Category Archives: OhioLINK

The Ohio Library and Information Network, OhioLINK, is a consortium of Ohio’s college and university libraries and the State Library of Ohio. Serving more than 600,000 students, faculty, and staff at 85 institutions, OhioLINK’s membership includes 17 public universities, 23 community/technical colleges, 44 private colleges and the State Library of Ohio. OhioLINK serves faculty, students, staff and other researchers via campus-based electronic library systems, the OhioLINK central site, and Internet resources. OhioLINK’s goal is to provide easy access to information and rapid delivery of library materials throughout the state. OhioLINK offers six main electronic services: a library catalog, research databases, a multi-publisher electronic journal center, a digital media center, a growing collection of e-books, and an electronic theses and dissertations center.

Why FEDORA? Answers to the FEDORA Users Interview Survey

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The Fedora Outreach and Communications team is conducting a survey of the high-level sense of passion and commitment inherent in the Fedora community. I’ve posted some answers back to the FEDORA wiki on behalf of OhioLINK, and am also including the responses here as it fits into the “Why FEDORA?” series of blog postings. (If you are reading this through a RSS news reader, I think you’ll have to actually come to the DLTJ website and scroll down to the bottom of this post to see the table of contents of the series.) On with the responses!

This is a preview of Why FEDORA? Answers to the FEDORA Users Interview Survey. Read the full post (731 words, 2:55 minutes estimated reading time)

Ohio Digital Commons for Education Conference Announcement

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[Image: ODCE Logo]Where can faculty, administrators, librarians and technology gurus all meet to discuss learning, libraries, technology and the convergence of these activities? At the Ohio Digital Commons for Education 2007 – The Convergence of Learning, Libraries and Technology Conference, of course!

Be a part of ODCE 2007! The Ohio Digital Commons for Education partners — Ohio Learning Network, OhioLINK, and the Ohio Supercomputer Center/OARnet — are seeking interactive and engaging proposals for presentations, pre-conference workshops and technology demonstrations. Proposals are sought for the following topics:

  • E Squared – Effectiveness and Efficiencies
  • STEM2: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine
This is a preview of Ohio Digital Commons for Education Conference Announcement. Read the full post (210 words, 1 image, 50 seconds estimated reading time)

Best Practice Proposal for a DESCRIPTION Datastream

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OhioLINK is deep in the process of migrating content from our old Bulldog/Documentum-based system to, well, something else, and we’ve been talking about the treatment of the metadata in the course of the migration. I think it is safe to say that the Bulldog asset management system (and Documentum, which bought and integrated Bulldog into its product line about five years ago) is not really known for its rich handling of metadata. Or at least how the library community thinks of metadata: Dublin Core, MIX, MODS, MARC, VRA Core, PREMIS, FGCD, etc. — all at the same time in the same application engine with structured crosswalks between them. 1 I think it is also safe to say that pure, unqualified Dublin Core, the only datastream that is required for every FEDORA object, does not completely encompass the descriptive fidelity needed for our objects. These observations, combined with reading a mid-term project report from the RepoMMan effort in the U.K., got me thinking about metadata and how we should store it in FEDORA objects. The outcome of that line of thinking is this proposal: “to establish a practice of creating an in-line XML datastream with the label ‘DESCRIPTION’ that contains the primary descriptive metadata for each object.”

This is a preview of Best Practice Proposal for a DESCRIPTION Datastream. Read the full post (754 words, 3:01 minutes estimated reading time)

XTF and FEDORA — Comments from the Community

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Some questions and observations that have come in through mechanisms other than blog comments on the analysis of the XTF/FEDORA integration. I’ve reproduced those here for the sake of completeness, but also be sure to go back to the first two entries in this series to read the comments there as well.

Indiana University’s Observations


As it turns out, Indiana University is considering much the same path. They have an existing FEDORA-based repository and a number of XTF projects that have been in development for a while. They, too, are looking to put these two technologies together and have a page on their project website with Digital Repository Architecture > Search”>IU’s observations of an XTF plus FEDORA (plus more!) combination.

