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This study aims to explore a way of representing historical collections by examining the features of an event in historical documents and building an event-based ontology model.

To align with a domain-specific and upper ontology, the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) model is adopted. Based on BFO, an event-based ontology for historical description (EOHD) is designed. To define events, event-related vocabularies are taken from the Library of Congress’ event types (2012). The three types of history and six kinds of changes are defined.

The EOHD model demonstrates how to apply the event ontology to biographical sketches of a creator history to link event types.

The EOHD model has great potential to be further expanded to specific events and entities through different types of history in a full set of historical documents.

The EOHD provides a framework for modeling and semantically reforming the relationships of historical documents, which can make historical collections more explicitly connected in Web environments.

To rescue at-risk historical scientific data stored at the McGill Observatory, the objectives of the Data Rescue Archive Weather (DRAW) project are: to build a repository; to develop a protocol to preserve the data in weather registers; and to make the data available to research communities and the public. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The DRAW project adopts an open archive information system compliant model as a conceptual framework for building a digital repository. The model consists of data collection, conversion, data capture, transcription, arrangement, description, data extraction, database design and repository setup.

A climate data repository, as the final product, is set up for digital images of registers and a database is designed for data storage. The repository provides dissemination of and access to the data for researchers, information professionals and the public.

Doing a quality check is the most important aspect of rescuing historical scientific data to ensure the accuracy, reliability and consistency of data.

The DRAW project shows how the use of historical scientific data has become a key element in research analysis on scientific fields, such as climatology and environmental protection.

The historical climate data set of the McGill Observatory is by nature unique and complex for preservation and research purposes. The management of historical scientific data is a challenge to rescue and describe as a result of its heterogeneous and non-standardized form.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship and interactions among trust, information and communication technologies (ICT) and country income levels.

This study adopts the standardization method by Osberg and Sharpe (2005) and analyzes the changes in global trends, coefficient of variations, and correlations. The statistical data consist of panel data for 28 countries from 2007 to 2014.

Trust in people (TP) and institutional confidence (IC) have different shapes of movement over the period and the change speed of IC has decreased much faster than that of TP. While TP in high income countries is positioned in relatively high ranks, IC of middle income countries tends to be ranked in higher ranks. While the telecommunication infrastructure index (TII) has continuously increased in all countries for the entire period, open service index (OSI) has not increased at the same rate since improving OSI is not easier than TII. As OSI increases, IC may affect an increase to a certain point and then decrease in an inverted U-shape. The result of this relationship emphasizes on the importance of OSI along with TII in building trust, particularly with institutions.

The examination of the relationship of trust, ICT and income in quantifiable values can contribute to understanding the direction of movement and change speed toward trust building with people and institutions.

To promote levels of trust, countries should consider different strategies for growing TP and institutions and concentrate on improving ICT-mediated services more than installing ICT facilities.

Quantifying the interactions of a qualitative concept of trust with ICT facilities, online services, and income levels presents an in-depth analysis of TP and with institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the main factors influencing government openness, develop a global government openness index (GGOI) for assessing the progress of government openness and investigate how the factors contribute to the advancement of open government by individual countries and country groups by income.

This study identifies the four factors and adopts them into four variables for making GGOI: accountability (ACC), citizen participation and freedom (CPF), transparency (TRA) and information and communication technology (ICT). To calculate GGOI, panel data for 134 countries from 2006 to 2015 were used.

GGOI scores constantly improved with an annual growth rate of 2.09 percent. Countries with high ACC values tend to have high TRA scores, resulting in high GGOI scores. While the differences in ACC and TRA were steady over the period, ICT increased the most in all groups. To boost ICT performance as a channel to support other variables, middle-income countries should make further effort for citizens to use ICT capabilities toward enhancing the levels of CPF and TRA.

This study presents a global picture of the advancement of open government and provides insights into specific areas that can be diagonalized.

The GGOI could be used as a useful assessment tool to measure the progress of government openness in countries and implement policies and action plans for improving government openness.

The GGOI covers the areas related to legal, administrative, participatory and technological factors and provides the factors’ inter-relationships for the composition of GGOI.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the social uses of digitisation within the social context of HIV/AIDS by building digital archives of photographs.

