HaIRST: Harvesting Institutional Resources in Scotland Testbed. Final Project Report

The HaIRST project conducted research into the design, implementation and deployment of a pilot service for UK-wide access of autonomously created institutional resources in Scotland, the aim being to investigate and advise on some of the technical, cultural, and organisational requirements associated with the deposit, disclosure, and discovery of institutional resources in the JISC Information Environment. The project involved a consortium of Scottish higher and further education institutions, with significant assistance from the Scottish Library and Information Council. The project investigated the use of technologies based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), including the implementation of OAI-compatible repositories for metadata which describe and link to institutional digital resources, the use of the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH) to automatically copy the metadata from multiple repositories to a central repository, and the creation of a service to search and identify resources described in the central repository. An important aim of the project was to identify issues of metadata interoperability arising from the requirements of individual institutional repositories and their impact on services based on the aggregation of metadata through harvesting. The project also sought to investigate issues in using these technologies for a wide range of resources including learning, teaching and administrative materials as well as the research and scholarly communication materials considered by many of the other projects in the JISC Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme, of which HaIRST was a part. The project tested and implemented a number of open source software packages supporting OAI, and was successful in creating a pilot service which provides effective information retrieval of a range of resources created by the project consortium institutions. The pilot service has been extended to cover research and scholarly communication materials produced by other Scottish universities, and administrative materials produced by a non-educational institution in Scotland. It is an effective testbed for further research and development in these areas. The project has worked extensively with a new OAI standard for 'static repositories' which offers a low-barrier, low-cost mechanism for participation in OAI-based consortia by smaller institutions with a low volume of resources. The project identified and successfully tested tools for transforming pre-existing metadata into a format compliant with OAI standards. The project identified and assessed OAI-related documentation in English from around the world, and has produced metadata for retrieving and accessing it. The project created a Web-based advisory service for institutions and consortia. The OAI Scotland Information Service (OAISIS) provides links to related standards, guidance and documentation, and discusses the findings of HaIRST relating to interoperability and the pilot harvesting service. The project found that open source packages relating to OAI can be installed and made to interoperate to create a viable method of sharing institutional resources within a consortium. HaIRST identified issues affecting the interoperability of shared metadata and suggested ways of resolving them to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of shared information retrieval environments based on OAI. The project demonstrated that application of OAI technologies to administrative materials is an effective way for institutions to meet obligations under Freedom of Information legislation

BlogForever D3.2: Interoperability Prospects

This report evaluates the interoperability prospects of the BlogForever platform. Therefore, existing interoperability models are reviewed, a Delphi study to identify crucial aspects for the interoperability of web archives and digital libraries is conducted, technical interoperability standards and protocols are reviewed regarding their relevance for BlogForever, a simple approach to consider interoperability in specific usage scenarios is proposed, and a tangible approach to develop a succession plan that would allow a reliable transfer of content from the current digital archive to other digital repositories is presented

Workshop on Applications of Metadata Harvesting in Scholarly Portals: Findings from the MetaScholar Projects: AmericanSouth and MetaArchive

It is with great pleasure that I preface these proceedings for the Workshop on Applicationsof Metadata Harvesting in Scholarly Portals: Findings from the MetaScholar Projects:AmericanSouth and MetaArchive. This event marks the conclusion of two projects fundedby the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to advance the understanding of metadataharvesting and scholarly communication. These projects were conjoined in 2001 to formthe MetaScholar Initiative, an ongoing research collaboration based at Emory Universityinvolving librarians, scholars, archivists, curators, and technologists. Now concluding,these projects have successfully led to many findings that have informed the planning fornew endeavors that the MetaScholar Initiative is now undertaking.Our goals in organizing this workshop have been: to include presentations of researchfindings by participants in the projects; to provide a forum for scholars involved in theprojects to discuss development of the portals for scholarly communication and research;to discuss future development of the resulting portal systems; to introduce newMetaScholar Projects now underway; and to examine the value of the OAI and other opensource systems in the academic community

Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library

This report updates and expands on A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services, originally commissioned by the DLF as an internal report in summer 2003, and released to the public later that year. It highlights major developments affecting the ecosystem of scholarly communications and digital libraries since the last survey and provides an analysis of OAI implementation demographics, based on a comparative review of repository registries and cross-archive search services. Secondly, it reviews the state-of-practice for a cohort of digital library aggregation services, grouping them in the context of the problem space to which they most closely adhere. Based in part on responses collected in fall 2005 from an online survey distributed to the original core services, the report investigates the purpose, function and challenges of next-generation aggregation services. On a case-by-case basis, the advances in each service are of interest in isolation from each other, but the report also attempts to situate these services in a larger context and to understand how they fit into a multi-dimensional and interdependent ecosystem supporting the worldwide community of scholars. Finally, the report summarizes the contributions of these services thus far and identifies obstacles requiring further attention to realize the goal of an open, distributed digital library system