This is a preview of XTF and FEDORA — Comments from the Community. Read the full post (447 words, 1:47 minutes estimated reading time)

Analysis of CDL’s XTF textIndexer to Replace the Local Files with FEDORA Objects

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This is a continuation of the investigation about integrating the California Digital Library’s XTF software into the FEDORA digital object repository that started earlier. This analysis looks at the textIndexer module in particular, starting with an overview of how textIndexer works now with filesystem-based objects and ending with an outline of how this could with reading objects from a FEDORA repository instead.

XTF’s Native File System handler

Natively, XTF wants to read content out of the file system. The core of the processing is done in these two class files:

TextIndexer.java

This is a preview of Analysis of CDL’s XTF textIndexer to Replace the Local Files with FEDORA Objects. Read the full post (993 words, 3:58 minutes estimated reading time)

CDL’s XTF as a Front End to Fedora

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We’re experimenting pretty heavily now with the California Digital Library‘s XTF framework as a front-end to a FEDORA object repository. Initial efforts look promising — thanks go out to Brian Tingle and Kirk Hastings of CDL; Jeff Cousens, Steve DiDomenico, and Bill Parod from Northwestern; and Ross Wayland from UVa for helping us along in the right direction.

XTF into Eclipse How-To


As we get more serious about XTF, I wrote up a How-To document for bringing XTF into Eclipse so that it can be deployed as a dynamic web application. Let me know if you find it useful. Definitely let me know if you find it in error. We haven’t put a version of XTF into OhioLINK’s source code repository, but that might follow shortly.

This is a preview of CDL’s XTF as a Front End to Fedora. Read the full post (635 words, 2:32 minutes estimated reading time)

Representing Collections In FEDORA

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One of the DRC developers had a question recently that sparked a discussion about what to do with collections of objects. In order to answer the question of how to represent the notion of a collection within the repository, we’re going to have to get pretty heavy into RDF: the Resource Description Framework. RDF is a language created by the Worldwide Web Consortium “for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web.” If you already know about RDF — or just want to see what a proposed solution is — you can skip down to the “RDF for Collections in FEDORA” heading.

This is a preview of Representing Collections In FEDORA. Read the full post (881 words, 3:31 minutes estimated reading time)

OhioLINK is seeking to fill a Systems Engineer position. Interested?

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OhioLINK is seeking candidates to fill a newly-created position: Systems Engineer – Access Manager. This position will work with other OhioLINK staff in providing support of daily operations and will serve a primary role as Access Manager. As Access Manager, this position will support users who are experiencing access issues to OhioLINK’s databases and services including IP management, remote authentication, Shibboleth implementation, and analyzing networking issues.

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Fedora Advanced Applications Panel at JCDL2006

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I am excited almost beyond description to be sharing a panel with Sandy Payette (Cornell
University, USA), Andrew Treloar (Monash University, Australia), Matthias Razum (Fiz
Karlsruhe, Germany), and Carl Lagoze (Cornell University, USA) at the upcoming Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. The tutorial is on Sunday afternoon (Sunday, June 11, 2006, 1:30-5:00pm local time) with the title “The Fedora Service Framework – Advanced Applications and Panel Discussion”. Sandy’s recent announcement include this abstract:

This is a preview of Fedora Advanced Applications Panel at JCDL2006. Read the full post (408 words, 1:38 minutes estimated reading time)

OhioLINK Mentors Three Students in the Google Summer of Code

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OhioLINK is pleased to mentor three students working on projects for Ohio’s higher education and libraries around the world during the Google Summer of Code 2006. The three projects are:

JPIP Browser Applet and Streaming Server
This is a preview of OhioLINK Mentors Three Students in the Google Summer of Code. Read the full post (570 words, 2:17 minutes estimated reading time)