ArticleDL.org publishes 4 Booklets for LIS Community

September 22nd, 2011

The main outputs of DL.org for Digital Library interoperability, best practices and reference modelling have been captured in 4 user-friendly booklets to facilitate the community of professionals, students and researchers in the field.
“To make focused progress on interoperability, we need to work against a joint conceptual framework such as the DL.org Digital Library Reference Model with its core domains: Content, User, Functionality, Policy, Quality and Architecture and consider the three levels of interoperability – technical, semantic, organisational – within the DL.org Interoperability  Framework.” Wolfram Horstmann, CIO Scholarly Information at Bielefeld University, Germany.

The Booklets can be downloaded here.

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ArticleDL.org Announces Cookbook

April 20th, 2011

DL.org - driving forward interoperable digital library systems

Interoperable systems broaden choice and open up new perspectives for researchers, governments and citizens across a spectrum of disciplines and domains. Interoperability is key to taking Digital Libraries to the next level, enabling wider collaboration across the board and ensuring that a broader spectrum of resources are available to a wider range of people whether for simple consumption or to enhance research activities. But interoperability is a complex, multi-layered and context-specific concept, encompassing different levels along a multi-dimensional spectrum ranging from organisational to technological aspects. It is a “hard and dirty job”.

DL.org is the first initiative to investigate interoperability from an all-encompassing perspective by harnessing leading figures in the DL space globally, investigating six core concepts characterising a Digital Library.The output is an innovative Digital Library Technological and Methodological Cookbook with a  portfolio of best practices and pattern solutions to common issues faced when developing large-scale interoperable digital  library systems. A key facet of the Cookbook is the interoperability framework that can be used to systematically characterise diverse facets linked to the interoperability challenge as well as current and emerging solutions and approaches. The Cookbook is designed to facilitate the assessment and selection of the solutions presented, enabling professionals working towards interoperability to define and pursue the different steps involved.

How did we get there?

The investigation has taken as its starting point the IEEE Glossary, which defines interoperability as “the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged” (Geraci, 1991). This definition highlights that to achieve interoperability between two entities (provider, consumer) two conditions must be satisfied:

  • The two entities must be able to exchange information.
  • The consumer entity must be able to effectively use the exchanged information, that is, the consumer must be able to perform the tasks it is willing to do by relying on the exchanged information.

DL.org has addressed the multiple digital library interoperability levels, along the classification of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF):

  • Organisational interoperability: defining business goals, modelling business processes and bringing about the collaboration of digital library (and their underlying systems) institutions that wish to exchange resources  and may have different internal structures and processes. Moreover, organisational interoperability aims at addressing the requirements of the user community by making resources available, easily identifiable, accessible and user-oriented.
  • Semantic interoperability:  ensuring that the precise meaning of exchanged digital library resources is understandable by any other digital library “system” that was not initially developed to deal with it. Semantic interoperability enables systems to combine received resources with other resources and to process (exploit) it in a meaningful manner.
  • Technical interoperability: technical issues of linking computer systems and services implementing the digital libraries and their resources.

 

To provide feedback on the Cookbook, contact cookbook@dlorg.eu.

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ArticleDL Professional Learning Culture Questionnaire

March 5th, 2011

Marcial Batiancila, Talinn University

Last November DL.org interviewed Marcial R. Batiancila, a Master Student in the Erasmus Mundus Digital Library Learning (DILL) programme as part of the synergy established for our Seminar in Parma on Research and Education in Digital Libraries. Marcial, from the Institute of Information Studies, Tallinn University, is conducting research on The Digital Library (DL) Professionals’ Learning Culture: A Study on Digital Libraries’ Communities of Practice (CoPs) in Europe.   This research is conducted in an attempt to identify the existence of CoPs in the field of digital libraries and how these communities contribute to the development of a learning culture among DL professionals.
The questionnaire asks a variety of questions about involvement in a CoP, its learning practices and activities, as well as issues that the community addresses.

Enquiries or concerns about the questionnaire can be addressed directly to Marcial via email mbatiancila@gmail.com or his supervisor, Sirje Virkus at sirvir@tlu.ee.

Many thanks for your cooperation.

