eBank UK: linking research data, scholarly communication and learning

This paper includes an overview of the changing landscape of scholarly communication and describes outcomes from the innovative eBank UK project, which seeks to build links from e-research through to e-learning. As introduction, the scholarly knowledge cycle is described and the role of digital repositories and aggregator services in linking data-sets from Grid-enabled projects to e-prints through to peer-reviewed articles as resources in portals and Learning Management Systems, are assessed. The development outcomes from the eBank UK project are presented including the distributed information architecture, requirements for common ontologies, data models, metadata schema, open linking technologies, provenance and workflows. Some emerging challenges for the future are presented in conclusion

Libraries and Information Systems Need XML/RDF... but Do They Know It?

This article presents an approach to the uses of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and Semantic Web technologies in the field of information services, focusing mainly on the creation and management of digital libraries compared to traditional libraries, while paying special attention to the concept and application of metadata, and RDF based integration

Open Access Metadata for Journals in Directory of Open Access Journals: Who, How, and What Scheme?

Open access (OA) is a form of publication that allows some level of free access to scholarly publications. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a repository to which OA journals may apply and upload content to increase discoverability. OA also refers to metadata that is freely available for harvesting. In making metadata open access, standards for schemes and protocols are needed to facilitate interoperability. For open access journals, such as those listed in the DOAJ, providing open access metadata in a form that promotes interoperability is essential for discoverability of their content. This paper investigates what standards exist or are emerging, who within journals is creating the metadata for DOAJ journals, and how are those journals and DOAJ sharing the metadata for articles. Moreover, since creating metadata requires specialized knowledge of both librarians and programmers, it is imperative that journals wanting to publish with OA metadata formulate plans to coordinate these experts and to be sure their efforts are compatible with current standards and protocols

Study on the use of metadata for digital learning objects in university institutional repositories (MODERI)

Metadata is a core issue for the creation of repositories. Different institutional repositories have chosen and use different metadata models, elements and values for describing the range of digital objects they store. Thus, this paper analyzes the current use of metadata describing those Learning Objects that some open higher educational institutions' repositories include in their collections. The goal of this work is to identify and analyze the different metadata models being used to describe educational features of those specific digital educational objects (such as audience, type of educational object, learning objectives, etc.). Also discussed is the concept and typology of Learning Objects (LO) through their use in University Repositories. We will also examine the usefulness of specifically describing those learning objects, setting them apart from other kind of documents included in the repository, mainly scholarly publications and research results of the Higher Education institution.En prens

For the love of metadata? : a functional approach to describing scholarly works

Repositories are springing up across institutions in the UK and worldwide. For institutional repositories there is a pressing need to fill them with content and to make those contents available through search interfaces, aggregators and other services. Speed and easy access are paramount both for depositors, who want to add their materials to the repository with minimum effort, and for researchers, who want to discover the quickest route to the full-text. Consistent, good quality metadata is needed to provide the signpost to full-texts, yet there is a resulting tension between the effort required to create, and share, metadata and the needs of depositors. Research and scholarly outputs are one of the main content types collected and managed by institutional repositories, in particular the research papers, or scholarly works, produced by academics and researchers1. In May 2006, the Joint Information Systems Committee JISC) engaged the Eduserv Foundation and UKOLN to produce an application profile for scholarly works that would facilitate the sharing of richer metadata between repositories and aggregators such as the newly-funded Intute search project. This article describes the development of the application profile

A bibliographic metadata infrastructure for the twenty-first century

The current library bibliographic infrastructure was constructed in the early days of computers – before the Web, XML, and a variety of other technological advances that now offer new opportunities. General requirements of a modern metadata infrastructure for libraries are identified, including such qualities as versatility, extensibility, granularity, and openness. A new kind of metadata infrastructure is then proposed that exhibits at least some of those qualities. Some key challenges that must be overcome to implement a change of this magnitude are identified

Exposing and harvesting metadata using the OAI metadata harvesting protocol: A tutorial

In this article I outline the ideas behind the Open Archives Initiative metadata harvesting protocol (OAIMH), and attempt to clarify some common misconceptions. I then consider how the OAIMH protocol can be used to expose and harvest metadata. Perl code examples are given as practical illustration.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure. Example programs included (download source). HEPLW version (HTML) available online at http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/4/papers/3