Search results

This paper aims to propose a toolset that enables individual digital collections owners to satisfy the requirements of aggregators even in cases where their IT and software infrastructure is limited and does not support them inherently. Managers of repositories/digital collections face the challenge of exposing their data via Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to multiple aggregators and conforming to their possibly differing requirements, for example on output metadata schemas and selective harvesting.

The authors developed a software server that is able to wrap existing systems or even metadata records in plain files as OAI-PMH sources. They analysed the functionality of OAI-PMH data providers in a flow of discrete steps and used a software library to modularise the software for these steps so that the whole process can be easily customised to the needs of each pair of OAI-PMH data provider and service provider. The developed server includes a mechanism for the implementation of schema mappings using an XML specification that can be defined by non-IT personnel, for example metadata experts. The server has been applied in various real-life use cases, in particular for providing content to Europeana.

It has been concluded through real-life use cases that it is indeed possible and feasible in practice to expose metadata records of digital collections via OAI-PMH even when the data sources do not support the required protocols and standards. Even advanced OAI-PMH features like selective harvesting can be supported. Mappings between input and output schemas in many practical cases can be implemented entirely or to a large extent as XML specifications by metadata experts instead of software developers.

Exposing data via OAI-PMH to aggregators like Europeana is made feasible/easier for digital collections owners, even when their software infrastructure does not inherently support the required protocols and standards.

The approach is original and applicable in practice to diverse technology environments, effectively addressing the indisputable fact of the heterogeneity of software and systems used to implement digital repositories and collections worldwide.

This paper describes the use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting in the NSF’s National Science Digital Library (NSDL). The protocol is used both as a method to ingest metadata into a central Metadata Repository and also as the means by which the repository exports metadata to service providers. The NSDL Search Service is used to illustrate this architecture. An early version of the Metadata Repository was an alpha test site for version 1 of the protocol and the production repository was a beta test site for version 2. This paper describes the implementation experience and early practical tests. Despite some teething troubles and the long‐term difficulties of semantic compatibility, the overall conclusion is optimism that the Open Archive Initiative will be a successful part of the NSDL.

In July of 2001, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign undertook a project to test the efficacy of using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting to construct a search and discovery service focused on information resources in the domain of cultural heritage. To date, the Illinois project has indexed over two million Dublin Core metadata records contributed by 39 metadata repositories in the museum, academic library, and digital library project communities. These records describe a mix of digital and analog primary content. Our analysis of these metadata records demonstrates wide divergence in descriptive metadata practices and the use and interpretation of Dublin Core metadata elements. Differences are particularly notable by community. This article provides an overview of the Illinois project, presents quantitative data about divergent metadata practices and element usage patterns, and details implications for metadata providers and harvesting services.

The purpose of this article is to review metadata issues identified in recent research carried out in Scotland on services based on metadata aggregation via OAI‐PMH, and to examine the role of collection‐level description in managing ingest to harvested repositories, subsequent harvesting by secondary aggregators, and the contextualisation of institutional and aggregated repositories in the wider information retrieval environment.

The paper reviews the output of several projects involving institutional repositories and collection‐level description in Scotland.

Collection‐level description is a useful tool for aggregator services, but further work is required to accommodate information about the manipulation of metadata sets. Communities need to consider how best to incorporate structured collection information within the OAI‐PMH for their specific purposes.

The paper shows the importance of recent developments in collection description metadata for implementors of OAI‐PMH services, building on the simple placeholders for such metadata allowed by the protocol.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the construction of the prototype of Europeana.eu, the cross‐domain cultural heritage portal funded by the European Commission, to look at the political vision behind the project, and examine the user scenarios that informed the build, to detail Europeana's metadata schema and object model, and to give an overview of the new projects that will bring the prototype to full operational service.

As the project to build the prototype ends, this is a narrative of Europeana's genesis, development, launch, and an overview of the scope of future plans.

A cross‐domain, cross‐border cultural heritage site has been successfully created. A total of 4.5 million items across the range of image, video, text and sound formats have been integrated and user interest has proved higher than anticipated.

Key issues have been found to be metadata standards and quality. Usability/searchability of Europeana.eu is only as good as the metadata provided by content owners.

Greater standardisation of metadata across the cultural heritage domain will increase in importance so providers can deliver content to portals and aggregators. Metadata enhancement, both by content providers and by using automated processes, will likewise become a priority.

This is the on‐the‐record account of the building of Europe's digital library, archive and museum.

The Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) is an international partnership of institutions and individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of language resources. The Dublin Core (DC) Element Set and the OAI Protocol have provided a solid foundation for the OLAC framework. However, we need more precision in community‐specific aspects of resource description than is offered by DC. Furthermore, many of the institutions and individuals who might participate in OLAC do not have the technical resources to support the OAI protocol. This paper presents our solutions to these two problems.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the current state of Linked Data (LD) in archival moving image description, and propose ways in which current metadata records can be enriched and enhanced by interlinking such metadata with relevant information found in other data sets.

Several possible metadata models for moving image production and archiving are considered, including models from records management, digital curation, and the recent BIBFRAME AV Modeling Study. This research also explores how mappings between archival moving image records and relevant external data sources might be drawn, and what gaps exist between current vocabularies and what is needed to record and make accessible the full lifecycle of archiving through production, use, and reuse.