Visual data sets on HIV/AIDS are drawn from photovoice studies in our previous work in Canada and South Africa. To organise and describe visual data sets, protocols for scanning and metadata have been developed.

Based on these protocols, a digital archive is being built to store and provide access to digital images.

The study intends to develop a methodological and technological framework to understand the social uses of photography by using digital technology.

The observations and lessons garnered from this study provide insights into the building of a digital archive of photo collections on HIV/AIDS and can be used in other social contexts where photos are developed and managed in order to address social issues.

The purpose of the paper is to present a progress report on the building of a digital archive of electronic journals by the Korean Electronic Site License Initiative (KESLI) of the National Digital Science Library in Korea.

The research involves identifying a system architecture, testing its prototype, deciding journal selection criteria and priority publisher selection criteria, and defining metadata sets.

The paper finds that production system and archiving system models are being implemented and tested. Implementation of the delivery system module is in progress. Preservation strategies will be identified.

The KESLI electronic journal digital archive project is proceeding toward completion of its tasks by the end of 2007.

The observations and lessons in the paper provide insights into building a digital archive of electronic journals that can be used as a basis for building similar digital archives in other countries.

The purpose of this research is to assess the current descriptions of architecture collections housed at the McGill University Library in preparation for building an interoperable metadata and search interface for Canadian architecture collections.

The names and frequencies of tables and fields of 11 architecture databases were analyzed and summarized into the most commonly used groups. In addition, typologies of buildings by purpose of construction were presented as subject headings.

Current metadata schemes are diverse and heterogeneous across the 11 databases.

This study is at the pilot stage and is limited to Canadian architecture collections at McGill University. The observations provide insights into metadata normalization that can be used as a basis for building architecture collections or image collections.

This is the first metadata assessment of architecture collections for the purpose of building a single uniform access.

The aim of this study is to assess the metadata element sets of electronic theses and dissertations that are currently used at Canadian academic institutional repositories, and to discuss issues related to variations and inconsistencies in Dublin Core data used by participating repositories.

The formats and usage patterns of metadata elements at ten participating institutional repositories are identified and analyzed. Additionally, metadata element variations are grouped by different types.

Current metadata elements have a significant level of inconsistency and variation.

The observations drawn from this study are limited to Canadian cases only. However, the results provide insights into developing a metadata framework for institutional repositories in other countries.

This study examines empirical data collected from data providers among Canadian institutional repositories. The result of this study may be beneficial to the achievement of interoperability across institutional repositories and to the development of a standardized application profile for Canadian institutional repositories.

To set up a protocol for electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) submission for the electronic thesis initiative pilot project at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

An electronic thesis and dissertation submission protocol was implemented and tested. To test authoring tools, we had 50 students submit their theses or dissertations using one of four style sheets. Word‐processed files were converted to PDF and XML formats. The pilot project team evaluated DigiTool's effectiveness in digital conversion, capture of metadata and cataloguing, digital content harvesting, digital preservation, and integration with the student information system.

All theses experienced some degree of information loss during the conversion. DigiTool is still being tested for storage, cataloguing, and dissemination capability. For full implementation, three major issues need to be addressed further: conversion; metadata; and file formats.

Most of the issues that have arisen during the McGill pilot project will be mirrored at other academic institutions that are considering electronic thesis submission.

This paper provides insights into the procedures that will arise as institutions go through the process of introducing electronic thesis and dissertation submission.

One of the great strides to develop a health information system is to define the requirements of the systems. This paper aims to identify and collect the requirements for designing a Web-based repository of evaluation tools for health-related software products.

The current qualitative-review study is conducted in four phases including searching databases, reviewing websites and similar repositories, holding focus group discussions with a group of experts and determining the essential requirements for designing a Web-based repository, and also drawing the unified modeling language diagrams using Visual Paradigm software for displaying the necessities which were gathered.

The requirements for designing a Web-based repository are provided in five main categories: technical, structural, content, legal and others. In general, creating a repository takes considerable time and effort, as well as going through the steps of the system’s life cycle.

In this study, the first and the most significant step is creating an developing a reasonable system identifying the system requirements, which is successfully conducted. The requirements given in this study will be used in the next steps, which make use of programming languages such as PHP and HTML, so as to design a Web-based repository for health product software evaluation tools.