Disruptive Library Technology Jester » standards

What To Do With ISO 2709:2008?

Peter Murray — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 01:43:48 +0000

My employer recently became a member of NISO and I was made the primary representative. This is my first formal interaction with the standards organization heirarchy (NISO → ANSI → ISO) and as one of the side effects I’m being asked to provide advice to NISO on how its vote should be cast on relevant ISO ballots. Much of it has been pretty routine so far, but today one jumped out at me — the systematic review for the standard ISO 2709:2008, otherwise blandly known as Information and documentation — Format for information exchange. You might know it as the underlying structure of MARC. (Though, to describe it accurately, MARC is a subset or profile of ISO 2709.) And the voting options are: Confirm (as is), Revise/Amend, Withdraw (the standard), or Abstain (from the vote).

What is ISO 2709?

The scope statement of the standard is:

This International Standard specifies the requirements for a generalized exchange format which will hold records describing all forms of material capable of bibliographic description as well as other types of records. It does not define the length or the content of individual records and does not assign any meaning to tags, indicators or identifiers, these specifications being the functions of an implementation format.
This International Standard describes a generalized structure, a framework designed specially for communications between data processing systems and not for use as a processing format within systems.

The Wikipedia page for ISO 2709 pretty much sums up what is in the standard itself without all of the gory definitions and details, and if you are used to dealing with MARC records, it’ll look familiar.

According to the documentation I can find, ISO 2709 was last revised in 2008 when it was “technically revised to incorporate specification of the use of ISO/IEC 10646 using 8-bit Unicode Transformation Format (UTF-8) encoding.” The ballot in play now is a “systematic review”¹ of the 2008 revision of the standard.

What are my choices again?

As a member of NISO, I can cast an advisory vote to recommend how NISO — the U.S. representative to ISO for this technical committee — casts it single vote among all of the voting countries of this technical committee. And in my capacity as a NISO member, I can vote to confirm the standard, revise it, or ask that it be withdrawn. And so here is my quandry. As a standard for “generalized exchange format which will hold records describing all forms of material capable of bibliographic description” it works okay, but I think it is hard to argue with the fact that information exchange formats have moved well beyond this sort of format. (My favorite interchange format is XML, but there are some that advocate now for JSON as a universal exchange format.)

So here is where I need help. Should I vote to confirm the status quo? Or should I vote to revise/amend with a comment that says it is time to take this interchange format into XML, and in doing so set a path for the eventual deprecation of what we know as ISO 2709:2008? Should I take the bold step and vote to withdraw the standard (which itself seems extreme given its current wide use in the library and closely related fields)?

What would you do with ISO 2709?

Footnotes

“In addition to the continuous maintenance of the standard described above, a comprehensive review of a database standard at regular intervals may be necessary which is organized in accordance with the rules in the ISO/IEC Directives and the ISO Supplement for the systematic review process.” Procedure for the development and maintenance of standards in database format. Annex ST of the ISO supplement to the ISO/IEC Directives.

New Web Expectations and Mobile Web Techniques

Peter Murray — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 01:11:09 +0000

Late last year I was asked to put together a 20-minute presentation for my employer (LYRASIS) on what I saw as upcoming technology milestones that could impact member libraries. It was a good piece, so I thought I’d share what I learned with others as well. The discussion was in two parts — general web technologies/expectations and mobile applications/web.

New Web Technologies, New Web Expectations

As libraries expand in the role of information providers on the internet with licensed/subscribed services and local collections, we enter into a competitive marketplace of others doing the same thing. Users compare how our services look and act to peer sites, and such a comparison goes beyond just the “skin” of the site graphical design that might encompass the traditional “website redesign.” This matters for what we do for ourselves and what we ask vendors to do for us. Below is a discussion of the latest trends in web technologies that impact library services.

Speed is Important

The speed of the web is now an essential part of web design. The user expectation for fast web services is now embodied in the fact that Google uses the speed of a web page as a signal in its relevancy calculation formula; faster websites appear higher in the results list. The speed of a web page is a combination of the time it takes for a web server to respond to the request and the time it takes a web browser to render the page. A recent example is the comparison of discovery layers and OPACs with results ranging from about 1 second to about 12 seconds¹. There is a growing body of best practices to use in coding web applications, operating web server farms, and designing fast web pages, and creators of our websites should be aware of them.

