Having considered organisational issues in her previous article, Marieke Guy takes a look at the many technologies that support remote working, from broadband to Web 2.0 social networking tools.

Embedding Web Preservation Strategies Within Your Institution

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Christopher Eddie reports on the third one-day workshop of the JISC-PoWR (Preservation of Web Resources) Project held at the University of Manchester on 12 September 2008.

The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland

editor — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 23:00:00 +0000

John MacColl reviews the first two volumes of this very substantial three-part work, covering the periods to 1640 and 1640-1850.

Cambridge University Press has, with the first two volumes of its three-volume history of libraries in Britain and Ireland, provided a wealth of fascinating information on the development of libraries and librarianship from a sterling collection of historians and scholar librarians. The publication of an edited history results in a denser packing of detail than would be achieved by a work of single authorship, since so many specialists each have an abundance of knowledge to cram into their relatively small allocations of space.

Search Engines: Why Ask Me, and Does 'X' Mark the Spot?

editor — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 23:00:00 +0000

Phil Bradley takes a look at different versions of Ask to see how it is developing and looks at how it is emerging from its servant roots.

Editorial Introduction to Issue 50: Side-Stepping Babel