Citation
(2005), "New & Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 22 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2005.23922fab.001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2005, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
New & Noteworthy
Internet Search Tools ProjectReleases Results
The JISC-funded CREE (Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment) Project has released the results of three areas of its work investigating the use of Internet search tools within portal and non-portal environments. The three areas of its work include:
A. Survey results report, comment and spreadsheet
The CREE Survey provides data and analysis of over 2000 responses from across the UK. The survey addressed the following issues:
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what search tools are used;
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what they are used for;
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how results should be treated;
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views of multiple resource searching; and
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views on the use of search tools alongside other systems.
B. Focus groups report and criteria
The survey was complemented by a series of 13 focus groups across three institutions. These addressed the same issues as the survey, providing validation of the survey results but also refinement of the opinions expressed and greater depth and reasoning behind why these opinions were held. The criteria under which the focus groups were held is also provided as assistance for others thinking of using this form of information gathering, which CREE has found extremely valuable. C. Investigation of JSR 168 and WSRP portlet standards
The study of how Internet search tools can be used within portal frameworks. CREE technical partners at the University of Oxford, EDINA and the Archaeology Data Service, plus instructional media + magic inc, have reported on their investigation of the JSR 168 and WSRP portlet standards for use with existing search tools. An initial investigation of the standards has been followed by results and feedback on the basis of experience of implementation. CREE is currently undertaking the user testing phase of its work, testing further the findings of the survey and focus groups through the use of demonstrators, and incorporating the JSR 168 and WSRP portlets developed by the project partners within a uPortal framework. The results of this testing, plus final reports on the technical work and the feasibility of using the portlet standards with communication and collaboration tools will be forthcoming in Autumn 2005.
Project web site: www.hull.ac.uk/esig/cree/deliverables/index.html
Presentations: www.hull.ac.uk/esig/cree/presentations/index.html
PREMIS Working GroupPublishes Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata
OCLC Online Computer Library Center and RLG have announced the release of a comprehensive guide to core metadata for supporting the long-term preservation of digital materials. Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata: Final Report of the PREMIS Working Group is the product of an international consensus-building effort directed at preservation metadata, and it is likely to become the foundation for future work in this area.
The Data Dictionary is the final product of the PREMIS (Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies) working group. Jointly sponsored by OCLC and RLG, PREMIS is an international set of more than 30 experts from libraries, museums, archives, government, and the private sector. The working group has been chaired by Priscilla Caplan, assistant director for digital library services at the Florida Center for Library Automation, and Rebecca Guenther, senior networking and standards specialist at the Library of Congress. Brian Lavoie, OCLC senior research scientist, and Robin Dale, RLG program officer, have served as liaisons to the group. Ongoing maintenance of the data dictionary and associated XML schemas, along with a forum for implementers, will be provided by the PREMIS maintenance activity at: www.loc.gov/standards/premis/
Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata includes in a single document the PREMIS working group's final report, the data dictionary, and a series of examples illustrating use of the data dictionary. The report, data dictionary, and examples can also be downloaded as three separate documents. Comments and questions on the data dictionary can be submitted to premis@loc.gov.
Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata and related materials: www.oclc.org/research/projects/pmwg/
PREMIS maintenance activity: www.loc.gov/standards/premis/
RLG: www.rlg.org
OCLC: www.oclc.org
IMLSReleases Report on Museums, Libraries, and K-12 Learning
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has released a report on how museums and libraries bolster K-12 education and lifelong learning in communities across the United States. "Charting the Landscape, Mapping New Paths: Museums, Libraries, and K-12 Learning," is based on a workshop the Institute hosted August 30-31, 2004 at which more than seventy educators, researchers, policymakers, and museum and library professionals examined K-12 collaborations among their organizations. As the report notes, workshop participants agreed that in the twenty-first century, a competitive and successful society will require people who never stop learning. It is essential, therefore, to build a foundation for lifelong learning during the elementary and secondary school years. The responsibility for building that foundation and nurturing lifelong learning does not rest with schools alone but cuts across institutional boundaries to include museums, libraries, and other community organizations. Three key challenges to developing a "learning society" with museum, library, and school partnerships as a central element of that society emerged from the workshop:
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Successfully redefining education as a lifetime endeavor.
