STARGATE : Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit. Final Project Report

STARGATE (Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit) was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and is intended to demonstrate the ease of use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) Static Repository technology, and the potential benefits offered to publishers in making their metadata available in this way This technology offers a simpler method of participating in many information discovery services than creating fully-fledged OAI-compliant repositories. It does this by allowing the infrastructure and technical support required to participate in OAI-based services to be shifted from the data provider (the journal) to a third party and allows a single third party gateway provider to provide intermediation for many data providers (journals). Specifically, STARGATE has created a series of Static Repositories of publisher metadata provided by a selection of Library and Information Science journals. It has demonstrated the interoperability of these repositories by exposing their metadata via a Static Repository Gateway for harvesting and cross-searching by external service providers. The project has conducted a critical evaluation of the Static Repository approach in conjunction with the participating publishers and service providers. The technology works. The project has demonstrated that Static Repositories are easy to create and that the differences between fully-fledged and static OAI Repositories have no impact on the participation of small journal publishers in OAI-based services. The problems for a service that arise out of the use of Static Repositories are parallel to those created by any other repository dealing with journal articles. Problems arise from the diversity of metadata element sets provided by a given journal and the lack of specific metadata elements for the articles' volume and issue details. Another issue for the use of publishers' metadata arise as the collection policies of some existing services only allow Open Access materials to be included in them. The project recommends that the use of Static Repositories continues to be explored - in particular as a flexible way to expose existing sets of structured information to OAI services and to create the opportunity to enhance the metadata as part of the process. The project further recommends that the publishing community consider the creation or adoption of an application profile for journal articles to support information discovery that can search by volume and issue. Significant further use of the Static Repository technology by small journal publishers will require the future creation and maintenance of a community-specific Static Repository Gateway. Further use will also require advocacy within the publishing community but might initially be most effectively kick-started through the creation of OAI repositories based on metadata held by the commercial services which publish or mediate access to electronic copies of journals on behalf of small publishers

A modular methodology for converting large, complex books into usable, accessible and standards-compliant ebooks

This report describes the methodology used for ebook creation for the Glasgow Digital Library (GDL), and provides detailed instructions on how the same methodology could be used elsewhere. The document includes a description and explanation of the processes for ebook creation followed by a tutorial

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

An Experimental Digital Library Platform - A Demonstrator Prototype for the DigLib Project at SICS

Within the framework of the Digital Library project at SICS, this thesis describes the implementation of a demonstrator prototype of a digital library (DigLib); an experimental platform integrating several functions in one common interface. It includes descriptions of the structure and formats of the digital library collection, the tailoring of the search engine Dienst, the construction of a keyword extraction tool, and the design and development of the interface. The platform was realised through sicsDAIS, an agent interaction and presentation system, and is to be used for testing and evaluating various tools for information seeking. The platform supports various user interaction strategies by providing: search in bibliographic records (Dienst); an index of keywords (the Keyword Extraction Function (KEF)); and browsing through the hierarchical structure of the collection. KEF was developed for this thesis work, and extracts and presents keywords from Swedish documents. Although based on a comparatively simple algorithm, KEF contributes by supplying a long-felt want in the area of Information Retrieval. Evaluations of the tasks and the interface still remain to be done, but the digital library is very much up and running. By implementing the platform through sicsDAIS, DigLib can deploy additional tools and search engines without interfering with already running modules. If wanted, agents providing other services than SICS can supply, can be plugged in

Proposal for an IMLS Collection Registry and Metadata Repository

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign proposes to design, implement, and research a collection-level registry and item-level metadata repository service that will aggregate information about digital collections and items of digital content created using funds from Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grants. This work will be a collaboration by the University Library and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. All extant digital collections initiated or augmented under IMLS aegis from 1998 through September 30, 2005 will be included in the proposed collection registry. Item-level metadata will be harvested from collections making such content available using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI PMH). As part of this work, project personnel, in cooperation with IMLS staff and grantees, will define and document appropriate metadata schemas, help create and maintain collection-level metadata records, assist in implementing OAI compliant metadata provider services for dissemination of item-level metadata records, and research potential benefits and issues associated with these activities. The immediate outcomes of this work will be the practical demonstration of technologies that have the potential to enhance the visibility of IMLS funded online exhibits and digital library collections and improve discoverability of items contained in these resources. Experience gained and research conducted during this project will make clearer both the costs and the potential benefits associated with such services. Metadata provider and harvesting service implementations will be appropriately instrumented (e.g., customized anonymous transaction logs, online questionnaires for targeted user groups, performance monitors). At the conclusion of this project we will submit a final report that discusses tasks performed and lessons learned, presents business plans for sustaining registry and repository services, enumerates and summarizes potential benefits of these services, and makes recommendations regarding future implementations of these and related intermediary and end user interoperability services by IMLS projects.unpublishednot peer reviewe

EviPlant: An efficient digital forensic challenge creation, manipulation and distribution solution

Education and training in digital forensics requires a variety of suitable challenge corpora containing realistic features including regular wear-and-tear, background noise, and the actual digital traces to be discovered during investigation. Typically, the creation of these challenges requires overly arduous effort on the part of the educator to ensure their viability. Once created, the challenge image needs to be stored and distributed to a class for practical training. This storage and distribution step requires significant time and resources and may not even be possible in an online/distance learning scenario due to the data sizes involved. As part of this paper, we introduce a more capable methodology and system as an alternative to current approaches. EviPlant is a system designed for the efficient creation, manipulation, storage and distribution of challenges for digital forensics education and training. The system relies on the initial distribution of base disk images, i.e., images containing solely base operating systems. In order to create challenges for students, educators can boot the base system, emulate the desired activity and perform a "diffing" of resultant image and the base image. This diffing process extracts the modified artefacts and associated metadata and stores them in an "evidence package". Evidence packages can be created for different personae, different wear-and-tear, different emulated crimes, etc., and multiple evidence packages can be distributed to students and integrated into the base images. A number of additional applications in digital forensic challenge creation for tool testing and validation, proficiency testing, and malware analysis are also discussed as a result of using EviPlant.Comment: Digital Forensic Research Workshop Europe 201