Overview of content related to 'mods'

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.

Retooling Libraries for the Data Challenge

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

Dorothea Salo examines how library systems and procedures need to change to accommodate research data.

Eager to prove their relevance among scholars leaving print behind, libraries have participated vocally in the last half-decade's conversation about digital research data. On the surface, libraries would seem to have much human and technological infrastructure ready-constructed to repurpose for data: digital library platforms and institutional repositories may appear fit for purpose. However, unless libraries understand the salient characteristics of research data, and how they do and do not fit with library processes and infrastructure, they run the risk of embarrassing missteps as they come to grips with the data challenge.

Whether managing research data is 'the new special collections,'[1] a new form of regular academic-library collection development, or a brand-new library specialty, the possibilities have excited a great deal of talk, planning, and educational opportunity in a profession seeking to expand its boundaries.

Faced with shrinking budgets and staffs, library administrators may well be tempted to repurpose existing technology infrastructure and staff to address the data curation challenge. Existing digital libraries and institutional repositories seem on the surface to be a natural fit for housing digital research data. Unfortunately, significant mismatches exist between research data and library digital warehouses, as well as the processes and procedures librarians typically use to fill those warehouses. Repurposing warehouses and staff for research data is therefore neither straightforward nor simple; in some cases, it may even prove impossible.

Characteristics of Research Data

What do we know about research data? What are its salient characteristics with respect to stewardship?

Size and Scope

Perhaps the commonest mental image of research data is terabytes of information pouring out of the merest twitch of the Large Hadron Collider Project. So-called 'Big Data' both captures the imagination of and creates sheer terror in the practical librarian or technologist. 'Small data,' however, may prove to be the bigger problem: data emerging from individual researchers and labs, especially those with little or no access to grants, or a hyperlocal research focus. Though each small-data producer produces only a trickle of data compared to the like of the Large Hadron Collider Project, the tens of thousands of small-data producers in aggregate may well produce as much data (or more, measured in bytes) as their Big Data counterparts [2]. Securely and reliably storing and auditing this amount of data is a serious challenge. The burgeoning 'small data' store means that institutions without local Big Data projects are by no means exempt from large-scale storage considerations.

Small data also represents a serious challenge in terms of human resources. Best practices instituted in a Big Data project reach all affected scientists quickly and completely; conversely, a small amount of expert intervention in such a project pays immense dividends. Because of the great numbers of individual scientists and labs producing small data, however, immensely more consultations and consultants are necessary to bring practices and the resulting data to an acceptable standard.

Variability

Digital research data comes in every imaginable shape and form. Even narrowing the universe of research data to 'image' yields everything from scans of historical glass negative photographs to digital microscope images of unicellular organisms taken hundreds at a time at varying depths of field so that the organism can be examined in three dimensions. The tools that researchers use naturally shape the resulting data. When the tool is proprietary, unfortunately, so may be the file format that it produced. When that tool does not include long-term data viability as a development goal, the data it produces are often neither interoperable nor preservable.

A major consequence of the diversity of forms and formats of digital research data is a concomitant diversity in desired interactions. The biologist with a 3-D stack of microscope images interacts very differently with those images than does a manuscript scholar trying to extract the underlying half-erased text from a palimpsest. These varying affordances must be respected by dissemination platforms if research data are to enjoy continued use.

One important set of interactions involves actual changes to data. Many sorts of research data are considerably less usable in their raw state than after they have had filters or algorithms or other processing performed on them. Others welcome correction, or are refined by comparison with other datasets. Two corollaries emerge: first, that planning and acting for data stewardship must take place throughout the research process, rather than being an add-on at the end; and second, that digital preservation systems designed to steward only final, unchanging materials can only fail faced with real-world datasets and data-use practices.

Learning to YODL: Building York's Digital Library

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

Peri Stracchino and Yankui Feng describe a year's progress in building the digital library infrastructure outlined by Julie Allinson and Elizabeth Harbord in their article last issue.

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].

iPRES 2008

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

Frances Boyle and Adam Farquhar report on the two-day international conference which was the fifth in the series on digital preservation of digital objects held at the British Library, on 29 - 30 September 2008.

RDA: A New International Standard

editor — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Ann Chapman describes work on the new cataloguing code, Resource Description and Access (RDA), based on the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR).

DC 2006: Metadata for Knowledge and Learning

editor — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Julie Allinson, Rachel Heery, Pete Johnston and Rosemary Russell report on DC 2006, the sixth international conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, held 3 - 6 October 2006.

