Search results

Postmodern society is characterized by information overload. In the scientific and academic sector alone there are more than 100,000 journals and 80,000 new books published each year, also a vast number of electronic documents. There are about 170 million hosts on the WWW, with an estimated 500 million sites. The number of serious scientific documents published solely in an electronic form is increasing constantly. It is becoming more difficult to identify relevant information and documents, so there is a need for a unique and permanent identifier for electronic documents. Although it is possible to identify print products unambiguously according to a uniform world‐wide standard (ISBN, ISSN), this is not yet the case for electronic documents. At the moment, the internet address (URL) is frequently used to cite and retrieve the documents. However, URLs may change and the publications then frequently simply disappear. Clear and permanent identification systems are therefore necessary so that online publications can be cited, retrieved and used. Libraries in particular are very interested in a unique and permanent identifier for electronic documents. Two different systems, the uniform resource name (URN) and the digital object identifier (DOI), are presented as examples of ways in which electronic publications can be identified.

The purpose of this study was to identify the digital curation practices in institutional repositories (IRs) in South India.

A voluntary survey was conducted among the IR managers of 23 South Indian IRs, and the response rate was 87%.

This study found that the active participation of South Indian IRs was only seen in a few digital curation activities. However, of the 33 digital curation activities analyzed, the active participation of repositories was only seen in ten digital curation activities. The performance of preservation activities was extremely low, and disagreements were recorded by the survey participants toward several digital curation activities. The most disagreed digital curation activities were emulation and cease data curation. All the participants had assigned metadata and allowed file downloads in their repositories. Raman Research Institute had provided a good number of digital curation services in their IR.

This is an in-depth study investigating the digital curation practice currently underway in South Indian IRs, and the researcher could not find similar studies in this niche.

This paper intends to describe activities of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB, the German National Library) in digital preservation. Special attention is to be given to the long‐term preservation project kopal, but prior developments, strategic implications and future scenarios will be addressed as well.

The paper is a narrative of the findings, that also describes the technical specification of kopal.

The current status of kopal development is presented, added by some remarks on potentials for further activities with regard to a digital preservation infrastructure.

Kopal has been presented in other publications. This paper describes the “strategic” value and impact of the solution, added by insights for future development.

Altmetric carries the potential of highlighting scholarly content by measuring online interactions much before other forms of traditional metrics grow up. The aim of this paper is to be the single point of access for librarians, scientists, information specialists, researchers and other scholars in public to learn to embed the open-source embeddable badge provided by Altmetric in their websites and showcase their article altmetrics. Libraries can take advantage of this free and innovative tool by incorporating it in their own websites or digital repositories.

This paper elucidates steps for embedding altimetric institutional repository badges in personal websites or institutional repositories.

This open-source Altmetric tool tracks a range of sources to catch and collect the scholarly activity and assists in monitoring and reporting the attention surrounding an author’s work in a very timely manner.

This tool is freely available to libraries worldwide.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the availability of embedded metadata within images of digital cultural collections. It is designed to examine a proposed hypothesis that most digitally derived images of cultural resources are stripped of their metadata once they are placed on the web.

A sample of 603 images were selected randomly from four cultural portals which aggregate digitized cultural collections, then four steps in the data collection process took place to examine image metadata via the web-based tool and windows application.

The study revealed that 28.5 percent of the analyzed images contained metadata, no links exist between image embedded metadata and its metadata record or the pages of the websites analyzed, and there is a significant usage of Extensible Metadata Platform to encode embedded metadata within the images.

The findings of the study may encourage heritage digital collection providers to reconsider their metadata preservation practices and policies to enrich the content of embedded metadata. In addition, it will raise awareness about the potential and value of embedded metadata in enhancing the findability and exchange of digital collections.

This study is ground breaking in that it is one of the early studies, especially in the Arab world, which aim to recognize the use of image embedded metadata within cultural heritage digital collections on the web.

For this fourth column in the IT I‐V (information technology interview) series participants actively engaged or interested in the metadata harvesting protocol of the open archives initiative were interviewed. The metadata harvesting initiative targets information generally inaccessible through standard browser searches, such as information stored in databases or within library online public access catalogs. We selected this topic as an information technology‐based initiative with the potential to provide information about the usefulness of metadata: in particular the Dublin Core metadata standard, but also about other metadata standards, as the protocol design supports community‐specific schemas as well. The group interviewed represents developers, commercial information providers, funders, and members of the scholarly publishing community. Along with learning about the interests and concerns of each of these stakeholders and about specific applications of the protocol, we identify potential questions that will ultimately need to be addressed.

The study aims to investigate the utilisation of open research data repositories (RDRs) for storing and sharing research data in higher learning institutions (HLIs) in Tanzania.

A survey research design was employed to collect data from postgraduate students at the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST) in Arusha, Tanzania. The data were collected and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. A census sampling technique was employed to select the sample size for this study. The quantitative data were analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), whilst the qualitative data were analysed thematically.

Less than half of the respondents were aware of and were using open RDRs, including Zenodo, DataVerse, Dryad, OMERO, GitHub and Mendeley data repositories. More than half of the respondents were not willing to share research data and cited a lack of ownership after storing their research data in most of the open RDRs and data security. HILs need to conduct training on using trusted repositories and motivate postgraduate students to utilise open repositories (ORs). The challenges for underutilisation of open RDRs were a lack of policies governing the storage and sharing of research data and grant constraints.

Research data storage and sharing are of great interest to researchers in HILs to inform them to implement open RDRs to support these researchers. Open RDRs increase visibility within HILs and reduce research data loss, and research works will be cited and used publicly. This paper identifies the potential for additional studies focussed on this area.

In today's digital environments, online engagement is a critical component of achieving successful, sustainable impact. Building an online presence that extends beyond the walls of academia is therefore an essential part of developing as a scholar during any stage of the career span. In this chapter, we discuss career-wide approaches for establishing yourself as a “networked scholar” (Goodier & Czerniewicz, 2015) to build connections and foster communication. We also explore ways to engage your audience through open, public outputs (publications, graphics, websites, profile tools, etc.). Using the key strategies presented, scholars can build an online academic presence and increase their scholarly visibility on the web or through social media. At the core of this chapter is an exploration of how academics can develop and communicate about themselves and their research interests, to achieve their goals both in the near-term and across their career span. While the approaches presented are not prescriptive, they are intended to encourage the reader to generate a plan for online engagement that helps establish their scholarly identity. These tried and tested activities can be leveraged for engaging different audiences in research in ways that promote networked scholarship and create pathways to impact.