The author notes several major impediments to implementation of LD for archival moving images. The various pieces of information about creators, places, and events found in moving image records are not easily connected to relevant information in other sources because they are often not semantically defined within the record and can be hidden in unstructured fields. Libraries, archives, and museums must work on aligning the various vocabularies and schemas of potential value for archival moving image description to enable interlinking between vocabularies currently in use and those which are used by external data sets. Alignment of vocabularies is often complicated by mismatches in granularity between vocabularies.

The focus is on how these models inform functional requirements for access and other archival activities, and how the field might benefit from having a common metadata model for critical archival descriptive activities.

By having a shared model, archivists may more easily align current vocabularies and develop new vocabularies and schemas to address the needs of moving image data creators and scholars.

Moving image archives, like other cultural institutions with significant heritage holdings, can benefit tremendously from investing in the semantic definition of information found in their information databases. While commercial entities such as search engines and data providers have already embraced the opportunities that semantic search provides for resource discovery, most non-commercial entities are just beginning to do so. Thus, this research addresses the benefits and challenges of enriching and enhancing archival moving image records with semantically defined information via LD.

This paper aims to examine the attitudes and experiences of information professionals with descriptive standards and collection management systems (CMSs) used for managing documentary heritage collections held by cultural heritage institutions in New Zealand (NZ). The aim is that such insights will inform decision-making around promoting documentary heritage collections discoverability and accessibility, in terms of advocating for appropriate system requirements when procuring or updating CMSs, and application of descriptive standards.

A qualitative design was applied to investigate the attitudes and experiences of information professionals working in libraries, archives and records management institutions, museums and public galleries. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with thirteen participants who worked across ten different cultural heritage institutions.

The findings reveal that variances among metadata in libraries, museums, public galleries, archives and records management institutions continue to lead to challenges around discovery and access of documentary heritage. If opportunities for connecting documentary heritage collections in the age of linked data are to be realized, the sector needs to work collectively to address these variances along with consideration of the CMSs used. The study findings highlight issues currently affecting the NZ cultural heritage sector goal to make collections discoverable and more widely accessible.

The findings highlight a need for deeper research into CMSs used by the cultural heritage sector as these systems have an impact on metadata management including constraining the application of appropriate descriptive standards for documentary heritage collections.

The purpose of this paper is to present how the JISC Usage Statistics Review Project aims to formulate a fundamental scheme for recording usage data and to propose a standard for its aggregation to provide meaningful and comparable item‐level usage statistics for electronic documents such as, for example, research papers and scientific resources.

A core element of the project has been a stakeholder workshop. This workshop was held in Berlin, 7/8 July 2008. Representatives of key stakeholder groups (repositories, libraries, COUNTER, IRStats, JISC, LogEc, MESUR, OA‐Statistics and other Open Access projects) were invited. During the workshop a fundamental scheme for the recording and the exchange of log files was discussed as well as the normalization of data collected.

The following mandatory elements describing usage events were agreed during the stakeholder workshop: Who – identification of user/session, What – item identification and type of request performed (e.g. full‐text, front‐page, including failed/partially fulfilled requests), When – date and time, usage event ID. The following elements were regarded as optional: From where – referrer/the referring entity and identity of the service. Usage events should be exchanged in the form of OpenURL Context Objects using OAI. Automated access (e.g. robots) should be tagged. The definition of automated access has to be straightforward with an option of gradual refinement. Users have to be identified unambiguously, but without recording personal data to avoid conflicts with privacy laws. Policies on statistics should be formulated for the repository community as well as the publishing community. Information about statistics policies should be available on services like OpenDOAR and RoMEO.

The paper is based on the detailed project report to the JISC, available at http://ie‐repository.jisc.ac.uk/250/

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the legal, governmental and non-governmental, academic and digital initiatives in relation to the preservation, conservation and promotion of cultural heritage in India and some of the key challenges associated with it.

The research has been carried out by reviewing various resources available on the official websites of Government of India; Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums; and cultural and memory institutions to know their various initiatives at different levels to protect, preserve and promote the cultural heritage of the country.

As of now there are various initiatives in India being carried out by the government, non-governmental organizations, cultural and educational institutions, societies, individuals, scholars and artists to safeguard and promote various cultural heritage inheritances of tangible and intangible nature. However, there is no comprehensive list of all such efforts made to understand the efforts for cultural heritage protection. Further, it has been observed from the study that the need for creating a single-window cultural heritage information system, cultural heritage directory, metadata aggregators, community participation, educational campaigns, strong policies and legislations, comprehensive heritage management programs, consistent follow-ups and establishment and promotion of financial incentives embracing of digital technologies towards sustainable preservation and better accessibility.

The study is an attempt to explore the noted initiatives of India to protect and conserve the cultural heritage properties. The study is limited to various schemes, projects and digital initiatives brought by the country for safeguarding the cultural identity at different levels. This paper can introduce the topic to those who intend to do detailed studies on different aspects of heritage conservation in the country and its problems and solutions.

This paper may be of interest to scientists, academic, historians, heritage conservationists, practitioners, archaeologists, policymakers, culture enthusiasts, researchers and the government to have a perspective on initiatives in the country in protecting the cultural heritage assets. The study can introduce the current status and outcome of the existing programs for heritage conservation to new researchers and administrators to enable them for incorporation required aspects and make necessary modifications while formulating guidelines for cultural heritage protection and management.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, there is no such summaries and general discussion on the initiatives, status, problems and technologies involved in the heritage conservation context with an integrated view in India. This short study may be of help in reviewing and analyzing the potential of the initiatives in the cultural heritage conservation scenario of India for evolving foolproof policies and also for implementing them.