HTML5 and CSS3 Bring New Capabilities

The state of web technology standards is progressing. The emerging definition and use of HTML5 and CSS3² bring new techniques that improve interoperability, semantic encoding, speed, and quite frankly visually pleasing design capabilities. A new standard for embedding video and audio promises to improve access to media in a leap that resembles how Flash-based media improved on the rash of competing encoding formats and plug-ins (RealMedia, Windows Media, QuickTime, etc.). New, more semantically meaningful HTML tags signal improvements to search hit relevance and web page accessibility. New abilities to store information in the browser will reduce client-to-server overhead and enable off-line access to web applications. And new capabilities for rendering content on pages with Cascading Style Sheets will simplify the hacks that designers are using now. We should look to our vendors and software developers to weave these new capabilities into website designs.

Wide Screen to Mobile: Responsive Web Design

Demonstration of Responsive Web Design

An emerging best practice in the development of web sites is “responsive web design.” In this case, “responsive” means that the page layout modifies itself to match the capabilities of the device. Content and navigation are arranged in meaningful ways using HTML/CSS/JavaScript coding for large desktop monitors to small handheld screens. One page can service needs of users across all of these devices, and in doing so eliminate the need for duplicating content across “desktop” and “mobile” sites. (As a side effect, consolidating page views for desktop and mobile devices onto a single set of URLs improves search engine optimization efficiency – resulting in pages appearing higher in search results lists.) A demonstration of this is worth a thousand words; the video at http://vimeo.com/17603980 shows the capabilities of responsive web design.

Good Web Design is Complex, Specialized Work

Back when I started with the web in 1995 a “webmaster” was someone with three skillsets: content markup (HTML), graphic design, and server management. Even in the early days, it was hard to find one person skilled in all of these areas. Today it is impossible. Web design now includes copyediting, web-specific graphic design, HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, database design, application programming (PHP, Java, Ruby on Rails, etc.), content distribution networks, web server optimization, hardware clustering. If you are creating websites on your own, be ready to hire the talent you need on short-term contracts or consulting arrangements.

Mobile

Meeting Your Users Where They Are

Last year IDC Research reported “there were more than 450 million mobile Internet users worldwide in 2009, a number that is expected to more than double by the end of 2013.” EMarketer research estimated in 2009 that 26% of all mobile phone subscribers (73.7 million) had internet access on their mobile device – numbers that were expected to increase to 43% and 134 million in 2013. Users are becoming accustomed to using mobile devices to look for information at the point of need. (My own family tells me that they can’t leave a factual question hanging – be it the weather for tomorrow or the relative size of humans to dinosaurs – without me pulling out my phone for the answer.)

Mobile Apps versus Mobile Websites

Mobile services come in two flavors: mobile apps and mobile websites. Each technique has advantages and disadvantages. Mobile apps use a software development kit supplied by the operating system creator (Apple, Google, etc.) that enables programmers to develop applications for handheld devices. These applications can use some capabilities on the phone that are not available to mobile websites running in the browser (e.g., accelerometer, camera, address book). The user interface of mobile apps tends to be smoother than mobile websites, and the full graphics capabilities of the device are available for intense graphics like games.

Mobile websites are always current because they refresh themselves from on the network; there isn’t a need to submit a version to a third-party for review. Eliminating the review step also removes restrictions on what can be done with a mobile service. With HTML5 techniques, mobile websites can now store and access information without a live network connection. There isn’t a need to code separate apps for different devices – HTML is universal.

As the responsive web design demonstration shows, it is possible to create web sites that scale from desktop to handheld without duplicating content or sacrificing usability. If a library application is not making use of the unique capabilities of a mobile app, why build one?

Footnotes

Brown-Sica, M., Beall, J., & Mchale, N. (December 2010). Next-Generation Library Catalogs and the Problem of Slow Response Time. Information Technology and Libraries, 29 (4), p213. Preprint available [PDF]
Technically, Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 is a family of specifications that are all in various stages of definition and adoption.

