Negotiating Online Access: Perspectives on Ethical Issues in Digital Collections

How do we act as responsible stewards of archival collections in the digital realm, with a reflective eye toward issues of privacy, ethics, and cultural sensitivity; while working with technological infrastructures that tend not to share these priorities? What strategies can be used to work within and around the limitations of existing systems, especially in regard to the nuances of privacy and access, and to advocate for further development that treats these concerns as core requirements rather than special cases? This article will provide practical considerations around the real-world work of building ethical digital collections. Framed as an asynchronous, semi-structured interview between two archivists working in academic libraries with digital collections management and culturally sensitive materials, we will draw examples from work with anthropological archives and academic-community archives partnerships. How do we do this work within our existing systems for digital asset management and aggregation, and how can we make them better? Pre-print first published online 10/14/202

FLAT: A CLARIN-compatible repository solution based on Fedora Commons

This paper describes the development of a CLARIN-compatible repository solution that fulfils both the long-term preservation requirements as well as the current day discoverability and usability needs of an online data repository of language resources. The widely used Fedora Commons open source repository framework, combined with the Islandora discovery layer, forms the basis of the solution. On top of this existing solution, additional modules and tools are developed to make it suitable for the types of data and metadata that are used by the participating partners

A tool for teaching principles of image metadata generation

Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL '06: p. 341.We developed a simple web-based prototype to familiarize students with digital library tools. To assist the students with the indexing task, the prototype provided basic functionalities, including metadata input form, photo search interface. The students generally expressed a positive feedback toward the use of digital library tools in their image indexing project

Preserving Endangered Languages using a Layered Web-based Archive

Many human languages, an essential part of culture, are in danger of extinction. UNESCO estimates that at least a half of the world's 6500 spoken languages will disappear within the next 100 years. This problem can be addressed to some extent by computer systems that collect, archive and disseminate dictionaries for various languages, thus performing the key function of preservation. The approach taken in this project was to develop a Web-based multilingual thesaurus, with mechanisms for the submission and retrieval of language data and metadata. This thesaurus was built on top of the FEDORA Web-based digital repository toolkit. Two distinct user interfaces were then developed as part of a proof of concept language preservation system, namely a Web interface and a cell phone interface. These were created using AJAX and J2ME+GPRS respectively. Both user interfaces were designed using an iterative User-Centred Design approach, and the back-end system was designed to meet the needs of the user interfaces, with a Web-based API. The resulting system proved to be useful as users indicated that they could preserve spoken languages by submitting and retrieving words in their own languages. The independent successful evaluations of the 2 user interfaces together demonstrate the feasibility of creating a preservation-directed archive as a layered Web-based digital repository, where the preservation function is separable and accessible through a well-defined Web-based API

From Hydra to Samvera: An open source community journey

The Hydra Project started in 2008 through a partnership between the University of Hull, the University of Virginia, Stanford University and Fedora Commons (now DuraSpace) to create tools that support use of the Fedora digital repository. Hull adopted the software outputs from this collaboration for its institutional repository in 2011 and remains an active Partner in the community, serving on the Steering Group and fostering development of the community and software in the UK and mainland Europe: The community now has 35 formal Partners and over 70 known adopters internationally. In June 2017 Hydra changed its name to Samvera, Icelandic for 'being together', to recognize the value gained from multiple institutions working together to create the underlying common basis upon which multiple different repository solutions have been implemented. Samvera can be adopted through a set of tools to develop your own repository (using a package called Hyrax as the starting point) and is also available as a complete repository solution, hosted or local, through the use of Hyku. The community has been at the heart of making Samvera a success, and will continue to underpin its future direction

A Comparison of Utilities for Converting from PostScript or Portable Document Format to Text

There are many available tools for converting PostScript and PDF files into text and HTML files. This report has been written following the testing of some of the most commonly available tools, and gives details of the results of this testing for each tool. A particular focus is given to the suitability of the output for the automatic extraction of reference information from full-text documents at CERN