Some practical points on organizing ETD consortia

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) digital libraries are being developed worldwide. Higher education organizations commonly collaborate in these efforts by forming consortia. Some of the existing consortia are at the national level while others are at regional levels. NDLTD (Networked Digital Library for Thesis and Dissertations) is an initiative that is creating an international consortium which includes organizations or other ETD consortia in various countries. Consortia are important because they create an opportunity to collaborate, to share experiences, and to establish or adopt standards that guarantee interoperability among participant ETD digital libraries. However, developing consortia is challenging since it requires a strong degree of coordination while at the same time preserving existing organizational identities and functions. this makes the role of consortium coordinator complex. Implementation and operation of information services that integrate the participants\u27 initiatives are the ultimate goal of a consortium. These services are of paramount importance and need to be clearly established in order to operate effectively. This paper addresses some of the issues mentioned above including solutions that have been implemented. It also points to problems that might occur during the organization and operation of consortia

Survival of the Fittest: The Evolving Nature of Metadata Creation for Digital Collections

The evolving nature of metadata is exemplified through a pictorial timeline that expands over a decade, identifying the development of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries digital collections, the context of their development, and the various factors that emerged later on that have influenced revisions of metadata decisions

Transforming digital collections into linked data: The rise of missing links

Goals Study the feasibility of developing a common process that would allow the conversion of our collection records into linked data preserving their original expressivity and richness Publish data from our collections in the Linked Open Data Cloud to improve discover-ability and connections with other related data sets on the We

Exposing Missing Links: From CONTENTdm digital collections to the Linked Open Data cloud

Agenda Linked Data basic concepts UNLV Linked Data project Technologies Transforming metadata into linked data Next step

Survival of the Fittest The Evolution of Metadata in Digital Collections

There is a common misconception that metadata creation for digital collections is performed in a single step by subject experts. Once the metadata record is created it is believed that the record remains mostly unchanged. Our experience demonstrates that designing and implementing digital collections is a learning process. Various elements in the environment may prompt us to review our metadata and make changes that affect all collections. We will provide you with a few examples

Keeping track of objects and metadata at UNLV: From material selection through metadata quality control

Often times a large amount of time is spent in organizing materials and tracking workflow in digital collection projects. Time is a precious resource in most projects since they are constrained by a rigid schedule. This problem is exacerbated in collaborative environments where different people collaborate in various stages of the project. Silvia Southwick and Jane Skoric with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas will present effective and efficient simple tools to manage digital objects and metadata throughout the life cycle of a digital collection project. Using actual work processes, we will describe and demonstrate the tracking of physical and digital items while simultaneously capturing metadata. Our presentation will begin talking about provisional metadata provided by content experts as they select materials for the collection. It progresses through various stages of the project up to quality control of metadata records within a soon to be published collection. Some of the existing tools are based on Access database and Excel spreadsheets. The presentation ends with plans for improving management processes to better integrate with collaborative environments

Not Just for Geeks: A practical approach to linked data for digital collections managers

As digital library managers, we know our collections contain rich metadata, but data (or metadata) are encapsulated in these records and are accessible to users only when records containing them are retrieved in a search. This approach for managing data, although a common practice that extends far beyond digital collections, creates silos of data. Data associated with records is isolated and does not directly link to related data existing in other records. These silos hide valuable relationships among data, leaving to users the task of discovering these hidden connections. Join other digital library managers at this workshop designed to provide you with key concepts to understand Linked Data and a selection of hands-on activities and demonstrations that will show step-by-step exactly how CONTENTdm metadata can be transformed into linked data. The workshop will also provide a forum for us to discuss how Linked Data will impact our guiding principles, best practices, and local workflows. This workshop is geared toward beginners – not just data geeks – and is designed for curious exploration and active learning in a welcoming environment. The Linked Data movement has gained momentum and it is not too early for us to start thinking about how this paradigm shift, akin to the transition from card catalogs to online catalogs, will affect discovery of our collections and our future workflows. How will we contribute our resources to the Linked Data Cloud where digital library data can be created locally and linked to existing data accessible globally? The movement is already being embraced by key organizations in the library field and the resources already exist to help us experiment with transitioning our collections

Linked Data Demystified: Practical Efforts to Transform CONTENTdm Metadata for the Linked Data Cloud

The library literature and events like the ALA Annual Conference have been inundated with presentations and articles on linked data. At UNLV Libraries, we understand the importance of linked data in helping to better service our users. We have designed and initiated a pilot project to apply linked data concepts to the practical task of transforming a sample set of our CONTENTdm digital collections data into future-oriented linked data. This presentation will outline rationale for beginning work in linked data and detail the phases we will undertake in the proof of concept project. We hope through this research experiment to evaluate challenges and benefits of publishing digital collection data into the Linked Data Cloud

Calibration of the CMS hadron calorimeters using proton-proton collision data at root s=13 TeV

Methods are presented for calibrating the hadron calorimeter system of theCMSetector at the LHC. The hadron calorimeters of the CMS experiment are sampling calorimeters of brass and scintillator, and are in the form of one central detector and two endcaps. These calorimeters cover pseudorapidities vertical bar eta vertical bar ee data. The energy scale of the outer calorimeters has been determined with test beam data and is confirmed through data with high transverse momentum jets. In this paper, we present the details of the calibration methods and accuracy.Peer reviewe

The Brazilian electronic theses and dissertations digital library: Providing open access for scholarly information

This paper describes a project led by the Instituto Brasileiro de Informações em Ciência e Tecnologia (Ibict), a government institution, to build a national digital library for electronic theses and dissertations - Bibliteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações (BDTD). The project has been a collaborative effort among Ibict, universities and other research centers in Brazil. The developers adopted a system architecture based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) in which universities and research centers act as data providers and Ibict as a service provider. A Brazilian metadata standard for electronic theses and dissertations was developed for the digital library. A toolkit including open source package was also developed by Ibict to be distributed to potential data providers. BDTD has been integrated with the international initiative: the Networked Digital Library of Thesis and Dissertation (NDLTD). Discussions in the paper address various issues related to project design, development and management as well as the role played by Ibict. Conclusions highlight some important lessons learned to date and challenges for the future in expanding the BDTD project