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Understanding the changing nature of professional roles.
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Moving beyond anecdotal evidence to show what works.
Workshop participants also identified steps that practitioners, policy-makers, and museum and library professionals and educators should take to support such a society:
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Build a community of practice by creating a clearinghouse of bestpractices, funding innovative partnerships, and developing tools forconvening stakeholders.
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Build better relationships with education policy-makers, educationassociations, and parent and community organizations at the federal, state and local level.
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Support research and evaluation that examines the impact of museumsand libraries on K-12 formal and informal learning.
The report highlights projects and partnerships and can be used as a tool to lay a foundation for understanding the power of museum, library, school, and community collaborations in cultivating lifelong learning societies. It includes an appendix of selected resources, most of which are available online and a useful glossary of terms used throughout the workshop. A free copy of the report can be accessed electronically from the agency's Web site at: www.imls.gov/pubs/pdf/Charting_the_Landscape.pdf
IMLS web site: www.imls.gov
Tools to Create Web-Based Digital Video Libraries
The Open Video Digital Library Toolkit (OVDLT) project will provide museums, libraries and other institutions holding moving image collections with the tools to create Web-based digital video libraries. Many museums and libraries have important video content that would be of great interest to their audiences but lack the necessary resources to address the many inherent challenges of building a digital video library. Using an iterative development process involving formative evaluation by project collaborators, this project will create and make available open source software tools that will enable organizations to create their own digital video libraries. The project products include:
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A digital video library toolkit. This Web-based toolkit will be downloadable at no charge by museums, libraries and others. Components of the Toolkit will enable an organization to catalog and make available their digital video resources in their own Web-based digital library. The Toolkit will provide utilities for key features of a digital video library, such as keyframe extraction and the creation of storyboard previews, and administrative functions that enable features such as tracking how often individual video files have been viewed or downloaded.
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Documentation and tutorials. The Toolkit will be accompanied by how-to and reference guides, a tutorial that will demonstrate in detail how a museum or library considering adopting the Digital Video Library Toolkit can use it to create their own digital video library, and detailed guidelines on digitization, content selection, and metadata for video resources.
The major tasks supported by the Toolkit in each phase are:
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Preparation and guidance: Many organizations are stymied in their efforts to create a digital library for their video resources because of the technical issues that have to be understood to make decisions about how to digitize their video. Our guidelines and tutorials on digitization, content selection, and metadata for video resources will assist organizations to more easily convert analog video, or existing digital video, into the most appropriate digital formats for their library.
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Digitization: Digitized video will be stored as files on an organization's Web server and accessed via pointers (file addresses) stored in a Toolkit database.
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Cataloging and metadata: To be effectively accessed by end users of the digital library, video must be cataloged and indexed. The Toolkit will include an interface for cataloging video, based on a carefully developed metadata schema. Metadata produced through cataloging will be stored in a Toolkit database. Tools will also be available for importing metadata from other schema.
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Library features: An administrative interface will provide access to tools and forms that enable an organization to create video previews such as storyboards and to customize the end user interface for their digital video library.
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End user experience: The digital video library interface produced by the Toolkit will be a Web site supported by the database. End users of the Web site will be able to search, browse, stream and download video resources.
On completion, the Toolkit and associated resources will be freely available through the project Web site and popular open-source software channels such as SourceForge.net. Information about the toolkit and project goals will be widely disseminated to the museum and library communities through publications, presentations, workshops, and Web sites.
The Open Video Digital Library Toolkit project is funded by The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) through a two-year National Leadership Grant in the Library-Museum Collaboration program. OVDLT is a joint project led by Gary Geisler, Assistant Professor at the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and Karan Sheldon, co-founder of Northeast Historic Film. An advisory board consisting of representatives from the Library of Congress, the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), the Moving Images Collections (MIC) project, among others, is also involved in the project.
DLIST and DL-Harvest
The School of Information Resources and Library Science at the University of Arizona, has invited the library and information science community to explore DL-Harvest.