“Do More … With Someone Else” — Guest Editor Introduction to NISO ISQ Fall Issue

Peter Murray — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:57:47 +0000

I’m pleased to announce that the Fall 2010 issue of NISO‘s International Standards Quarterly (ISQ) is done and available online to NISO members and ISQ subscribers. Print copies are scheduled to be mailed on December 28th. The individual issue is available for purchase (see the form link to on the issue homepage), and some of the articles are freely available on the NISO website. The theme for the issue is resource sharing, and I was privileged to be the guest editor for the issue. Included below is my introduction letter to whet your appetite for the full issue.

Issue Introduction: “Do More … With Someone Else”

It comes as no surprise in today’s economic conditions that the mantra of “do more with less” is often repeated. For libraries, there simply isn’t enough money to buy and hold everything that patrons might want. Although that has been true for a long time, as has the professional ethic to share the information resources we have to the greatest extent possible, pressures are increasing to find new partnerships and new workflows that improve service to patrons and reduce the costs of doing so.

This issue contains articles that illustrate new approaches and improvements to resource sharing. One feature article is an exploration by Kyle Banerjee and Anya Arnold of the standards and protocols used by the Orbis Cascade Alliance Consortial Borrowing System. The first consortium to use the WorldCat Navigator software, the Alliance is at the forefront of pushing interoperability between various systems. Their experience points to practical issues when standards such as Z39.50 and NCIP are used to connect multi-party, multi-system environments. A second feature contains a compilation of some of the new tools, systems, and standards that are available for resource sharing. One or more might be right for you.

As important as standards are in making the data bits flow smoothly from place-to-place, the ways in which projects are financed and sustained are key to enabling those bits to keep flowing. In the opinion section of this issue are two articles that address funding models for cooperative information resources and repositories. First, Edward Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Principal Editor and Senior Editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), review the successes and the challenges of their effort to endow a fund for the maintenance and expansion of an open access encyclopedia. SEP started by soliciting commitments first from libraries and private donors, then from individuals. Now they are striving to find new “carrots” for contributors to make up the difference in the hopes of avoiding “sticks” that may result in closed access. In the second article, Oya Rieger and Simeon Warner discuss the early stages of finding a sustainable business model for the arXiv service. Up to this point it has been supported by the generosity of the host institution. Twenty years after it was founded and ten years after it moved from Los Alamos National Laboratory to Cornell University, an international advisory group is now working on a business plan for the long-term sustainability of arXiv.

The member spotlight is an interview with Susan Campbell of the College Center for Library Automation (CCLA) in Florida. CCLA is making use of standards such as COUNTER/SUSHI, NCIP, and Open URL to support their consortium members.

Much of the focus today seems to be on electronic resources, but a substantial volume of physical materials are still being shared and finding cost-effective ways of doing this are more important than ever. In the NISO Reports section Valerie Horton and Diana Sachs-Silveira, co-chairs of the Physical Delivery of Library Resources working group, provide an update on their work to create a recommended practice for optimizing the sharing of items between libraries.

In times of “do more with less” perhaps the phrase we should take to heart is “do more with someone else.” By combining efforts we can be greater than the sum of our parts. We need to stretch, enhance, and redefine the standards and processes used today to meet this new, critical mission. I hope this issue of ISQ helps you find ways to do just that.

Originally published as: Murray, Peter E. (2010). Do More … With Someone Else International Standards Quarterly, 22 (4), 3-3 : 10.3789/isqv22n4.2010.01

RDA-as-Service Only

Peter Murray — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 13:40:19 +0000

At the ALA Annual Conference exhibit floor I got my first chance to see the RDA Toolkit. RDA is “Resource Description and Access” — the new standard for bibliographic description of content. So this was the first time I really got to look at the RDA Toolkit. (By the way, you can look at it, too, during an open trial access period that runs through the end of August by signing up for it.) What really struck in me the demonstration, though, was that the site is as much a subscription to access the content of the RDA standard as it is a subscription to a delivery service with functions and features that go beyond the text of the standard itself. The text of the standard will be available in printed form, but one cannot get an electronic copy of the standard itself. This strikes me as sort of weird, so this blog post talks through that weirdness feeling.

