Changing Practice in a National Legal Deposit Library

This two-part essay considers how digital culture has influenced ideas about permanence and looks at the change in collecting practice in a legal deposit library. The author asks: how is the idea of permanence, understood in cultural heritage terms, influencing digital culture and thus digital technology? The first part of the essay touches upon the concepts associated with permanence, digital culture, digital technology, social change, and cultural institutions, in relation to collecting digital cultural material. The second part of this essay focuses on the change in collecting practice of the Alexander Turnbull Library (Turnbull Library) at the National Library of New Zealand in developing its heritage collection of electronically published material with the benefit of legal deposit, with a particular focus on the change in practice to include the collection of online publications

STARGATE : Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit. Final Project Report

STARGATE (Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit) was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and is intended to demonstrate the ease of use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) Static Repository technology, and the potential benefits offered to publishers in making their metadata available in this way This technology offers a simpler method of participating in many information discovery services than creating fully-fledged OAI-compliant repositories. It does this by allowing the infrastructure and technical support required to participate in OAI-based services to be shifted from the data provider (the journal) to a third party and allows a single third party gateway provider to provide intermediation for many data providers (journals). Specifically, STARGATE has created a series of Static Repositories of publisher metadata provided by a selection of Library and Information Science journals. It has demonstrated the interoperability of these repositories by exposing their metadata via a Static Repository Gateway for harvesting and cross-searching by external service providers. The project has conducted a critical evaluation of the Static Repository approach in conjunction with the participating publishers and service providers. The technology works. The project has demonstrated that Static Repositories are easy to create and that the differences between fully-fledged and static OAI Repositories have no impact on the participation of small journal publishers in OAI-based services. The problems for a service that arise out of the use of Static Repositories are parallel to those created by any other repository dealing with journal articles. Problems arise from the diversity of metadata element sets provided by a given journal and the lack of specific metadata elements for the articles' volume and issue details. Another issue for the use of publishers' metadata arise as the collection policies of some existing services only allow Open Access materials to be included in them. The project recommends that the use of Static Repositories continues to be explored - in particular as a flexible way to expose existing sets of structured information to OAI services and to create the opportunity to enhance the metadata as part of the process. The project further recommends that the publishing community consider the creation or adoption of an application profile for journal articles to support information discovery that can search by volume and issue. Significant further use of the Static Repository technology by small journal publishers will require the future creation and maintenance of a community-specific Static Repository Gateway. Further use will also require advocacy within the publishing community but might initially be most effectively kick-started through the creation of OAI repositories based on metadata held by the commercial services which publish or mediate access to electronic copies of journals on behalf of small publishers

JISC Preservation of Web Resources (PoWR) Handbook

Handbook of Web Preservation produced by the JISC-PoWR project which ran from April to November 2008. The handbook specifically addresses digital preservation issues that are relevant to the UK HE/FE web management community”. The project was undertaken jointly by UKOLN at the University of Bath and ULCC Digital Archives department

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

Collaborative design of educational digital libraries for African higher education

This thesis will develop a model that can be used to guide collaborative design of educational digital libraries that are relevant to the learning objectives and are appropriate to African Higher Education. Factors affecting connections between educational digital library capabilities, learning processes and learners’ needs in higher education will be identified and used to develop the model. These factors will be identified through qualitative studies with the key players (i.e. academics, information professionals, digital library technical designers and students). The model will be iteratively developed and later evaluated for correctness by some of the key players. So far a preliminary literature review has been done to locate related work and identify knowledge gaps. In addition, a pilot study has been carried out and identified some temporal factors that will be pursued further in the proposed study

A Study on the Open Source Digital Library Software's: Special Reference to DSpace, EPrints and Greenstone

The richness in knowledge has changed access methods for all stake holders in retrieving key knowledge and relevant information. This paper presents a study of three open source digital library management software used to assimilate and disseminate information to world audience. The methodology followed involves online survey and study of related software documentation and associated technical manuals.Comment: 9 Pages, 3 Figures, 1 Table, "Published with International Journal of Computer Applications (IJCA)

A two-step hybrid approach for modeling the nonlinear dynamic response of piezoelectric energy harvesters

An effective hybrid computational framework is described here in order to assess the nonlinear dynamic response of piezoelectric energy harvesting devices. The proposed strategy basically consists of two steps. First, fully coupled multiphysics finite element (FE) analyses are performed to evaluate the nonlinear static response of the device. An enhanced reduced-order model is then derived, where the global dynamic response is formulated in the state-space using lumped coefficients enriched with the information derived from the FE simulations. The electromechanical response of piezoelectric beams under forced vibrations is studied by means of the proposed approach, which is also validated by comparing numerical predictions with some experimental results. Such numerical and experimental investigations have been carried out with the main aim of studying the influence of material and geometrical parameters on the global nonlinear response. The advantage of the presented approach is that the overall computational and experimental efforts are significantly reduced while preserving a satisfactory accuracy in the assessment of the global behavior

A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation

This volume is devoted to the broad topic of distributed digital preservation, a still-emerging field of practice for the cultural memory arena. Replication and distribution hold out the promise of indefinite preservation of materials without degradation, but establishing effective organizational and technical processes to enable this form of digital preservation is daunting. Institutions need practical examples of how this task can be accomplished in manageable, low-cost ways."--P. [4] of cove

SciTech News Volume 71, No. 2 (2017)

Columns and Reports From the Editor 3 Division News Science-Technology Division 5 Chemistry Division 8 Engineering Division 9 Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division 12 Architecture, Building Engineering, Construction and Design Section of the Engineering Division 14 Reviews Sci-Tech Book News Reviews 16 Advertisements IEEE