 

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ArticleDL.org Tutorial on Digital Libraries Foundation and Interoperability

February 21st, 2011

DL.org Tutorial at ESWC2011

DL.org announces the Tutorial on Digital Libraries: Foundations & Interoperability during the Extended Semantic Web Conference, 29 May – 2 June 2011, Heraklion, Greece. The half-day Tutorial focuses on the DL.org Reference Model, a conceptual framework for Digital Libraries, coupled with real-world examples and a hands-on session. The aim of this tutorial is to introduce the audience to the state-of the art in Digital Libraries documenting the significant effort towards building a common language to express key issues surrounding interoperability.
The tutorial covers the core concepts characterising Digital Libraries: content, functionality, user, policy, quality and architecture. The tutorial features a rich mix of presentations, interactive discussion, demos and hands-on with comprehensive examples of existing systems that apply semantic technologies to help exemplify abstract concepts. Participants will come away with a conceptual framework and new knowledge on DL.org’s approach to Digital Library Interoperability, Best Practices and Modelling Foundations enhancing their research and professional practices.  To ensure maximum impact, DL.org will provide tutorial attendees with a Virtual Reading List and pointers well ahead of the event.
Presenters

  • Yannis Ioannidis, University of Athens
  • Donatella Castelli, Institute of Information Science & Technologies, National Research Council of Italy
  • Leonardo Candela, Institute of Information Science & Technologies, National Research Council of Italy
  • Katerina El Raheb, University of Athens

Target Audience
The tutorial is designed for researchers and practitioners dealing with different aspects of semantic technologies, specifically Information Scientists, PhD candidates, Engineers, Digital Library Designers and Administrators, as well as Digital Libraries Managers, Librarians and Information Scientists attending ESWC 2011.

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ArticleHeather Jones on Future scenarios for Open Access

February 16th, 2011

Heather Joseph

Very timely workshop on a topic that is central to the advancing collective mission not only of the library community, but of the academy as a whole, and society at large. Role as a representative of the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is to focus on the importance of consistently using Open Access as a compass point that underpins our efforts in the Digital Library and Institutional Repository space, so that initiatives led by the community can achieve the global impact they are intended to deliver. SPARC’s mission is to act as a catalyst for action in creating a more open and equitable system of scholarly communication, expand dissemination of research and scholarship in a way that leverages digital networked technology and ultimately reduces the financial pressure on libraries. The approach to Open Access is holistic:

  • Infrastructure
  • Journals
  • Digital Repositories
  • Legal Framework
  • Copyright/licensing
  • Author education
  • Policy Framework
  • Local/national/international
  • Coalition Building

In particular, SPARC actively works to support emerging “meta policies” that help ensure that full OA becomes a requirement in the research arena, and enable true interoperability to be achieved.

Policy focus

  • Dissemination of results is an essential component of research and the Public’s investment in science.
  • Funders obtain value from their investment only when results are used.
  • Governments would boost innovation and get a better return on their investment in publicly funded research by making research findings more widely available, and by doing so,  they would maximize social returns on public investments.

Emerging trends in the U.S.

U.S. NIH Public Access Policy; – U.S. Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008; Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grants (TAA – CCCT). We are in the midst of some clear trends on which the community can capitalise, helping to achieve, from a larger policy level, the kind of interoperability promised by Open Access. A very clear message is being sent from the top that Open is the default.

Call to action

  • Set the Default to “Open”
  • Recognition that maximising access & utility maximises benefits
  • Recognition that exceptions will be the rule – “Shades of Open”
  • Community driven approach to  development/implementation
  • National discussions include data, Open Educational Reseouces (OERs), other materials – not just articles
  • Explicitly recognize need for partnerships (public/private and beyond)
  • Culture change needed – incentivize sharing Intellectual property rights must be respected
  • “Good Practices” that will evolve into “Best Practices”
  • “Will to act” increasing as results from active policies become available

The talk is available on the dedicated web page.

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ArticleWolfram Horstmann on the many ways to interoperability

February 16th, 2011

Wolfram Horstmann

Digital libraries are complex systems, intrinsically interdisciplinary and heterogeneous. They involve collaboration support, digital preservation, digital rights management, distributed data management, hypertext, information retrieval, human-computer interaction, library automation, publishing.
Autonomy challenge — degrees of freedom in DLs needed for representing heterogeneous requirements; standards for interoperation.

“By open access, we mean its immediate, free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, [export], search or link to the [materials], crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose.”
The Budapest Declaration (squared brackets indicate changes of the original wording)

European Initiatives

DRIVER: Digital Repository Vision for European Research

  • Construction plans for a distributed DL backbone.
  • Generic infrastructure development & production.

OpenAIRE: Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe

  • Support for European Open Access Policy (pilot phase)
  • Multi-faceted application of DRIVER-results
  • Ultimate goal: Multi-sited Open Access-Digital Library system

Perfect example for OA interoperability challenges with complete walkthrough coverage of all levels, e.g. semantic interoperability. Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) as content agreements. Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) standard as implementation. Addressing technical (transfer) as well as semantic (content) interoperability – with known problems.