I’m trying to think of another example of a standard that inseparable from a delivery system for the standard, and I can’t think of any. Now granted, that the RDA Toolkit website has some very nice features for interlinking between documents, for creating local “workflows” and “mappings” for local activities, and creating group subscription-specific links to local documents. But this decision to only allow electronic access to the standard through this subscription service that requires an annual fee feels uncomfortable. Like I don’t really have access to the standard. Like it was a decision to limit competition for other delivery mechanisms to make sure a rather lucrative ongoing income through the RDA Toolkit website.

Also weird is the answer to the question “How does the site calculate the number of concurrent users?“. The notion of “concurrent users” is pretty hard in the web space because in the normal mode of operation there isn’t an ongoing connection between a user’s browser and the content server. There is a connection to deliver the HTML, associated graphics and other page content when a user initially asks for the page. But while the user is reading the page there is no ongoing connection between browser and server. I would expect to see mention in this section of “a concurrent user is counted for five minutes from when the browser last accesses the server” but that isn’t there.

Has anyone else thought about this, or is it getting discussed elsewhere? I may write more here as I have a chance to think about it and talk with others about it.

Update: Monday, June 28th

CC:DA Meeting with Ron Murray's FRBR Paper Tool documents spread out on the floor

As it happens, I was at the CC:DA meeting on Monday morning to see Ron Murray’s talk on network structures of FRBR entities, and right afterwards was an update on the RDA Toolkit site by Don Chatham, Associate Executive Director at ALA Publishing Services. I got to ask the question about electronic access to the standard, and it seems to be something they are considering. He said they designed the interface to be optimized for the ruleset, but they might consider an e-book format. I pressed about getting access to the raw document to create other derivatives. The canonical file is in XML format with a very complicated structure, and they use that to create the derivatives (the preprints that have been released over the past year or so, RDA Toolkit site, and the planned print version). They have been so busy getting the RDA Toolkit site up that they have not considered other modes of distribution (including the newly announced print version) until recently. It also isn’t clear what the licensing terms would be for the electronic version.

Some other interesting facts. There have been 2,200 requests for trial access. (I wish they wouldn’t call it “open access” because that phrase has other connotations, but what can you do…) About 2/3rds of the trial access requests were for institutional accounts. 53% came from the United States; 11% from Australia; 10% from Canada; 4% from the U.K. Creating these trial access accounts has been a manual process, and there is a backlog at the moment. (I signed up for trial access on Saturday and I haven’t heard back yet — probably because all the people who would act on that request are here at ALA.)

There was discussion about the update process for the standard. They are taking a very deliberate approach to start with — thinking that even minor typographical changes might have major conceptual impacts — so they won’t make any changes without JSC approval. On the service side, there are plans to enhance the site with multiple translations and more user configurable options. There is also the print version, but no date or pricing information has been set. (The cost of the print version will probably be in the $150 range.) They are also preparing help guides and mechanisms for deep linking into the RDA Toolkit site and for advanced searching.

Proposals for NISO Work Items: Physical Delivery Best Practices and Standardized Markup for Journal Articles

Peter Murray — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 21:17:19 +0000

NISO voting members are currently considering two new work items: a statement of best practices for the physical delivery of library resources and formalizing the NLM journal article DTD de facto standards. The Physical Delivery and Standardized Markup for Journal Articles proposal documents are openly available for download.

The first is a proposal submitted by Valerie Horton, Executive Director, Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC), on the Physical Delivery of Library Resources — and subsequently approved by NISO’s Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee —that aims to develop a statement of best practices. This proposed project would build on the efforts of three recent projects: Moving Mountains, Rethinking Resource Sharing’s Physical Delivery Committee, and the American Library Association’s ASCLA ICAN’s Physical Delivery Discussion Group. The document is proposed to include recommendations for: packaging, shipping codes, labeling, acceptable turn-around time, lost or damaged materials handling, package tracking, ergonomic considerations, statistics, sorting, a set of elements to be used for comparison purposes to determine costs, linking of regional and local library carriers, and international delivery.
The second proposal on Standardized Markup for Journal Articles was submitted by Jeff Beck, Technical Information Specialist, National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) — and subsequently approved by NISO’s Content & Collection Management Topic Committee — and is based on the National Library of Medicine’s journal archiving and interchange tag suite. Three schemas for journal articles are include in the Suite and are maintained by NLM: NLM Archiving and Interchange Tag Set, NLM Journal Publishing Tag Set, and the NLM Article Authoring Tag Set. The goal of this work item is to take the currently existing Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite version 3.0, the three journal article schemas, and the documentation and shepherd them through the NISO process to become an ANSI/NISO consensus standard.

