33,231 research outputs found
Invest to Save: Report and Recommendations of the NSF-DELOS Working Group on Digital Archiving and Preservation
Digital archiving and preservation are important areas for research and development, but there is no agreed upon set of priorities or coherent plan for research in this area. Research projects in this area tend to be small and driven by particular institutional problems or concerns. As a consequence, proposed solutions from experimental projects and prototypes tend not to scale to millions of digital objects, nor do the results from disparate projects readily build on each other. It is also unclear whether it is worthwhile to seek general solutions or whether different strategies are needed for different types of digital objects and collections. The lack of coordination in both research and development means that there are some areas where researchers are reinventing the wheel while other areas are neglected.
Digital archiving and preservation is an area that will benefit from an exercise in analysis, priority setting, and planning for future research. The WG aims to survey current research activities, identify gaps, and develop a white paper proposing future research directions in the area of digital preservation. Some of the potential areas for research include repository architectures and inter-operability among digital archives; automated tools for capture, ingest, and normalization of digital objects; and harmonization of preservation formats and metadata. There can also be opportunities for development of commercial products in the areas of mass storage systems, repositories and repository management systems, and data management software and tools.
Video as art: collecting artists’ moving image in academic art libraries
Video collections have been part of library holdings for several decades, but developing and managing these collections presents a number of challenges. This is the case particularly for artists’ film and video, and this article attempts to identify the issues involved and to offer some practical guidance, drawing on the experience of collection development and management at Chelsea College of Art and Design Library, and across the libraries of University of the Arts London and elsewhere
An Experimental Digital Library Platform - A Demonstrator Prototype for the DigLib Project at SICS
Within the framework of the Digital Library project at SICS, this thesis describes the implementation of a demonstrator prototype of a digital library (DigLib); an experimental platform integrating several functions in one common interface. It includes descriptions of the structure and formats of the digital library collection, the tailoring of the search engine Dienst, the construction of a keyword extraction tool, and the design and development of the interface. The platform was realised through sicsDAIS, an agent interaction and presentation system, and is to be used for testing and evaluating various tools for information seeking. The platform supports various user interaction strategies by providing: search in bibliographic records (Dienst); an index of keywords (the Keyword Extraction Function (KEF)); and browsing through the hierarchical structure of the collection. KEF was developed for this thesis work, and extracts and presents keywords from Swedish documents. Although based on a comparatively simple algorithm, KEF contributes by supplying a long-felt want in the area of Information Retrieval. Evaluations of the tasks and the interface still remain to be done, but the digital library is very much up and running. By implementing the platform through sicsDAIS, DigLib can deploy additional tools and search engines without interfering with already running modules. If wanted, agents providing other services than SICS can supply, can be plugged in
Extracting, Transforming and Archiving Scientific Data
It is becoming common to archive research datasets that are not only large
but also numerous. In addition, their corresponding metadata and the software
required to analyse or display them need to be archived. Yet the manual
curation of research data can be difficult and expensive, particularly in very
large digital repositories, hence the importance of models and tools for
automating digital curation tasks. The automation of these tasks faces three
major challenges: (1) research data and data sources are highly heterogeneous,
(2) future research needs are difficult to anticipate, (3) data is hard to
index. To address these problems, we propose the Extract, Transform and Archive
(ETA) model for managing and mechanizing the curation of research data.
Specifically, we propose a scalable strategy for addressing the research-data
problem, ranging from the extraction of legacy data to its long-term storage.