Interoperability

  • Interoperability is multi-leveled but a network rather than a layer-model is required
  • Simplicity is the clue for uptake of standards
  • Semantics are core DL interoperability challenge
  • Content (semantic) and functionality (technical) to be decoupled as far as possible – Look deeper into the DL.org-RM?
  • Focus on semantic interoperability allow DLs/repositories the autonomy they need to meet heterogeneous requirements

Tentative Outlook
Semantic interoperability can be enhanced.(not immediately by semantic web; probably still too powerful and versatile for DLs to encode content) through rigid terminology standards applied on the local site (DL/repository), e.g. authority files for Journal Titles, Names, Institutions,  through adaptive algorithms (unsupervised, dynamic, fault-tolerant…) that tame semantic variability on the central site (specialised service providers)
Separation of semanticists & technologists?

The talk is available on the dedicated web page.

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ArticlePeter Burnhill on Open Access in the UK

February 16th, 2011

Peter Burnhill

“A scholar’s positive contribution is measured by the sum of the original data that he contributes. Hypotheses come and go but data remain.”
in Advice to a Young Investigator (1897) Santiago Ramón y Cajal (Nobel Prize winner, 1906)

2 traditions/mentalities co-exist in Information Science:

  1. Document tradition: signifying record-ness
  2. Computational tradition: various uses of formal technique

There are non-convergent mentalities working to build the ‘digital library’: modernisation of library services  and infrastructure to access complex databases.

Emergence of Digital Library: Information Science
“Approaches based on a concern with documents, with signifying records: archives, bibliography, documentation, librarianship, records management, and so forth
“approaches based on uses for formal techniques, whether mechanical (such as punch cards and data-processing equipment) or mathematical (as in algorithmic procedures).”

Semantics of Open Repositories & Interoperability
R is for Repository

  • “university-based institutional repository is a set of services … for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution & its community members. … organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access … (C. Lynch, 2003)
  • Digital repository differs from other digital collections in that content is deposited, whether by content creator, owner or third party; architecture manages content as well as metadata; repository offers a minimum set of basic services; must be sustainable & trusted, well-supported & well-managed. Digital Repositories Review (R.Heery and S.Anderson, 2005)

O is for Open

  • OA (for publications) not the only ‘open’ policy:
  • OER: Open Educational Resources
  • Open means ‘not closed’: making teaching & learning materials visible
  • Open CourseWare – often as open stack of webpages
  • Open Data
  • Datasets tradition (IASSIST); ‘open/privilege access to databases; open data.gov
  • Open Source Software
  • OSS has its own way of doing things

Key questions

  • Are Repositories the (only) way to support an Open Agenda?
  • Is Open really what Repositories are for?
  • Is this usage just intended to help us avoid issues of IP and access management?

Should the focus be on:

  • Interoperability between Repositories?
  • Interoperability of Repositories with the wider Internet?

Interoperability Challenges & Strategies

  • Whose strategy, and towards what purpose?
  • ‘within & for the research & education sector’? Or beyond?
  • For the institution, the UK, EU, global anybody; for the researcher?
  • For the machine as user [“Provider/Consumer”]?

The talk is available on the dedicated web page.

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ArticlePablo De Castro on the SONEX Work Group

February 16th, 2011

SONEX (Scholarly Output Notification & Exchange) is an initiative supported by JISC. Its main aim was to identify and analyse deposit opportunities (use cases) for the ingest of research papers into the research space.

Comparing SONEX and DL.org approaches to interoperability

SONEX Work Group

Similarities include: international in scope; building on existing projects/systems. Main differences are: the pragmatic approach of SONEX by characterising an environment for running projects working on repository interoperability and it has a narrow scope: IR-based plus various deposit-driving stakeholders (publishers, CRIS, etc), whereas DL.org has a theoretical foundation and a wide scope in that it is characterising Digital Library Management Systems from the perspective of DL end-users, designers, administrators and developers.

Some questions on research data management

  • Are IRs a proper target for research data deposit?
  • Could Sword deal with data transfer?
  • Available workforce for dealing with data management: is it big enough? Trained enough?
  • Research data file sizes: should deposit by reference be considered instead/besides binary data transfer?
  • At what point along the publication life-cycle should dataset deposit take place?

Current SONEX texts

  • Widening deposit use-case analysis in cooperation with selected projects at JISC Deposit call: further use-case scenarios, more digital object types (beyond research papers – Sword v2)
  • Analysis on research data management from JISC MRD environment
  • Providing support to selected projects at JISC Deposit call
  • Gathering information on new & ongoing deposit-related projects and initiatives
  • Dissemination of initiative for potential international cooperation: OpenAIRE, DL.org

The talk is available on the dedicated web page.