For a proposed working group to get started, at least 10% of NISO’s Voting Members must express an interest in the work item. The Physical Delivery ballot ends on September 1 and Journal Article Markup ends on September 2. Should the work items be approved, you can express interest in joining the working groups by using the NISO Contact Form, even if you aren’t affiliated with a NISO Voting Member organization.

Specifications for Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) published

Peter Murray — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:39:08 +0000

The first production version of the Object Reuse and Exchange from the Open Archives Initiative was published today. In the words of the release announcement, ORE provides “the foundation for applications and services that can visualize, preserve, transfer, summarize, and improve access to the aggregations that people use in their daily Web interaction: including multiple page Web documents, multiple format documents in institutional repositories, scholarly data sets, and online photo and music collections.”

This release of the 1.0 version features a newly rewritten primer as well as updated user guides (Resource Map Implementation in Atom, Resource Map Implementation in RDF/XML, Resource Map Implementation in RDFa, HTTP Implementation, and Resource Map Discovery) and core specifications (Abstract Data Model and ORE Vocabulary). There are also Tools and Additional Resources, an ORE Google Group and a ORE Wiki.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://foresite.cheshire3.org/wiki/ on January 28th, 2011.

“Object Reuse and Exchange” Beta Specifications Now Available

Peter Murray — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:11:58 +0000

Carl Lagoze of Cornell University and Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory announced the release of the beta form of the ORE specifications yesterday. Here is the full text of their announcement:

Over the past eighteen months the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), in a project called Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), has gathered international experts from the publishing, web, library, and eScience community to develop standards for the identification and description of aggregations of online information resources. These aggregations, sometimes called compound digital objects, may combine distributed resources with multiple media types including text, images, data, and video. The goal of these standards is to expose the rich content in these aggregations to applications that support authoring, deposit, exchange, visualization, reuse, and preservation. Although a motivating use case for the work is the changing nature of scholarship and scholarly communication, and the need for cyberinfrastructure to support that scholarship, the intent of the effort is to develop standards that generalize across all web-based information including the increasing popular social networks of “web 2.0″.
The beta version of the OAI-ORE specifications and implementation documents are released to the public on June 2, 2008. These documents describe a data model to introduce aggregations as resources with URIs on the web. They also detail the machine-readable descriptions of aggregations expressed in the popular Atom syndication format, in RDF/XML, and RDFa. The table of contents page with links to the following other documents is located at http://www.openarchives.org/ore/toc.
A forum for feedback on this beta release is at http://groups.google.com/group/oai-ore. This feedback and further consultation with the OAI-ORE community will be considered in the evolution of this beta release to a production release scheduled for September 2008.
Ben O’Steen has some comments about the differences between the last alpha and this beta. I haven’t had a chance to go through this version yet, but hope to next week.

Preserving Digital Video

Peter Murray — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 20:22:14 +0000

My place of work is looking to acquire educational videos in a digital form with an eye towards long-term preservation. At this point we receive a physical form (preferably DVD, but sometimes VHS) and digitize it to a very lossy access format (RealMedia, in this case). With this change, we would get a preservation-worthy digital copy from the producer/distributor and forego the physical version.

There is quite a lot written on preserving video, but I wanted to distill the requirements down into statements that vendors could reasonably provide today. I think these are pretty sound requirements, but I’m looking for feedback. In particular, I’m not quite sure how to handle the transfer of closed caption text from the publisher/distributor; suggestions are welcome.

[Jester's note: I just realized that an earlier version of this posting went out to the net about two hours before this "final" version. Sorry about publishing the work-in-progress early; I must have hit the wrong button in the new version of WordPress...]

