Tune It Up: Creating and Maintaining the Institutional Repository Revolution

The explosion of recent open access repositories and the future desire for global open access to scholarly communication has prompted the need to have more credible resources for new authors. This article highlights some of the areas in which creators need to be informed concerning repositories, including software information, peer-review advocacy, and the need for more literature on mature repositories and how they interact with scholarly communication.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 92 KB)

Source: Nicole Carpenter (via E-LIS)

A content integrity service for digital repositories

We present a “content integrity service” for long- lived digital documents, especially for objects stored in digital repositories. The goal of the service is to demonstrate that information in the repository is authentic and has not been unintentionally or maliciously altered, even after its bit representation in the repository has undergone one or more transformations. We describe our design for an efficient, secure service that achieves this, and our implementations of two prototypes of such a service that we developed, most recently for DSpace. Our solution relies on one-way hashing and digital time- stamping procedures. Our service applies not only to transformations to archival content such as format changes, but also to the introduction of new cryptographic primitives, such as the new one-way hash function family that will be chosen by NIST in the competition that was recently announced [10]. In the face of recent attacks on hash functions, this feature is absolutely necessary to the design of an integrity- preserving system that is meant to endure for decades.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 156 KB)

Source: HP Labs

Embracing the future: Embedding digital repositories in the University of London

Digital repositories can help Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to develop coherent and coordinated approaches to capture, identify, store and retrieve intellectual assets such as datasets, course material and research papers. With the advances of technology, an increasing number of Higher Education Institutions are implementing digital repositories. The leadership of these institutions, however, has been concerned about the awareness of and commitment to repositories, and their sustainability in the future.

This study informs a consortium of thirteen London institutions with an assessment of current awareness and attitudes of stakeholders regarding digital repositories in three case study institutions. The report identifies drivers for, and barriers to, the embedding of digital repositories in institutional strategy. The findings therefore should be of use to decision-makers involved in the development of digital repositories. Our approach was entirely based on consultations with specific groups of stakeholders in three institutions through interviews with specific individuals.

+ Summary (PDF; 135 KB)
+ Full Document (PDF; 590 KB)

Source: RAND Corporation

Universities Launch Collective Digital Library, 78 Terabytes Large

Twenty three universities have agreed to share and combine their digitized content, including millions of scanned books and documents, in one gigantic, 78-terabyte library that launched Monday.

Called the HathiTrust, the depository contains digital content from 11 University of California libraries and a 12-university consortium that forms the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which includes the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago.

+ Major Library Partners Launch HathiTrust Shared Digital Repository

Source: Wired Blog Network

See also: An Elephant Backs Up Google’s Library (Bits Blog/NYT)

From the article:

The National Archives will start copying and making available online all central government website content from November.

Source: Kable’s Government Computing

From the article:

How does the government manage data that was born digital, meaning it was created in electronic form? Organizations as varied as the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the White House, open-government groups, and House members have recently offered recommendations for managing the growing volume of such information. Their approaches underscore the differences of opinion about how much responsibility and power various entities should have over future federal recordkeeping.

Source: FCW (via LISNews)

From the EUobserver:

The European Commission has urged member states to step up efforts to make Europe’s cultural heritage available to citizens at a mouse click.

Plans for a European digital library containing books, paintings, music, film and photographs are already underway but progress on making works digitally available has been slow with funding problems and lack of technical know-how dragging the ambitious project down.

According to commission figures, European libraries contain over 2.5 billion books but only around 1 percent of archival material has been made available online.

Source: EUobserver

From the news release:

Europe’s cultural diversity in books, music, paintings, photographs, and films open to all citizens at the click of a mouse via one portal – this dream of a European Digital Library could become reality this autumn. However, further efforts by the EU Member States are needed, said the Commission today in a new Communication on making available digital versions of works from cultural institutions all over Europe. Digitisation of cultural works can give Europeans access to material from museums, libraries and archives abroad without having to travel or turn hundreds of pages to find a piece of information. Europe’s libraries alone contain more than 2.5 billion books, but only about 1% of archival material is available in digital form. The Commission therefore called on Member States to do more to make digitised works available online for Europeans to browse them digitally, for study, work or leisure. The Commission itself will provide some € 120 million in 2009-2010 for improving online access to Europe’s cultural heritage.