DL-Harvest is a federated archive, an open aggregator service of DLIST. It brings together full-text, scholarly materials in the Information Sciences from many different OAI-PMH compliant repositories. DL-Harvest is using PKP Harvester with software improvements for flow control, sets, and advanced searching, that have been developed by DLIST Graduate Research Assistant, Joseph Roback. Besides DLIST, the current list of 11 archives harvested includes selective harvesting from ArXiV, E-LIS and OCLC Research. DLIST (Digital Library for Information Science and Technology), an Open Access, cross-institutional repository of full-text electronic resources in the domains of Library and Information Science (LIS) and Information Technology (IT), is a service of the School of Information Resources and Library Science and the Learning Technologies Center, University of Arizona. Seed monies for DLIST are from the University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Proposition 301 funded initiative of the Internet Technology Commerce and Design Institute, now the Arizona Center for Information Science and Technology. DLIST is running on EPrints2 archive-creating software, which generates eprints archives that are compliant with the Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting OAI v2.0.
DL-Harvest web site: dlharvest. sir.arizona.edu
DLIST web site: dlist.sir. arizona.edu/
New IT Book SeriesTopics in the Digital Humanities
The University of Illinois Press has announced a new book series, "Topics in the Digital Humanities", under the general editorship of Susan Schriebman, Head of Digital Collections and Research University of Maryland Libraries, and Ray Siemens, Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing, English, University of Victoria.The editors describe the series rationale and description as follows:
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The incorporation of computational methods into the humanities does more than speed task work. Computers change the nature of tasks that can be imagined and performed. New questions can be asked, and must be asked, new research methods and tools have appeared, new methods for teaching and publication have proliferated, expectations about skills have evolved, and library purchases have shifted dramatically. Humanities computing is undergoing a redefinition of basic principles by a continuous influx of new, vibrant, and diverse communities of practitioners within and well beyond the halls of academe. These practitioners recognize the value computers add to their work, that the computer itself remains an instrument subject to continual innovation, and that competition within many disciplines requires scholars to become and remain current with what computers can do.
Topics in the Digital Humanities is accepting proposals for monographs and co-authored works that directly serve the community of those engaging with humanities computing tools and methodologies. Preparation and submission guidelines are available at: www.press.uillinois.edu/about/acquisition.html.
LITA 2005Award Winners Announced
Paul M. Gherman, university librarian at Vanderbilt University, has been named the 2005 winner of the Hugh C. Atkinson Memorial Award. Named in honor of one of the pioneers of library automation, the Atkinson Award recognizes an academic librarian who has made significant contributions in the area of library automation or management, and has made notable improvements in library services or research. "Throughout his career as a librarian, Paul Gherman has been an innovator and a risk taker," said James L. Mullins, award committee chair. "From Virginia Tech to Kenyon College to Vanderbilt University, Paul was always on the cutting edge in his exploration of ideas and opportunities on how to effectively utilize technology to provide better access to information. Without exception, the profession adopted his concepts." Four divisions of the American Library Association, including the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the Library Administration and Management Association (LAMA), and the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), jointly sponsor the Hugh C. Atkinson Award.
William E. Moen, associate professor in the School of Library and Information Sciences, University of North Texas, and interim director of the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge, is the winner of the Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology for 2005. OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. and the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) sponsor the award, which was established to honor the achievements of Frederick G. Kilgour, the founder of OCLC and a seminal figure in library automation. The award is given to a person who has amassed a significant body of research in the field of library and information technology, with particular recognition given to research which results in a positive and substantive impact on the publication, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information. "The Kilgour Award Committee is pleased to acknowledge the work of William Moen, whose research into protocols and standards for information retrieval, and investigations into interoperability and metadata utilization, are making important contributions to improving the ways library systems communicate," said Heidi Hanson, chair of the award committee.
Dan Chudnov is the 2005 recipient of the LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award. Chudnov is a librarian who currently serves as a programmer at Yale's Center for Medical Informatics. Sponsored by Thomson Gale and the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), the award recognizes exemplary entrepreneurship that provides an innovative product or service designed to meet the needs of the library world. "Dan Chudnov has demonstrated exemplary entrepreneurship over time in bringing together professionals to develop innovative information technology products for, and provide innovative services to, the library world," said Russ Bailey, award committee chair. Chudnov played a major role in the Jointly Administered Knowledge Environment (JAKE), the open source tool for distributing information about journal and online journal products. While at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Chudnov's work was central in the development of DSpace, one of the leading content management software tools at the heart of numerous institutional repositories. Most recently, Chudnov led in the development of Unalog, an open source link sharing application that is finding wide usage and acceptance.
