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Tag Archives: digital libraries

NISO IR Presentation: “The Third Wave of Library Information Stewardship”

On Monday, I had the honor and pleasure of speaking at the NISO workshop “Getting the Most Out of Your Institutional Repository” on the topic of The Third Wave of Library Information Stewardship. The presentation abstract was:

[Academic] Libraries are gearing up for the third wave of information under our stewardship. In the first wave, libraries purchased, made discoverable, and managed information from commercial sources in physical forms (e.g., paper-bound monographs, traditional serials, and microform archives). In the second wave, libraries licensed, made discoverable, and supported information from commercial sources in digital form (e.g., electronic journals, index/abstract databases, and image collections).

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A View of Regional Digitization Centers

As a part of work for an OhioLINK strategic task force, I have been exploring the creation and operation of regional/collaborative/shared digitization centers. This is a report of findings to date after an open call for information. The report is structured with questions to be explored when considering a regional digitization center followed by narratives from conversations with the Collaborative Digitization Program (formerly the Colorado Digitization Program), the Mountain West Digital Library, and the Ohio Historical Society. My thanks go out to Leigh Grinstead, Liz Bishoff, Karen Estlund, Angela O’Neal, and Phil Sager for their assistance.

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OAI-ORE Thoughts on Compound Documents

The Technical Committee and Liaison Group of the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange effort met last week in New York City to hammer out face-to-face some of the last remaining issues before work could begin on a draft specifications document. In preparation for that meeting, we worked on a white paper that is officially called “Compound Information Objects: The OAI-ORE Perspective” — but it might more accurately be called “Thoughts on Compound Documents”. The outline of the white paper looks like this:

  1. Introduction and Motivation
  2. An OAI-ORE Interoperability Layer for Compound Objects
  3. Exposing Logical Boundaries in the Web Graph
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Planning a digital preservation assessment using TRAC:CC and DRAMBORA

OhioLINK is engaged in building a “trusted digital repository” on behalf of its membership. As we build it, we want to have an understanding of what “trusted” means, and so we are engaging in an audit process to assess whether we can claim to be trustworthy. This process is panning out to have four major phases:

  1. Research common and best practices for preservation.
  2. Evaluate the OhioLINK policies and processes against common and best practices.
  3. Perform a gap analysis between where we are now and where common and best practices suggest we should be.
  4. Propose and adopt policies and processes that get us closer to the ideal common and best practices.

This is a report at the end of phase 1. Earlier this year, two major reports were released that address how one measures a “trustworthy repository.” The two reports are summarized below, followed by a recommendation.

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Seeking Information about Regional Digitization Centers

I’m looking for information about the formation and management of regional digitization centers for one of the OhioLINK strategic task forces. For our purposes, a “regional digitization center” is a place that has the hardware, software, and human expertise to convert a variety of media to digital form. (We’re primarily looking at small format imaging, but could also include broadside imaging, audio capture, and video transformation.) There is plenty of information to be found about the services that centers provide and even more evidence of regional groups wanting to create these centers, but precious little about the operation of the centers themselves. (As in zilch in professional literature searches, and only a few hits via general web searching.) The kinds of things I’m looking for are:

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Creating Participatory Digital Libraries

“Participatory Digital Libraries” is the name of a talk Paul Jones, Director of ibiblio.org, gave this morning at OCLC’s Kilgour Auditorium. Known as “The Public’s Library,” ibiblio is a large, diverse digital library. His talk offered insight on how ibiblio works and commentary for applying the same successful techniques in library projects. This is a summary of the key points of his talk; errors of transcription and omission are undoubtedly my own.

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“Using Access Data for Paper Recommendations”

Here is a pair of papers that I’d like a chance to digest at some point. The first is “Recommending Related Papers Based on Digital Library Access Records” by Stefan Pohl, Filip Radlinski, and Thorsten Joachims. According to the notes on the paper, it is to appear in proceedings of JCDL’07. The abstract:

An important goal for digital libraries is to enable researchers to more easily explore related work. While citation data is often used as an indicator of relatedness, in this paper we demonstrate that digital access records (e.g. http-server logs) can be used as indicators as well. In particular, we show that measures based on co-access provide better coverage than co-citation, that they are available much sooner, and that they are more accurate for recent papers.

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Disseminators As the Core of an Object Repository

I’ve been working to get JBoss Seam tied into Fedora, and along the way thought it would be wise to stop and document a core concept of this integration: the centrality of Fedora Disseminators in the the design of the Ohio Digital Resource Commons. Although there is nothing specific to JBoss Seam (a Java Enterprise Edition application framework) in these concepts, making an object “render itself” does make the Seam-based interface application easier to code and understand. A disseminator-centric architecture also allows us to put our code investment where it matters the most — in the repository framework — and exploit that investment in many places. So what does it mean to have a disseminator-centric architecture and have objects “render themselves”?

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Brewster Kahle on the Economics and Feasibility of Mass Book Digitization

Brewster Kahle, Director of the Internet Archive, was interviewed this week in a Chronicle of Higher Education podcast on the Economics and Feasibility of Mass Book Digitization. Among the many interesting points in the interview was that one of the biggest challenges is to such a mass digitization effort to believe that to digitize massive numbers of books and make them available is actually possible. The Open Content Alliance has put together a suite of technology that brings down the cost for a color scan with OCR to 10 cents per page or about $30 per book. He then goes on to perform this calculation: the library system in the U.S. is a 12B industry. One million books digitized a year is $30M, or “a little less than .3 percent of one year’s budget of the United States library system would build a 1 million book library that would be available to anyone for free.” He also covers copyright concerns including the more liberal copyright laws in countries such as China.

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What Librarians Could Learn From Journalists

On Tuesday, the Poynter Institute (a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists) released results of their EyeTrack07 study — an examination of reader behavior in the print and online mediums. An article on their website goes into more detail about the initial data but what caught my eye as of interest to the library community is the headline (”The Myth of Short Attention Spans”) and this conclusion “The reading-deep phenomenon [thoroughly reading a selected story] is even stronger online than in print.” Their website site has a video which explains the process and some of the initial results.

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From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Thursday the 28th of August 2008 at 4:27:30 AM EDT (-0400). The URL to this page is http://dltj.org/tag/digital-libraries/

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