Introducing UnAPI

editor — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:00:00 +0000

Dan Chudnov and a team of colleagues describe unAPI, a tiny HTTP API for serving information objects in next-generation Web applications.

Common Web tools and techniques cannot easily manipulate library resources. While photo sharing, link logging, and Web logging sites make it easy to use and reuse content, barriers still exist that limit the reuse of library resources within new Web services. [1][2] To support the reuse of library information in Web 2.0-style services, we need to allow many types of applications to connect with our information resources more easily. One such connection is a universal method to copy any resource of interest.

Metasearch: Building a Shared, Metadata-driven Knowledge Base System

editor — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000

Terry Reese discusses the creation of a shared knowledge base system within OSU's open-source metasearch development.

Surveying the current metasearch tools landscape, it is somewhat surprising to find so few non-commercial implementations available. This is especially true considering that, as a group, the library community has cultivated a very vibrant open source community over the past ten or so years. One wonders then, why this particular service has been ceded to the world of commercial vendors. One can speculate that the creation and management of a metasearch knowledge base has likely played a large role [1].

Opening Up OpenURLs with Autodiscovery

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

Daniel Chudnov, Richard Cameron, Jeremy Frumkin, Ross Singer and Raymond Yee demonstrate a 'gather locally, share globally' approach to OpenURLs and metadata autodiscovery in scholarly and non-scholarly environments.

Library users have never before had so many options for finding, collecting and sharing information. Many users abandon old information management tools whenever new tools are easier, faster, more comprehensive, more intuitive, or simply 'cooler.' Many successful new tools adhere to a principle of simplicity - HTML made it simple for anyone to publish on the Web; XML made it simple for anyone to exchange more strictly defined data; and RSS made it simple to extract and repurpose information from any kind of published resource [1].

What Do Application Profiles Reveal about the Learning Object Metadata Standard?

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Jean Godby assesses the customised subsets of metadata elements that have been defined by 35 projects using the LOM standard to describe e-learning resources.

A Metadata Standard for Learning Objects

As learning objects grow in number and importance, institutions are faced with the daunting task of managing them. Like familiar items in library collections, learning objects need to be organised by subject and registered in searchable repositories. But they also introduce special problems. As computer files, they are dependent on a particular hardware and software environment.

An Introduction to the Search/Retrieve URL Service (SRU)

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

Eric Lease Morgan describes sibling Web Service protocols designed to define a standard form for Internet search queries as well as the structure of the responses.

This article is an introduction to the "brother and sister" Web Service protocols named Search/Retrieve Web Service (SRW) and Search/Retrieve URL Service (SRU) with an emphasis on the later. More specifically, the article outlines the problems SRW/U are intended to solve, the similarities and differences between SRW and SRU, the complimentary nature of the protocols with OAI-PMH, and how SRU is being employed in a sponsored NSF (National Science Foundation) grant called OCKHAM to facilitate an alerting service.

News and Events

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

Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.

The Joint Technical Symposium (JTS) - 24-26 June, Toronto

The Joint Technical Symposium (JTS) is the international meeting for organisations and individuals involved in the preservation and restoration of original image and sound materials. This year, JTS is scheduled to be held in Toronto, Canada, June 24-26, 2004.

Preliminary program information is now available on the JTS 2004 website. See: http://www.jts2004.org/english/program.htm

Building OAI-PMH Harvesters With Net::OAI::Harvester

editor — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Ed Summers describes Net::OAI::Harvester, the Perl package for easily interacting with OAI-PMH repositories as a metadata harvester. Ed provides examples of how to use Net::OAI::Harvester to write short programs which execute each of the 6 OAI-PMH verbs.

Net::OAI::Harvester is a Perl package for easily interacting with OAI-PMH repositories as a metadata harvester. The article provides examples of how to use Net::OAI::Harvester to write short programs that execute each of the 6 OAI-PMH verbs. Issues related to efficient XML parsing of OAI-PMH responses are discussed, as are specific techniques used by Net::OAI::Harvester.

ECDL-2003 Web Archiving

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Day reports on the 3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives held in Trondheim, August 2003.

On 21 August 2003, the 3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives [1] [2] was held in Trondheim, Norway in association with the 7th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) [3]. This event was the third in a series of annual workshops that have been held in association with the ECDL conferences held in Darmstadt [4] and Rome [5].