Applying Semantic Web Technologies to Medieval Manuscript Research

Medieval manuscript research is a complex, fragmented, multilingual field of knowledge, which is difficult to navigate, analyse and exploit. Though printed sources are still of great importance and value to researchers, there are now many services on the Web, some commercial and many in the public domain. At present, these services have to be consulted separately and individually. They employ a range of different descriptive standards and vocabularies, and use a variety of technologies to make their information available on the Web. This chapter proposes a new approach to organizing the international collaborative infrastructure for interlinking knowledge and research about medieval European manuscripts, based on technologies associated with the Semantic Web and the Linked Data movement. This collaborative infrastructure will be an open space on the Web where information about medieval manuscripts can be shared, stored, exchanged and updated for research purposes. It will be possible to ask large-scale research questions across the virtual global manuscript collection, in a quicker and more effective way than has ever been feasible in the past. The proposed infrastructure will focus on building links between data and will provide the basis for new kinds of services which exploit these data. It will not aim to impose a single metadata standard on existing manuscript services, but will build on existing databases and vocabularies. The article describes the architecture, services and data which will comprise this infrastructure, and discusses strategies for making th challenging and exciting goal a reality

dh+CU: Future Directions for Digital Humanities at CU Boulder

Digital Humanities (DH) work harnesses digital technologies to disseminate, analyze and synthesize information in new and innovative ways, often to answer humanistic questions, and may make use of tools like visualization, text mining and statistical tools. The Libraries’ Digital Humanities Task Force was formed to investigate and report on DH activities and needs on campus and formulate recommendations for how the Libraries might help support these needs in tandem with campus partners. We take a broad view of DH and were as inclusive as possible in all of these activities – the disciplinary affiliation of the scholar engaging in these activities (humanities, social sciences or sciences) is irrelevant. In this context, DH is not a circumscribed concept but rather a broad set of methodologies and approaches that loom large in the realm of support and participation libraries and their staff can offer to users undertaking digital scholarship. The Task Force undertook several major activities to meet these goals. Among them are: an investigation of library-associated DH initiatives at other institutions; an environmental scan of campus facilities and services; a campus-wide survey (345 responses); in-depth interviews with 20 faculty, graduate students and other campus researchers; additional interviews with those involved in external DH initiatives; and presentations and feedback during the DH symposium and workshop held in August 2013. Our research showed that DH work was of broad interest to graduate students and faculty on campus across disciplinary boundaries

DRIVER Technology Watch Report

This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field

Creating the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC): Challenges and Perspectives

The aim of this contribution is to reflect on the process of building the multilingual European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC) that is being created in the framework of the networking project Distant Reading for European Literary History funded by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). To provide some background, we briefly introduce the basic idea of ELTeC with a focus on the overall goals and intended usage scenarios. We then describe the collection composition principles that we have derived from the usage scenarios. In our discussion of the corpus-building process, we focus on collections of novels from four different literary traditions as components of ELTeC: French, Portuguese, Romanian, and Slovenian, selected from the more than twenty collections that are currently in preparation. For each collection, we describe some of the challenges we have encountered and the solutions developed while building ELTeC. In each case, the literary tradition, the history of the language, the current state of digitization of cultural heritage, the resources available locally, and the scholars’ training level with regard to digitization and corpus building have been vastly different. How can we, in this context, hope to build comparable collections of novels that can usefully be integrated into a multilingual resource such as ELTeC and used in Distant Reading research? Based on our individual and collective experience with contributing to ELTeC, we end this contribution with some lessons learned regarding collaborative, multilingual corpus building

Creating the Virtual Library

Workshop presentation paper by Jules Winterton (Associate Director and Librarian, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies) providing an understanding of the key issues to be considered in creating and managing collections of electronic resources in libraries and some background to project design, funding and management

Application Profile Development for Consortial Digital Libraries: An OhioLINK Case Study

In 2002, OhioLINK’s consortia of libraries recognized the need to restructure and standardize the metadata used in the OhioLINK Digital Media Center as a step in the development of a general purpose digital object re-pository. The authors explore the concept of digital object repositories and mechanisms used to develop complex data structures in a cooperative environment, report the findings and recommendations of the OhioLINK Data-base Management and Standards Committee (DMSC) Metadata Task Force, and identify lessons learned, ad-dressing data structures as well as data content standards. A significant result of the work was the creation of the OhioLINK Digital Media Center (DMC) Metadata Application Profile and the implementation of a core set of metadata elements and Dublin Core Metadata Element Set mappings for use in OhioLINK digital projects. The profile and core set of metatadata elements are described