File Formats

Some of the clearest guidance on file formats comes from this short excerpt from the Moving Image section of the U.K. Arts and Humanities Data Service Preservation Handbook:

Guidance on the preservation of digital video should, by necessity, change over time. [...] The MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 formats are better suited to high-quality digital video. MPEG-2 is better known for its use as a format for DVD-Video, which encourages confidence when considering the likelihood that the format will be readable in the long-term. The format has an average transfer rate of 2-5 megabits per second, but there may be disk space restraints and the software tools necessary to convert and store this format are costly. MPEG-4 has a lower transfer rate of 1-2 megabits per second and is intended for streaming video. Other codecs, such as QuickTime, Windows Media, Real Video and Open DIVX, are useful for specific purposes, but not suitable for preservation. ¹

The Library of Congress Sustainability of Digital Formats site has an entry for MPEG-2 (also known as H.262) and an entry for MPEG-4 (more completely, MPEG-4 file format version #2) that give the nitty-gritty details for the file formats.

The preservation master copies we want to store has a frame size of 720 pixels by 480 pixels. (That size is for NTSC format videos, common in USA, Canada and Japan. Master copies of PAL-format videos, common in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and most of Europe, is 720 x 576.) This is the standard resolution used in MPEG-2-compressed commercially distributed DVD movies.² These frame sizes are appropriate for analog video signals. (“As defined by ITU-R Recommendation BT.601, more commonly know by the abbreviations Rec. 601 or BT.601 or its former name, CCIR 601. [It is] a standard published by the CCIR (now ITU-R) for encoding interlaced analogue video signals in digital form.”³ ) The audio is 48KHz stereo at 224 kb/s or better.

Captioning Text

There appears to be two primary schemes for binding closed captioned text with video files. One from the W3C is Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (or SMIL) is an XML format and is used by many media players. The other is Microsoft’s Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange (or SAMI), a pseudo-HTML format that is only read by Windows Media player.

To make matters more complicated, a whole set of different schemes are used for DVDs. (On VHS recordings, closed caption text was encoded in one of the non-visible lines that make up the video signal. Since the DVD format only included visible lines, other schemes were required.) The most popular seems to be the Scenarist Closed Caption (SCC) format. This is a binary file that exists on the DVD along side the video files.

Resources Consulted

Arms, C. R., & Fleischhauer, C. Sustainability of Digital Formats: Planning for Library of Congress Collections. National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. Retrieved April 8, 2008, from http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/.

Audio/Video Capture and Management. (2002).In NINCH Guide to Good Practice (1st). Retrieved April 8, 2008, from http://www.nyu.edu/its/humanities/ninchguide/VII/.

Guideline H: Provide access to multimedia presentations for users with sensory disabilities. Accessible Digital Media: Design Guidelines for Electronic Publications, Multimedia and the Web. Retrieved 14-Apr-2008 from http://ncam.wgbh.org/publications/adm/guideline_h.html.

Knight, G., & McHugh, J. (2005). Preservation Handbook: Moving Image. AHDS Preservation Handbook. 8 p. Arts and Humanities Data Service. Retrieved April 8, 2008, from http://ahds.ac.uk/preservation/video-preservation-handbook.pdf.

Rec. 601. (2008, April 8).Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved April 8, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._601 (version at time of citation).

The text was modified to update a link from http://ahds.ac.uk/ to http://www.ahds.ac.uk/ on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://ahds.ac.uk/preservation/ahds-preservation-documents.htm to http://www.ahds.ac.uk/preservation/ahds-preservation-documents.htm on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://ahds.ac.uk/preservation/video-preservation-handbook.pdf to http://www.ahds.ac.uk/preservation/video-preservation-handbook.pdf on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://ncam.wgbh.org/publications/adm/guideline_h.html to http://ncam.wgbh.org/invent_build/web_multimedia/accessible-digital-media-guide/guideline-h-multimedia on January 28th, 2011.

Footnotes

Knight, G., & McHugh, J. (2005). Preservation Handbook: Moving Image. p. 3.
Audio/Video Capture and Management (2002).
“Rec. 601″ (2008).

