October 19, 2005
October 2005 D-Lib Magazine Now Available
The October 2005 issue of D-Lib Magazine is now available.
This issue contains six articles, the 'In Brief' column, excerpts from recent press releases, and news of upcoming conferences and other items of interest in 'Clips and Pointers'. The Featured Collection for the October issue is ARKive contributed by Hamish MacCall, Wildscreen.
The articles include:
* The CREE Project: Investigating User Requirements for Searching within Institutional Environments
Chris Awre and Ian Dolphin, University of Hull; Gabriel Hanganu and Tony Brett, Oxford University; and Caroline Ingram, CSI Consultancy
* Using Machine Learning to Support Quality Judgments
Myra Custard and Tamara Sumner, University of Colorado at Boulder
* Hierarchical Catalog Records: Implementing a FRBR Catalog
David Mimno, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Gregory Crane and Alison Jones, Tufts University
* Development and Assessment of a Public Discovery and Delivery Interface for a Fedora Repository
Leslie Johnston, University of Virginia
* Exploiting "Light-weight" Protocols and Open Source Tools to Implement Digital Library Collections and Services
Xiaorong Xiang and Eric Lease Morgan, University of Notre Dame
* Lund Virtual Medical Journal Makes Self-Archiving Attractive and Easy for Authors
Yvonne Hultman Özek, Lund University
Links: D-Lib
September 23, 2005
Lionshare P2P Project at Penn State
DrWeb's Domain has an entry about Lionshare, a project at Penn State to develop an authenticated P2P file-sharing application/network for access to digital collections.
From the Lionshare website:
The LionShare P2P project is an effort to facilitate legitimate file-sharing among individuals and educational institutions around the world. By using Peer to Peer (P2P) technology and incorporating features such as authentication, directory servers, and owner controlled sharing of files, LionShare promises secure file-sharing capabilities for the easy exchange of image collections, video archives, large data collections, and other types of academic information. In addition to authenticated file-sharing capabilities, LionShare will also provide users with resources for organizing, storing, and retrieving digital files.
Here's a blurb from Open Access News (who got it from Chronicle of Higher Education, a subscription site):
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University at University Park plan to unveil today free software that attempts to turn the peer-to-peer technology often used by music pirates into a tool for professors to legitimately share large data sets, high-resolution images from their research, and other educational files. The software -- called LionShare -- will be released at a meeting of members of Internet2, the high-speed networking consortium. And it will be made available to colleges by the end of September, according to Michael J. Halm, senior strategist for Penn State's Teaching and Working With Technology office. The software, financed in part by a $1.1-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was about two years in the making. A number of college officials have awaited LionShare's release because the program could help professors establish their own online reserves. It allows users to search one another's digital collections of documents, images, and other academic material and view specific files....Professors can use the software to make files available only to students registered for their courses, for example. And users can organize their own digital collections by affixing keyword descriptions, known as metadata, to individual items.
The project is looking at using Shibboleth, a project from Internet2 MACE group (Middleware Architecture Committee for Education), to provide federated P2P while maintaining security, user identity and information.
There are interesting similarities with this application and the Stanford's LOCKSS application. Each take the concept of replication (many copies) to new heights. Though Lionshare seems to be heading towards community tagging. Cool.
Link: http://lionshare.its.psu.edu/main/
Requirements for Digital Preservation Systems: A Bottom-Up Approach
This article was posted to arXiv.org a couple weeks ago by researchers at Stanford. Here's the abstract:
The field of digital preservation is being defined by a set of standards developed top-down, starting with an abstract reference model (OAIS) and gradually adding more specific detail. Systems claiming conformance to these standards are entering production use. Work is underway to certify that systems conform to requirements derived from OAIS.
We complement these requirements derived top-down by presenting an alternate, bottom-up view of the field. The fundamental goal of these systems is to ensure that the information they contain remains accessible for the long term. We develop a parallel set of requirements based on observations of how existing systems handle this task, and on an analysis of the threats to achieving the goal. On this basis we suggest disclosures that systems should provide as to how they satisfy their goals.
Several things I like about this paper.
1. It is very readable and easy to understand. When dealing with OAIS, preservation systems, etc., this is not always true.
2. Makes a good argument for open standards, systems, and communication.
3. Authenticity and trust in the digital preservation system will require a full disclosure of strategies, threats and failures. Yes, if a system fails, everyone should know about it.
Unfortunately, the paper often presents Stanford's own LOCKSS digital preservation system in such glowing terms that some readers may consider the paper as self-congratulatory.
A must-read article with great references.
Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.DL/0509018
September 19, 2005
Public Hacks Library of Congress Photo Collection Interface
"Hacking" is often considered a bad thing by the general public. Though sometimes a hack can be a good thing. Take the Library of Congress digital collections for example. The site has a rich collection of multimedia resources but the interface is fairly low tech.
Cory Doctorow, a SF writer and regular blogger on Boing Boing, blogged the following on Friday, Sept. 16.
The Library of Congress has a stupendous, enormous photo gallery called "America from the Great Depression to World War II: Color Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1939-1945,"... Unfortunately, the organizational back-end for this is so primitive (especially in comparison with modern image-sharing and organizing sites like Flickr) that it, too, seems to hail from 1939-1945, making the site a real pain to navigate and use.
In response to Cory's lament, an enterprising programmer created a script that improves the interface.
Simon Willison hacked a Greasemonkey script called americanmemoryfixer.user.js that fixes the user-interface's worst sins:
* Changes the colour scheme to black-on-white, and the typeface to Verdana.
* Removes all table borders.
* Adds headings to some pages, and fixes various title tags.
* Sets the default gallery view to be a set of thumbnails, rather than a list of names.
* Displays a large image (as opposed to a thumbnail) when you view a photograph.
::
Continue reading "Public Hacks Library of Congress Photo Collection Interface"
June 02, 2005
New version of ContentDM
OCLC has announced the latest release of ContentDM, the digital collections management software developed by DiMeMa. OCLC's press release states:
CONTENTdm software offers a complete set of tools to store, manage and deliver digital collections—such as historical documents, photos, newspapers, audio and video—on the Web. Newest features include:
* Fast multiple document entry.
* Increased security for items and collections to better protect copyrighted or other restricted materials.
* Detailed reports that show how online items and collections are being used.
* Additional digital repository features.
* Linking to WorldCat for worldwide visibility of digital collections.
"Digitization of materials in libraries, historical societies and other archive agencies offers an exciting opportunity for these organizations to add value to their collections and provide access to their unique holdings," said Greg Zick, President of DiMeMa Inc., creator of CONTENTdm software."
The new upgrade will be available sometime in June.
May 13, 2005
Pachyderm
I've been playing a little bit with Pachyderm. Check out the specs
Here's what they say about themselves:
The project brings software development teams and digital library experts from six NMC universities together with counterparts from five major museums to create a new, open source authoring environment for creators of web-based and multimedia learning experiences.
If you want to play, I can share my login and password. Just let me know.
