Changing Trains at Wigan: Digital Preservation and the Future of Scholarship

This paper examines the impact of the emerging digital landscape on long term access to material created in digital form and its use for research; it examines challenges, risks and expectations.

Bibliographic Control in the Digital Ecosystem

With the contributions of international experts, the book aims to explore the new boundaries of universal bibliographic control. Bibliographic control is radically changing because the bibliographic universe is radically changing: resources, agents, technologies, standards and practices. Among the main topics addressed: library cooperation networks; legal deposit; national bibliographies; new tools and standards (IFLA LRM, RDA, BIBFRAME); authority control and new alliances (Wikidata, Wikibase, Identifiers); new ways of indexing resources (artificial intelligence); institutional repositories; new book supply chain; “discoverability” in the IIIF digital ecosystem; role of thesauri and ontologies in the digital ecosystem; bibliographic control and search engines

B!SON: A Tool for Open Access Journal Recommendation

Finding a suitable open access journal to publish scientific work is a complex task: Researchers have to navigate a constantly growing number of journals, institutional agreements with publishers, funders’ conditions and the risk of Predatory Publishers. To help with these challenges, we introduce a web-based journal recommendation system called B!SON. It is developed based on a systematic requirements analysis, built on open data, gives publisher-independent recommendations and works across domains. It suggests open access journals based on title, abstract and references provided by the user. The recommendation quality has been evaluated using a large test set of 10,000 articles. Development by two German scientific libraries ensures the longevity of the project

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

Digital Histories

Historical scholarship is currently undergoing a digital turn. All historians have experienced this change in one way or another, by writing on word processors, applying quantitative methods on digitalized source materials, or using internet resources and digital tools. Digital Histories showcases this emerging wave of digital history research. It presents work by historians who – on their own or through collaborations with e.g. information technology specialists – have uncovered new, empirical historical knowledge through digital and computational methods. The topics of the volume range from the medieval period to the present day, including various parts of Europe. The chapters apply an exemplary array of methods, such as digital metadata analysis, machine learning, network analysis, topic modelling, named entity recognition, collocation analysis, critical search, and text and data mining. The volume argues that digital history is entering a mature phase, digital history ‘in action’, where its focus is shifting from the building of resources towards the making of new historical knowledge. This also involves novel challenges that digital methods pose to historical research, including awareness of the pitfalls and limitations of the digital tools and the necessity of new forms of digital source criticisms. Through its combination of empirical, conceptual and contextual studies, Digital Histories is a timely and pioneering contribution taking stock of how digital research currently advances historical scholarship

Library catalogue records as a research resource:introducing 'A Big Data History of Music'

Librarians and archivists are increasingly collecting and working with large quantities of digital data. In science, business, and now the humanities, the production and analysis of vast amounts of data (so-called ‘big data research’) have become fundamental activities. This article introduces the project A Big Data History of Music, a collaboration between Royal Holloway, University of London, and the British Library. The project has made the British Library’s catalogue records for printed and manuscript music available as open data, and has explored how the analysis and visualisation of huge numbers of bibliographic records can open new perspectives for researchers into music history. In addition to the British Library data (over a million records), the project drew on a further million bibliographic descriptions from RISM, which have also recently been released as open data. To show the challenges posed by the heterogeneous nature of the data, the article outlines the different structures of the various catalogue records used in the project, and summarises how the British Library data was cleaned and enhanced prior to its public release. Examples are given of how music-bibliographical data can be analysed and visualised, and how scholars and citizen scientists can engage with this data through hackathons, large-scale data analyses, and database construction. It is hoped this article will encourage other research libraries to consider making their catalogue records available as open data

Cultural Heritage in a Changing World

Cultural Heritage; Cultural Economics; Cultural Studies; Archaeology; Information Storage and Retrieval; Information Systems Applications (incl. Internet

A Usable Collection: Essays in Honour of Jaap Kloosterman on Collecting Social History

Established in 1935, the International Institute of Social History (IISH) is one of the world’s leading research institutes focused on social history and holds one of the richest collections in the field. This volume brings together thirty-five essays in honor of the IISH’s longtime director Jaap Kloosterman, who built the institute into a world leader in the field