September 22nd, 2009
(On reflecting on the title of this entry, and whether “fray” was appropriate, perhaps I should also qualify the term as a “friendly” skirmish, contest, or quarrel…)
Ed, George, and I spent the morning in a meeting discussing Shelf2Life, a project encompassing the digitization of public domain texts, distribution of e-versions of the texts to various online vendors, and the ability to print these works on demand at the point-of-sale, at BCR. Several of our members are participating in the initiative, while others are generally interested.
We’ve begun to explore whether there is a consortial interest, as well as how to offer long-term digital archiving of the e-texts, if our members desire. Local access to and distribution of the e-texts is tied up in contracts and business models, but at the very least, we should be able to provide tiers of secure preservation services for the e-texts, and auto-loading workflows not unlike our developing OA ProQuest ETDs auto-load service. There are a lot of stakeholders involved in the Shelf2Life project, not to mention a heck of a lot of ISBNs – for the e-text, for the hard cover, for the soft cover, for the online edition, etc. There are also multiple sources of metadata, multiple formats, and many questions still to be answered regarding server and system security from the prospective of a profit-oriented vendor. The meeting – and attendees – were upbeat and positive, while we hammered out what we all thought we needed to know more about…
There is some homework, certainly future meetings, and some continued testing…but, all in all, it appears to be an interesting project. Now, I just have to lobby for the members’ royalties from the sale of these works to be dedicated to the on-going storage and preservation costs of these texts…Another “fray” to be sure!
Posted in Alliance Digital Repository, Batch Ingest, Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, Content, Digital Preservation | No Comments »
September 1st, 2009
Earlier today, I drafted the following document to support member discussion of our ProQuest Dissertation Metadata to MODS to Simple DC wrapped in METS with a FezACML insert for an administrative section for Fedora ingest. We’re auto-loading “raw” or “pre-print” versions of students’ ETD Administrator submissions into the repository portals, on behalf of participating member libraries…and some things clearly need to be “translated” from the ProQuest/UMI world to ours…
ProQuest DISS_XML Metadata: Selected Attribute Codes and Definitions
Overview:
Various DISS_XML metadata schema elements capture raw information from the ETD Administrator student submission process. There are attributes with coded values with some connection to open access, publishing, and other administrative and rights-related activities. The Alliance is interested in determining from members which attributes, codes, information, and actions are relevant to the deposit workflow of ProQuest-shared ETDs in the repository. The primary element attributes and values of question are: embargo_code, publishing option, third_party_search, as well as the sales_restriction element.
From dissertations_metadata Document Type Definition (DTD):
· publishing_option (0|1)
o default “0”
o ProQuest comments: Publishing option can be 0 (Traditional) or 1 (Open Access). Open Access publishing requires an extra fee, in addition to the Traditional publishing fee.
· embargo_code (0|1|2|3|4)
o default “0”
o ProQuest comments: Embargo code can be 0 corresponding to no embargo OR
§ 1 – 6 months embargo
§ 2 – 1 year embargo
§ 3 – 2 year embargo
§ 4 – Reserved for future use
· third_party_search (Y|N)
o default “Y”
o ProQuest comments: Indicates the author would like to have his or her
metadata indexed by search engines like Google Scholar. Use N if the
author does not want that.
· DISS_sales_restriction code (0|1|2|4) remove
o default “0”
o ProQuest comments: The sales restriction codes are as follows:
§ 0: No sales restriction
§ 1: Not available for sale
§ 2: Sell to author only/copyright
§ 4: Sell to author only
o ProQuest comments: the remove attribute is a mm/dd/yyyy date on which the restriction is to be removed
Posted in Alliance Digital Repository, Metadata, ProQuest | 1 Comment »
July 1st, 2009
A heavily ADR-focused issue of DataLink, the Alliance’s newsletter, is now available here.
Posted in Alliance Digital Repository, Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries | No Comments »
March 9th, 2009
We have three distinct OAI (http://www.openarchives.org/) projects underway at the moment in the ADR. Briefly, the three projects are:
- Support the aggregation of openly accessible metadata records from all institution’s repository portals into a single consortially-scoped discovery point we’ve been referring to as MINeR as part of an early branding effort
- Support harvesting of any given institution’s openly accessible metadata by said library’s vendor-supplied nextGen library discovery tools (i.e. III’s Encore is emerging as one popular choice among the consortia’s members)
- Repurpose available OAI Dublin Core metadata to support the ingest, management, and discovery of member library content created as part of early grant projects, specifically those supported as part of the CDP’s early digital collection building support awards.
In the first two cases, we are the data providers, making our metadata available for harvest and re-use in other environments (one of which we intent to support by building on PKP’s OAI Harvester interface as a foundation. Once we gain a better foundation for our local OAI exposure activities, and cement the sharing with the vendor(s), we will encourage larger aggregators, like OAIster, to come harvest us, too. We are definitely of the approach “the more, the merrier!”
In the third case, we are actively harvesting, filtering, refining, and normalizing metadata from another resource – and really, from another, earlier time of collaborative efforts, which adds some interesting challenges to isolating specific elements like where to find the matching file name to join a record to a primary content file provided by the institution or how to validate a several-year-old URL used as an identifier. The immediate goal is to transform harvested DC records into the MODS/DC metadata components of a basic ADR METS-contained digital object.
To be on both sides of the OAI aisle is fascinating, if at times frustrating and time-consuming. We are simultaneously being challenged by our own choices to adopt an open sources repository interface and presented with a significant learning curve about how Fez approaches OAI – and how we can change that approach to meet our immediate needs and long-term anticipated needs, while we also are challenged trying to repurpose earlier efforts to do much the same…at times it’s like looking in a three-way mirror – What is reflecting where? What do we see? And, which – in any given view – is the primary object of focus? Doesn’t it kind of makes you want to ask, “Mirror, Mirror on the wall…Who’s OAI is the “fairest” of them all…?”
Posted in Alliance Digital Repository, Collaborative Digitization Program, Fez, Harvester, MINeR, Metadata, OAI, Publick Knowledge Project, Software | No Comments »
January 21st, 2009
Today, the Alliance is co-hosting a Shibboleth InstallFest with CHECO, the Colorado Higher Education Computing Organization. Currently, there are 30+ IT personnel from Alliance and CHECO organization gathered around laptops in a classroom at DU. Nate Klingenstein from Internet2 is leading the Fest. Shibboleth is “open source, enterprise, federated, single sign-on software” that builds on SAML, Security Access Markup Language.
The Fest grew out of a combined interest in supporting federated authentication and authorization at the campuses as well as specifically within the Alliance Digital Repository service. There is a mix of library and central IT personnel participating today, and this Fest is one part of an emerging collaboration among library and IT staff.
Shibboleth is one form of authentication, along with LDAP, that is currently being investigated and – hopefully after today – prototyped among Alliance institutions. It relies on attributes, SAML, metadata at a more technical level and ultimately an understanding of identity management on each campus. This is new territory for many of our library member representatives. As a related activity, Alliance members have been encouraged to think about roles and workflows within the repository and generate a matrix and use cases to help support the discussion with IT staff.
Nate’s slides will be available shortly from the CHECO Web site (I will update the link here)
Many thanks to Chad Burnham, Nate Klingenstein (who’s T-Shirt provided the title of this blog post), and CHECO for organizing and supporting this event.
Posted in Alliance Digital Repository | No Comments »