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ArticleGiuseppina Vullo on Quality Interoperability Survey

February 16th, 2011

Some pointers on Quality:

Giuseppina Vullo

Quality is associated not only with each class of content or functionality but also with specific information objects or services. Quality is also the degree to which a DL conforms to a specific policy on the goal of a DL. The policy can cover very general guidelines to aspects that are highly technical. Quality is also applicable to either overall or single aspects of any products, services and processes, usually defined in relation to a set of guidelines and criteria. This is often implicit.

Sample of Policy survey participants

German Digital Library, Max-Planck DL, e-prints for Library and Information Science (E-LIS), Europeana,
E-Archivo: Institutional Repository of University Carlos III of Madrid, The European Library (TEL), DRIVER (D-NET) and The World Digital Library (WDL).

Survey focus

Formats, Format compliance checking tools (and results), Metadata standards, Metadata compliance checking tools (and results), Communication protocols, Communication protocol compliance checking tools (and results), Web guidelines/standards in the areas of accessibility, usability, multilingualism, Policies and legal obligations (eg for web standards or Reference Model) in addition to Multi-level guidelines and certifications, User satisfaction, Current interoperations, Quality interoperability and the Reference Model.

Outcomes

  • 60% of respondents have validation tools to check Information object format compliance (eg.Pdf/A Validator).
    80% have validation tools to check metadata format compliance (eg. DC Validator).
    50% have validation tools to check communication protocols compliance (OAI/PMH & DRIVER Validators).
  • 10% have very complete metadata; 60% complete metadata; 20% sufficiently complete and 10% incomplete metadata.

So what are the barriers to metadata creation?

  • Time
  • Accuracy
  • Missing, too complex or contradictory guidelines
  • Not having enough humans involved in the process
  • Not understanding its real value, reason and purpose
  • Review is required by qualified personnel

Most respondents see interoperability as mainly being technical in focus. Quality aspects are crucial for successful interoperability.

Connections to the Reference Model: some DLs are already using the RM for:

  • Design and operation of processes
  • Business and organisational models
  • Changes of institutional repositories
  • Revision of DL policies

Conclusions

  • It’s a metadata-centric world.
  • Role of guidelines (e.g. DRIVER, MINERVA, etc.), certifications (eg. DINI, Drambora) and validators
  • Different meanings of Quality and Interoperability: contexts and objectives
  • Lack of formalised and well-analysed policies
  • Need to be supported
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ArticleHans Pfeiffenberger on Trust, Reliability & Quality

February 16th, 2011

Hans Pfeiffenberger on RidingtheWave

The building of scientific knowledge needs to be preserved for the long term, so it needs solid foundations. Today’s knowledge is conveyed through articles, papers and events, as well as datasets, which begs the question as to whether datasets can be less reliable than books and articles. Are there any sound reasons for treating them differently? An EC-commissioned report, Riding the Wave – How Europe can gain from the rising tide of scientific data (Oct 2010) writes that challenges related to trust that need overcoming include: How can we make informed judgements about whether certain data are authentic and can be trusted? How can we judge which repositories we can trust? How can appropriate access and use of resources be granted or controlled? On data publication and access, the Report states: How can data producers be rewarded for publishing data? How can we know who has deposited what data and who is re-using them – or who has the right to access data which are restricted in some way? How do we deal with the various ‘filters’ that different disciplines use when choosing and describing data? What about differences in these attitudes within disciplines, or from one time to another?

Sample of initiatives

The International Polar Year is a good example of generating significant amounts of data and of the issues at stake. Its mission is to take a data snapshot of the polar caps for re-use in decades to come bringing together 50.000 participants and 63 Nations with ca. 1 G€.

DataCite is a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration agency for research data. DataCite is now considering to ask data repositories for some kind of certification (professional organization with some policy to permanently deliver on the technology promise). DataCite will foster global interoperability about a specific policy issue.

ICSU World Data System is about global interoperability on a number of policy issues long-term availability: handover of data in case of default would be so much more helpful, if DOIs were employed

  • Open Access
  • Makes things so much easier
  • What about endangered species, social science data?
  • Operates by accreditation, considers certification
  • Which certification?

The Situation Today

There are lots of data repositories today…

  • Most operate as projects, on a best effort basis
  • They are highly incompatible regarding, e.g. (access) protocols and formats supported, content qualities (QA, granularities, and so on), rights/licensing
  • Interoperability at a global scale is hard/impossible
  • Integration of data (don’t mix high/low quality data)
  • Trust about long term availability

Digital Data Library = a data repository with a policy.

Conclusions
Most important elements for the stability of the knowledge architecture of science:

  • Quality of each building block: quality assurance, encoding of quality indicators, provenance
  • Persistent availability, accessibility of each block: Handover / Mirroring and Persistent IDs
  • Checksums?

The talk is available on the dedicated web page.

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