“The European Digital Library will be a quick and easy way for people to access European books and art – whether in their home country or abroad. It will, for example, enable a Czech student to browse the British library without going to London, or an Irish art lover to get close to the Mona Lisa without queuing at the Louvre,” said Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media.

Source: Rapid

See Also: EU digital library plans under threat (via Hollywood Reporter)

New from LC:
State Digital Resources: Memory Projects, Online Encyclopedias, Historical & Cultural Materials Collections

Source: Library of Congress

From the news release:

LexisNexis, a leading provider of information and services solutions, today announced that it has acquired the assets of Florida Legal Periodicals, a wholly owned subsidiary of Law Bulletin Publishing Company of Chicago. Florida Legal Periodicals is a market leader in the collection and distribution of Florida and Alabama verdict and settlement information. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The latest edition (vol 7, no 2) of Digital Document Quarterly, an online newsletter from HMG Consulting that offers perspectives on trustworthy information, is now available.

Source: HMG Consulting

Now Available Online: Preserving State Government Digital Information
Robert Horton’s presentation at the Library of Congress on April 24, 2008. The presentation runs 50 minutes.

Robert Horton, director of Library, Publication and Collections at the Minnesota Historical Society, discussed “A Model Technological and Social Architecture for the Preservation of State Government Digital Information.”

This NDIIPP-supported project is working with legislatures in several states to explore enhanced access to a variety of legislative digital records. Technology does not really make any of this easy, but it does make it possible, as appropriate within the disparate legal, administrative and financial contexts of the collaborating states. The project will identify the differences and emphasize the commonalities, so that other states can determine how to adapt the model for their own use.

Source: Library of Congress

From the JISC Exec Summary:

The rising tide of digital research data raises issues relating to access, curation and preservation for HEIs and within the UK a growing number of research funders are now implementing policies requiring researchers to submit data management, preservation or data sharing plans with their funding applications. This study provides: Research funders are implementing policies requiring researchers to submit data management, preservation or data sharing plans with their applications

Brief overviews of the potential benefits to HEIs of preservation of research data; issues that HEIs will need to consider when determining the medium to long-term costs of data preservation; and different service models. A framework and guidance for determining costs consisting of:

* A list of key cost variables and potential units of record
* An activity model divided into pre-archive, archive, and support services
* A resources template including major cost categories in TRAC; and divided into the major phases from our activity model and by duration of activity

A series of case studies from Cambridge University, King’s College London, Southampton University, and the Archaeology Data Service at York University, illustrating different aspects of costs for research data within HEIs. Recommendations for future work and use/adaptation of software costing tools to assist implementation

Source: JISC

The National Archives has published its Strategy for Digitizing Archival Materials, 2007–2016.

Direct to Full Text

Source: NARA

Adapting Web Archive Catalogues for Dynamic Change.
Wu, Paul H-J and Ichsan, Tamsir P. and Nguyen, Ngoc Giang (2007)
In Julien, Masanes and Andreas, Rauber, Eds. Proceedings The Seventh International Workshop of Archiving Web, Vancouver, Canada.

Web archives are an important source of information. However, before a Web archive can be properly utilized, it needs to be catalogued. This is to ensure that the accessed materials yield the historical understanding intended by the researcher. At the same time, the dynamic nature of the Web will easily render these catalogues outdated, and there is a constant need to monitor when the Web catalogues become irrelevant upon change of the Web content. This means a substantial amount of human effort is required to maintain the catalogue records for the Web archives, adding additional burden to any institutions that maintain it. In this paper, we propose an automatic mechanism to monitor changes in Web content, so that human workload can be reduced. The system combines two component technologies to make this possible: (1) a contextualized annotation module and (2) an evidence change detection module. Contextualized annotation enables the cataloguing process to link content on the Web page (the evidence), to the value assigned for an element of a metadata schema. Thus, the metadata is “supported” by certain Web content that functions as evidence for a cataloguing decision. Regardless of changes in the webpages outside of the evidence, the metadata remains valid as long as all the evidence remains the same. In order to achieve evidence-specific change detection, we need to extend the traditional Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) based Diff engine using a Page Coordinate translation algorithm, which we argue, through a survey, is the first among many other Web content monitoring approaches.

Source: (via d-LIST)