We review some existing solutions and propose novel avenues of research.Comment: 8 pages, Fourth Workshop on Very Large Digital Libraries, 201
Illinois Digital Scholarship: Preserving and Accessing the Digital Past, Present, and Future
Since the University's establishment in 1867, its scholarly output has been issued primarily in print, and the University Library and Archives have been readily able to collect, preserve, and to provide access to that output. Today, technological, economic, political and social forces are buffeting all means of scholarly communication. Scholars, academic institutions and publishers are engaged in debate about the impact of digital scholarship and open access publishing on the promotion and tenure process. The upsurge in digital scholarship affects many aspects of the academic enterprise, including how we record, evaluate, preserve, organize and disseminate scholarly work. The result has left the Library with no ready means by which to archive digitally produced publications, reports, presentations, and learning objects, much of which cannot be adequately represented in print form. In this incredibly fluid environment of digital scholarship, the critical question of how we will collect, preserve, and manage access to this important part of the University scholarly record demands a rational and forward-looking plan - one that includes perspectives from diverse scholarly disciplines, incorporates significant research breakthroughs in information science and computer science, and makes effective projections for future integration within the Library and computing services as a part of the campus infrastructure.Prepared jointly by the University of Illinois Library and CITES at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaig
Preparing to Preserve: Three Essential Steps to Building Experience with Long-Term Digital Preservation
Many organizations face complex questions of how to implement affordable and sustainable digital preservation practices. One strategic priority at the University Libraries at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, United States, is increased focus toward preservation of unique digital assets, whether digitized from physical originals or born digital. A team comprised of experts from multiple functional library departments (including the special collections/archives area and the technology area) was established to help address this priority, and efforts are beginning to translate into operational practice. This work outlines a three-step approach: Partnership, Policy, Pilot taken by one academic research library to strategically build experience utilizing a collaborative team approach. Our experience included the formation of a team, education of all members, and a foundational attitude that decisions would be undertaken as partners rather than competing departments or units. The team’s work included the development of an initial digital preservation policy, helping to distill the organizational priority and values associated with digital preservation. Several pilot projects were initiated and completed, which provided realistic, first-person experience with digital preservation activities, surfaced questions, and set the stage for developing and refining sustainable workflows. This work will highlight key activities in our journey to date, with the hope that experience gained through this effort could be applicable, in whole or part, to other organizations regardless of their size or capacity
Access Interfaces for Open Archival Information Systems based on the OAI-PMH and the OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services
In recent years, a variety of digital repository and archival systems have
been developed and adopted. All of these systems aim at hosting a variety of
compound digital assets and at providing tools for storing, managing and
accessing those assets. This paper will focus on the definition of common and
standardized access interfaces that could be deployed across such diverse
digital respository and archival systems. The proposed interfaces are based on
the two formal specifications that have recently emerged from the Digital
Library community: The Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
(OAI-PMH) and the NISO OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services
(OpenURL Standard). As will be described, the former allows for the retrieval
of batches of XML-based representations of digital assets, while the latter
facilitates the retrieval of disseminations of a specific digital asset or of
one or more of its constituents. The core properties of the proposed interfaces
are explained in terms of the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information
System (OAIS).Comment: Accepted paper for PV 2005 "Ensuring Long-term Preservation and
Adding Value to Scientific and Technical data"
(http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/pv-2005/
Towards Exascale Scientific Metadata Management
Advances in technology and computing hardware are enabling scientists from
all areas of science to produce massive amounts of data using large-scale
simulations or observational facilities. In this era of data deluge, effective
coordination between the data production and the analysis phases hinges on the
availability of metadata that describe the scientific datasets. Existing
workflow engines have been capturing a limited form of metadata to provide
provenance information about the identity and lineage of the data. However,
much of the data produced by simulations, experiments, and analyses still need
to be annotated manually in an ad hoc manner by domain scientists. Systematic
and transparent acquisition of rich metadata becomes a crucial prerequisite to
sustain and accelerate the pace of scientific innovation. Yet, ubiquitous and
domain-agnostic metadata management infrastructure that can meet the demands of
extreme-scale science is notable by its absence.
To address this gap in scientific data management research and practice, we
present our vision for an integrated approach that (1) automatically captures
and manipulates information-rich metadata while the data is being produced or
analyzed and (2) stores metadata within each dataset to permeate
metadata-oblivious processes and to query metadata through established and
standardized data access interfaces. We motivate the need for the proposed
integrated approach using applications from plasma physics, climate modeling
and neuroscience, and then discuss research challenges and possible solutions
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