William Gosling has been named the winner of the 2005 LITA/Library Hi Tech award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology. Emerald and the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) sponsor the award. The award recognizes outstanding achievement in communicating to educate practitioners within the library field in library and information technology. Since 1997, as director/university librarian at the University of Michigan, William Gosling has overseen a period of rapid change and dynamic technological innovation including the expansion of the fledgling Digital Library into one of the premier digital library programs in the country. Successful major digital conversion projects have led to the library's selection as one of the five institutions partnering with Google to digitize the entire collection. Gosling serves on editorial boards of two journals, Library Collections, Acquisitions and Technical Services and Cataloging and Classification Quarterly, and represents the University of Michigan on many national organizations, including Digital Library Federation, CIC Library Directors, and the Coalition for Networked Information.
Music-to-Knowledge (M2K)Update Release
The release of M2K 1.1 Alpha: MIREX Edition is now available. This latest M2K release has undergone some significant debugging and feature enhancements including the addition of framework itineraries and modules specifically designed for each of the "contests" in the upcoming Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX).A summary of key enhancements is listed below:
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Added new file input modules (InputSignals, InputSignalArrays).
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Updated DEMO itineraries to use new input modules (vastly simplifying itineraries).
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Added MIREX evaluator and file reader modules.
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Added MIREX evaluator test itineraries and test data.
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Added MIREX framework itineraries.
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Updated all itineraries to be based on relative file paths (M2K itineraries should now work "out-of-the-box" on all platforms).
M2K Home: www.music-ir.org/evaluation/m2kM2K Release Page: www.music-ir.org/evaluation/m2k/releaseM2K Module and Itinerary Listing: www.music-ir.org/evaluation/m2k/module_listing.htmlMIREX Home: www.music-ir.org/mirexwiki
Meridian ERM Product in General Release
Endeavor Information Systems has announced the first general release of Endeavor Meridian, an enterprise-level electronic resource management system. Meridian is intended to provide a single, cost-effective database to assist with the process of managing, delivering content and analyzing a library's electronic collections. Meridian reduces the staff effort traditionally required to manage, deliver and analyze e-content while providing improved service to information consumers. Meridian dynamically integrates with Voyager and Cognos ReportNet. Among the first to place Meridian into full production will be Princeton University Library. Over the course of the past year, Princeton library staff members actively participated in the Endeavor Meridian development process, advising the company on key functionality and testing the software throughout development and field test cycles. Field tests began at partner libraries following implementation of the system with the help of Endeavor-developed import programs. Implementations involved loading data from a wide range of disparate sources including Voyager and other ILS systems, link resolvers, publication access management services and local databases. Product Information on Meridian: www.endinfosys.com/prods/meridian.htm
Interesting Blog on Libraries, Services, Networks
One information technology related blog to keep an eye on is that of Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President of Research for OCLC (The Online Computer Library Center) who muses on libraries, services and networks. Categories on his weblog include: digital asset management, knowledge organization and representation, libraries – distributed environments, libraries – systems and technologies, metadata, research learning and scholarly communication, standards and more.
Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: orweblog.oclc.org/
Best of the Web Awards
The Museums and the Web 2005's Best of the Web Awards winners were announced in Vancouver on April 15, 2005 at the close of the conference. Nominations were received in the following categories: E-Services, Education, Innovative, On-line Exhibition, Museum Professional's Site, and Research Site. Recognizing achievement in cultural and heritage web site design, a committee of museum professionals selects the Best of the Web each year. Sites are judged on content, functionality, interface: visual design and usability, interactivity and overall impact.
This year's best overall museum web site was: "Making the Modern World Online – Stories about the lives we've made," www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/ Institution: The Science Museum, (London, UK)
List of the Best of the Web Awards: www.archimuse.com/mw2005/best/list.html