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

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

The Metascholar Initiative: AmericanSouth.Org and MetaArchive.Org

The MetaScholar Initiative is a collaborative endeavor to explore the feasibility and utility of scholarly portal services developed in conjunction with Open Archives Initiative (OAI) metadata harvesting technologies. The MetaScholar Initiative comprises two projects, the MetaArchive and AmericanSouth projects, both funded by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation totaling $600,000. These two projects have created two metadata aggregation networks connecting some 24 libraries, archives, museums, and electronic text centers. Each network has an associated portal being created under the guidance of teams composed of scholars, librarians, archivists, and technologists. The MetaScholar Initiative is studying issues such as metadata normalization, alternative forms of scholarly communication through portals, and the process of facilitating smaller archival institutions in providing better access to their collections through the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The MetaScholar Initiative is based at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia

Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education

A study carried out for the UK Joint Information Systems Committee examined models for the provision of access to material in institutional and subject-based archives and in open access journals. Their relative merits were considered, addressing not only technical concerns but also how e-print provision (by authors) can be achieved – an essential factor for an effective e-print delivery service (for users). A "harvesting" model is recommended, where the metadata of articles deposited in distributed archives are harvested, stored and enhanced by a national service. This model has major advantages over the alternatives of a national centralized service or a completely decentralized one. Options for the implementation of a service based on the harvesting model are presented

The DART-Europe project: towards developing a European theses portal

This paper will report on the new European theses project DART-Europe. The purpose of this project is to align institutional and national e-theses developments across Europe with the wider open archives movement by the construction of a European portal for research theses, thus enabling a global view of European institutional research assets. This project is driven through an innovative partnership between an information provider and an international body of university libraries and open access consortia. The project’s goal is to explore the creation of a European model for the deposit, discovery, use and long-term care of research theses in an open access environment. The paper will outline the projected outcomes of DART-Europe, which is an active group of institutions in addition to a technical service. To this end, DART-Europe is engaged with disciplines and institutions that are widening the definition of research by redefining the formats of theses. For institutions and countries without a repository infrastructure, DART-Europe will enable the creation of a depository. Institutions and countries with a repository infrastructure can engage with DART-Europe to deliver their e-theses. DART-Europe acts as a technology bridge for researchers between those who have existing infrastructures and those who do not. The DART-Europe architecture assumes free at point of use access to full text theses, whether held on the DART-Europe server or by institutional repositories. This paper will provide session attendees with the current progress of this initiative, including a report on the 5 strands of the project, including: architecture; creation of a management tool kit; content acquisition; digital preservation and an investigation of business models

Preserving Open Access Journals: A Literature Review

This literature review addresses certain questions concerning the preservation of free, born-digital scholarly materials. It covers recent thinking on the current state of preservation efforts of born-digital materials; the range of actors involved in significant preservation initiatives of these artefacts; the perceived barriers preventing open access materials from benefiting from existing preservation efforts; initiatives that may enable local, small-scale preservation efforts to be undertaken; the challenges and opportunities posed to preservation by new models of scholarship such as open access datasets, reference sharing and annotation, collaborative authoring and community peer review. The review identifies representative international collaborative preservation initiatives, describes their goals and results, their specific preservation strategie, and their applicability to the preservation of born digital open access materials

Digitised content in the UK research library and archives sector

In August 2004, the JISC and CURL Digital Content Creation & Curation Task Force issued an invitation to tender for a study of the current provision of digitised collections for researchers in the UK higher education sector. The objectives of this study were to: 1) Produce a high level survey of digitised material, both already available and in the process of being created, held in UK research collections across all disciplines 2) Survey demand for digitised material and identify gaps in existing provision 3) Develop a mechanism for identifying future digitisation priorities 4) Review funding structures and opportunities and assess possible ways of funding priority areas 5) Recommend standards and formats for future digitisation projects 6) Provide an outline action plan for a national digitisation strategy for the UK research community. JISC and CURL commissioned a team of researchers from the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University to carry out this survey. The study was carried out between 1 November 2004 and 7 March 2005

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