OAI-ORE Open Meeting, April 4 2008, Johns Hopkins University

Peter Murray — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:19:24 +0000

Copied from the press release announcing the U.K. Public Meeting for OAI/ORE.

Open Archives Initiative Announces U.K. Public Meeting on April 4, 2008 for European Release of Object Reuse and Exchange Specifications

Ithaca, NY and Los Alamos, NM, January 21, 2008 – As a result of initiatives in eScholarship, the format of scholarly communication, and the process that underlies it, are becoming increasingly expressive and complex. The resulting new artifacts of scholarship are aggregations composed of multiple media types, links to data, and to applications that allow interaction with that data. The success of these innovations depends on standard methods to identify, describe, and exchange these new forms scholarly communication.

On April 4, 2008 the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) will hold a public meeting in Southampton, England, in connection with Open Repositories 2008, to introduce the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) specifications, which propose such standards. This meeting is the European follow-on to a U.S.-based meeting on March 3 at Johns Hopkins University.

The OAI-ORE specifications define a data model to represent aggregations as resources on the web, identified with a URI like any resource. They also define a machine-readable format in ATOM to describe these aggregations. The specifications provide a foundation for new forms of citation, reuse, and analysis of the products and process of scholarship.

In addition to eScholarship applications, ORE specifications are useful for the aggregations that are part of our everyday interaction with the web. These include multi-page HTML documents, collections of multi-format images on sites like flickr. ORE descriptions of aggregations can be used to improve search engine behavior, provide input for browser-based navigation tools, and make it possible to develop automated web services to analyze and preserve information.

Attendees of the April 4 meeting will learn about the ORE data model, which is based on techniques developed in the Semantic Web initiative. They will also learn about the translation of this data model to the XML-based ATOM syndication format, allowing exchange of ORE- based descriptions via standardized feed software. Finally, they will hear the results of initial experiments with the specifications by ORE community members. There will be ample time for discussion and questions. Detailed information and registration information for the meeting is http://regonline.com/eu-oai-ore (NOTE: attendees must register in advance and attendance is limited).

About the Open Archives Initiative: The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination, sharing, and reuse of web-based content. OAI-ORE work is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Microsoft Corporation, the JISC, and the National Science Foundation (IIS-0430906). More information is available at http://www.openarchives.org.

Add this event to your desktop calendar program.

What’s the Deal with NCIP?

Peter Murray — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:11:07 +0000

What’s the deal with NCIP? For those that don’t know, NCIP is the NISO protocol that attempts to “define the various transactions needed to support circulation activities among independent library systems.” For example, “patron and item inquiry and update transactions, such as hold or reserve, check-out, renew, and check-in.”

I came away from a meeting yesterday at the State Library of Ohio on plans to investigate a new statewide resource sharing system somewhat confused about the state of this standard. Those in the meeting were pessimistic, based apparently on experience with prior products that claimed to be “NCIP compliant,” about the standard’s ability to truly “support circulation activities among independent library systems.” From what I could gather, even with the approved standard and implementations that can claim compliance with the standard, there is enough variability in interpretation that bilateral testing and agreement on meanings of messages was still required to make it work. And that so much flexibility was possible that such bilateral testing and agreement is a very time consuming process.

A little searching turned up the NCIP Implementation Group website hosted and maintained by EnvisionWare, Inc. It seems somewhat stagnant, though (the link to the discussion mailing list leads to a 404-not-found error page). I stopped following NCIP a number of years ago, but I thought I understood the basic concepts and remember thinking that what was going on was a good thing. In fact, I assumed, based on what remember from those several years ago, that the issue of inter-ILS circulation communication was a solved problem. Fast forwarding to now, is the world of inter-ILS communication really this bad? Is anything being done to solve it? Does “NCIP Compliant” actually mean anything?

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.niso.org/standards/standard_detail.cfm?std_id=728 to http://www.niso.org/workrooms/ncip on January 19th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.winslo.state.oh.us/ to http://www.library.ohio.gov/ on January 20th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://ohiolibrarycollaboration.blogspot.com/ on January 20th, 2011.