The Preservation Storage Network

The Preservation Storage Network is a cross platform server and client that enables the construction of a private cloud storage network. The PSN provides a single piece of software which acts much like a BitTorrent client but with data security, self healing abilities and an Amazon S3 API on the front. Taking influences from RAID and recent work on the Sun Honeycomb the PSN software provides a way of constructing an efficient trusted, multi-site, multi-node ?cloud? storage network

Open Bibliography

Poster presented at the VSMF Symposium held at the Unilever Centre on 2011-01-17.More research is published currently than can be understood or followed by a researcher without the aid of a computer. We need Open shareable information on research publications, an Open Bibliography, to build the services that enable researchers to explore their field and discover the research they need. Producers of bibliographic data such as libraries, publishers, universities, scholars or social reference management communities have an important role in supporting the advance of humanity's knowledge. For society to reap the full benefits from bibliographic endeavours, it is imperative that bibliographic data be made open - that is, available for anyone to use and re-use freely for any purpose

Ami-The Chemist's Amanuensis

Poster presented at the VSMF Symposium held at the Unilever Centre on 2011-01-17The Ami project was a six month Rapid Innovation project sponsored by JISC to explore the Virtual Research Environment space. The project brainstormed with chemists and decided to investigate ways to facilitate monitoring and collection of experimental data. A frequently encountered use-case was identified of how the chemist reaches the end of an experiment, but finds an unexpected result. The ability to replay events can significantly help make sense of how things progressed. The project therefore concentrated on collecting a variety of dimensions of ancillary data – data that would not normally be collected due to practicality constraints. There were three main areas of investigation: 1) Development of a monitoring tool using infrared and ultrasonic sensors; 2) Time-lapse motion video capture (for example, videoing 5 seconds in every 60); and 3) Activity-driven video monitoring of the fume cupboard environs. The Ami client application was developed to control these separate logging functions. The application builds up a timeline of the events in the experiment and around the fume cupboard. The videos and data logs can then be reviewed after the experiment in order to help the chemist determine the exact timings and conditions used. The project experimented with ways in which a Microsoft Kinect could be used in a laboratory setting. Investigations suggest that it would not be an ideal device for controlling a mouse, but it shows promise for usages such as manipulating virtual molecules.Ami was a six month project under the “JISC Rapid Innovation Grants 10/09” programme, Grants for the Virtual Research Environment - Rapid Innovation funding call. [http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/funding_calls/2009/10/vreri.aspx

Applying Open Storage to Institutional Repositories

Repository interoperability and the capability to support preservation can be enhanced by introducing a storage layer that is independent of repository software. Institutional Repositories (IRs) are largely characterized by ‘openness’, that is, most are based on open source software, conform with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and aim to provide open access to content and data. We introduce a new ‘open’ approach to repositories: open storage combines open source software with standard hardware storage architectures. Examples include platforms provided by Sun Microsystems, which we use in this work. The paper will describe how the open storage approach has been allied to the OAI framework for Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) to enable repositories managed with different softwares to share and copy data more easily and to be provided with extra services such as preservation service

Ami - The Chemist's Amanuensis

RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are.Abstract The Ami project was a six month Rapid Innovation project sponsored by JISC to explore the Virtual Research Environment space. The project brainstormed with chemists and decided to investigate ways to facilitate monitoring and collection of experimental data. A frequently encountered use-case was identified of how the chemist reaches the end of an experiment, but finds an unexpected result. The ability to replay events can significantly help make sense of how things progressed. The project therefore concentrated on collecting a variety of dimensions of ancillary data - data that would not normally be collected due to practicality constraints. There were three main areas of investigation: 1) Development of a monitoring tool using infrared and ultrasonic sensors; 2) Time-lapse motion video capture (for example, videoing 5 seconds in every 60); and 3) Activity-driven video monitoring of the fume cupboard environs. The Ami client application was developed to control these separate logging functions. The application builds up a timeline of the events in the experiment and around the fume cupboard. The videos and data logs can then be reviewed after the experiment in order to help the chemist determine the exact timings and conditions used. The project experimented with ways in which a Microsoft Kinect could be used in a laboratory setting. Investigations suggest that it would not be an ideal device for controlling a mouse, but it shows promise for usages such as manipulating virtual molecules.Peer Reviewe

Cherry-picking the semantic web

Implementing ideas from the semantic web makes the discovery, reuse and more importantly, curation of digital resources easier

Cherry-picking the semantic web

Implementing ideas from the semantic web makes the discovery, reuse and more importantly, curation of digital resources easier

BL Flickr image dataset: User Submitted Tags (til March 2016)

In Dec 2013, the British Library Labs project uploaded over 1 million undescribed images onto Flickr. These illustrations, diagrams and decorations were extracted from 65,000 volumes of digitised works.<div><br></div><div>The dataset is a table of the descriptive and other tags added by contributors to the images in order to better describe them, and contain all the user-submitted ones to date (March 2016).</div><div><br></div><div><div>The data table (in TSV format) has the following columns:</div><div><br></div><div>flickrid - The id of the image.</div><div><br></div><div>enteredtext - The text typed in by a contributor.</div><div><br></div><div>from - the epoch time (in seconds) since the last data harvest before the 'to' harvest.</div><div><br></div><div>to - the epoch time of the metadata harvest that the change was detected in</div><div><br></div><div>tagid - The tag identifier supplied by Flickr</div><div><br></div><div>author - The user's account who added the tag</div><div><br></div><div>tag - The simplified version of the text, used in flickr's URLs and so on.</div><div><br></div><div>mode - either 'add' or 'del', showing that a tag has either been added since last harvest, or that it has been removed since then.</div><div><br></div></div

Tag activity (for 2014) on BL Flickr Commons

<p>Tag information for BL Flickr Commons, from 11 Dec 2013 - 11 Dec 2014.</p> <p>Tab-separated, UTF-8 encoded file, each row corresponds to a tag change. A change is simply a tag being added or removed. The image's metadata is harvested regularly so that we can spot when a tag has been added or has been removed. It is not clear if it is possible to work out when a tag has been precisely added from Flickr's API or hidden information within the tag's identifier.</p> <p> </p> <p>The TSV has the following columns:</p> <p>flickrid - The id of the image.</p> <p>enteredtext - The text typed in by a contributor.</p> <p>from - the epoch time (in seconds) since the last data harvest before the 'to' harvest.</p> <p>to - the epoch time of the metadata harvest that the change was detected in</p> <p>tagid - The tag identifier supplied by Flickr</p> <p>author - The user's account who added the tag</p> <p>tag - The simplified version of the text, used in flickr's URLs and so on.</p> <p>mode - either 'add' or 'del', showing that a tag has either been added since last harvest, or that it has been removed since then.</p

Book data

<p>Contains 'book_data.json'</p> <p>A JSON-encoded list of records, consisting of bibliographic information about the digitised works as well as technical information about the identifier's of extracted images on Flickr and identifier's for the PDF versions.</p