Augmenting Dublin Core digital library metadata with Dewey Decimal Classification

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a new approach to a well-known problem for digital libraries, how to search across multiple unrelated libraries with a single query. Design/methodology/approach – The approach involves creating new Dewey Decimal Classification terms and numbers from existing Dublin Core records. In total, 263,550 records were harvested from three digital libraries. Weighted key terms were extracted from the title, description and subject fields of each record. Ranked DDC classes were automatically generated from these key terms by considering DDC hierarchies via a series of filtering and aggregation stages. A mean reciprocal ranking evaluation compared a sample of 49 generated classes against DDC classes created by a trained librarian for the same records. Findings – The best results combined weighted key terms from the title, description and subject fields. Performance declines with increased specificity of DDC level. The results compare favorably with similar studies. Research limitations/implications – The metadata harvest required manual intervention and the evaluation was resource intensive. Future research will look at evaluation methodologies that take account of issues of consistency and ecological validity. Practical implications – The method does not require training data and is easily scalable. The pipeline can be customized for individual use cases, for example, recall or precision enhancing. Social implications – The approach can provide centralized access to information from multiple domains currently provided by individual digital libraries. Originality/value – The approach addresses metadata normalization in the context of web resources. The automatic classification approach accounts for matches within hierarchies, aggregating lower level matches to broader parents and thus approximates the practices of a human cataloger. </jats:sec

A case study on TUdatalib

Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies might solve issues originating from research data being published by independent providers. For maximum benefit from these technologies, metadata should be provided as standardized as possible. The Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) is a W3C recommendation of potential value for Linked Data exposure of research data metadata. The suitability of DCAT for institutional research data repositories was investigated using the TUdatalib repository as study case. A model for TUdatalib metadata was developed based on the analysis of selected resources and guided by a draft of DCAT 3. The model allowed for providing the essential information about the repository structure and contents indicating suitability of the vocabulary and, conceptually, should permit automated data conversion from the repository system to DCAT 3. A loss of expressiveness comes from the omission of dataset series. Conformance with DCAT 3 class definitions led to a highly complex model, thus creating challenges with actual technical realizations. A comparative study revealed simpler models to be used at two other repositories, but implementation of the TUdatalib or a similar model would have potential to improve alignment to DCAT specifications. DCAT 3 was observed to be a promising option for Linked Data exposure of institutional research data repository metadata and the TUdatalib model might serve towards developing a general DCAT 3 application profile for institutional and other research data repositories

A Digital Library Component Assembly Environment

Digital libraries (DLs) represent an important evolutionary step towards accessing structured digital information. DLs are often built from scratch or by using proprietary monolithic software that is often difficult to customise and extend to meet changing requirements. Researchers are beginning to realise that this is not an ideal solution and as a result, are creating component suites and accompanying protocols to encourage the creation of modular DLs. Despite the introduction of component models, it is not immediately apparent how they can be seamlessly assembled to produce diverse, yet fully functional, component-based digital library systems without knowledge of the underlying protocols. This dissertation presents a graphical user interface and its associated framework for creating DL systems from distributed components, consequently shielding DL architects from the complexity of using components models and taking advantage of the inherent benefits of the component programming paradigm. The framework introduced in this dissertation was designed to be generic enough to be adopted for the assembly of a variety of component-based systems over and beyond the digital library community. After being tested on over thirty inexperienced users and modelling a number of existing DL systems, graphically assembling distributed components has been shown to be a viable approach to simplify the creation of modular DLs from a pool of heterogeneous components

Metadata Quality Evaluation in Institutional Repositories: A Survey of Current Practices

Metadata plays an important role in the discovery, access, and use of materials in institutional repositories (IRs). Thus far, little empirical research been conducted to assess and evaluate metadata quality practices in place. This study begins to address that gap in knowledge by gathering data on current practices and procedures relating to metadata quality and evaluation in institutional repositories. A survey was distributed to individuals at ARL-member institutional repositories with knowledge of their institution's metadata procedures. The survey specifically gathered data on what metadata practices were in place and whether quality control procedures were being used. Forty respondents provided results that offer a state of the art view into the current metadata quality practices in place at IRs. Survey results indicate that metadata activities may not yet be streamlined into institutional workflow. For most institutions, metadata quality checking is a manual process, with only a small percentage (4%) employing the use of automated tools. Additionally, institutions rely on users as much as repository to staff to discover quality problems. Other results indicate that the majority of institutions surveyed are maintaining documentation relating to metadata policies. For example, 75% of respondents reported that their institution had developed either minimum metadata requirements or metadata submission guidelines for contributors. Overall, these results reflect the challenges and growing pains facing institutions as they adapt to managing materials in the digital world