Extended-Linking Services: towards a Quality Web

A URL takes requesters from a citation to a destination… provided, of course, the URL is still valid. The current chaotic web is wonderful in its way. However, within this chaotic web, we believe there is a need for a high-quality web of vetted information. The emerging OpenURL standard is the cornerstone of a worldwide web with high-quality links that feature properties such as: •Persistence: Increase the probable lifetime of citations. •Multiplicity: Produce a menu of targeted services for each citation. •Context-Sensitivity: Resolve a citation in a manner appropriate to the user and to the context. To encourage the development of extended-linking services, NISO formed a committee to develop a standard OpenURL syntax. Our immediate goal is to serve the scholarly-information community immediately. However, the OpenURL technique is widely applicable, and we expect to serve many other information communities

Template Mining for Information Extraction from Digital Documents

published or submitted for publicatio

Transfer and Inventory Components of Developing Repository Services

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PresentationsDate: 2009-05-19 10:00 AM – 11:30 AMAt the Library of Congress, our most basic data management needs are not surprising: How do we know what we have, where it is, and who it belongs to? How do we get files "new and legacy" from where they are to where they need to be? And how do we record and track events in the life cycle of our files? This presentation describes current work at the Library in implementing tools to meet these needs as a set of modular services -- Transfer, Transport, and Inventory -- that will fit into a larger scheme of repository services to be developed. These modular services do not equate to everything needed to call a system a repository. But this is a set of services that equate to many aspects of "ingest" and "archiving" the registry of a deposit activity, the controlled transfer and transport of files, and an inventory system that can be used to track files, record events in those files life cycles, and provide basic file-level discovery and auditing. This is the first stage in the development of a suite of tools to help the Library ensure long-term stewardship of its digital assets

BioGUID: resolving, discovering, and minting identifiers for biodiversity informatics

Background: Linking together the data of interest to biodiversity researchers (including specimen records, images, taxonomic names, and DNA sequences) requires services that can mint, resolve, and discover globally unique identifiers (including, but not limited to, DOIs, HTTP URIs, and LSIDs). Results: BioGUID implements a range of services, the core ones being an OpenURL resolver for bibliographic resources, and a LSID resolver. The LSID resolver supports Linked Data-friendly resolution using HTTP 303 redirects and content negotiation. Additional services include journal ISSN look-up, author name matching, and a tool to monitor the status of biodiversity data providers. Conclusion: BioGUID is available at http://bioguid.info/. Source code is available from http://code.google.com/p/bioguid/

The Future of Institutional Repositories at Small Academic Institutions: Analysis and Insights

Institutional repositories (IRs) established at universities and academic libraries over a decade ago, large and small, have encountered challenges along the way in keeping faith with their original objective: to collect, preserve, and disseminate the intellectual output of an institution in digital form. While all institutional repositories have experienced the same obstacles relating to a lack of faculty participation, those at small universities face unique challenges. This article examines causes of low faculty contribution to IR content growth, particularly at small academic institutions. It also offers a first-hand account of building and developing an institutional repository at a small university. The article concludes by suggesting how institutional repositories at small academic institutions can thrive by focusing on classroom teaching and student experiential learning, strategic priorities of their parent institutions

The multi-faceted use of the OAI-PMH in the LANL Repository

This paper focuses on the multifaceted use of the OAI-PMH in a repository architecture designed to store digital assets at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and to make the stored assets available in a uniform way to various downstream applications. In the architecture, the MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language is used as the XML-based format to represent complex digital objects. Upon ingestion, these objects are stored in a multitude of autonomous OAI-PMH repositories. An OAI-PMH compliant Repository Index keeps track of the creation and location of all those repositories, whereas an Identifier Resolver keeps track of the location of individual objects. An OAI-PMH Federator is introduced as a single-point-of-access to downstream harvesters. It hides the complexity of the environment to those harvesters, and allows them to obtain transformations of stored objects. While the proposed architecture is described in the context of the LANL library, the paper will also touch on its more general applicability

Exploiting open standards in academic web services

In Digital Library-related technologies, there is a whole host of open standards and protocols that are at varying stages of definition or emergence and acceptance or agreement. Nevertheless, specifically in an academic context, these have led to some valuable improvements in the quality and value of services provided to teachers, learners and researchers alike. However, it often remains difficult for these information seekers to find relevant resources that are not immediately 'visible', they may be effectively hidden within database-driven web services or proprietary applications. The focus of this paper is upon a project based at the UK academic data centre, MIMAS, which provides web-based services to the education community in the UK, Ireland and beyond. The project's principle aim was to increase the visibility and accessibility of 'appropriate' resources by exploiting a number of relevant open standards and initiatives to ensure interoperability. This principally required focusing on machine-to-machine metadata interchange