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.

Over the last year, cloud computing has not only found fertile ground in the commercial sector but also gained increasing interest in government and eScience. The notion of a simple interface to acquire dynamically provisioned computing resources has taken root in all sectors with SMEs among the primary beneficiaries. We have also witnessed the emergence of a number of national cloud initiatives aimed at reducing IT costs, lower energy costs, gain greater flexibility and drive innovation.

What’s new on the Digital Library front?
Cloud computing may be a viable solution when it comes to providing off-site storage for data as institutional repositories are set up to provide free on-line collections of papers by researchers in their respective institutions. DuraCloud is a new project where developers are building software to facilitate librarians in putting repositories in off-site data storage services. The main advantage lies in having storage providers take care of the basics of pure storage and in saving on costs.

The project, which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and spearheaded by DuraSpace, is currently in a pilot phase but developers are planning to release a version to share with other librarians later this year. Of course, the idea is to provide more than just storage, with the ultimate goal of offering services that support libraries in terms of access, preservation, re-use and sharing.

Impediments & New Headway on Standards Front
Current impediments to the wider adoption of cloud computing span data handling, security and privacy, as well as with regard to the legal and policy framework. Interoperability is also a top-level challenge. Last year also saw a positive approach on the standards front as several standards development organisations working on cloud computing specifications came together to ensure a more co-ordinated approach that will help bring a complementary standards framework (The Cloud Standards wiki has been created to put everyone on the same page). Governments involvement in cloud computing could also shape these developments and foster open standards.

From a European and global perspective, OGF-Europe has spearheaded the establishment of a Research Group on Digital Repositories within the Open Grid Forum (OGF) co-chaired by two Europeans – Andreas Aschenbrenner from Goettingen University and Nicholas Ferguson from OGF.eeig the technical co-ordinating partner of OGF-Europe. The Group has connected the distributed computing, curation and repository communities to work towards an architecture study and collection of metadata use cases. The ultimate goal is to understand how current and emerging standards can bring about interoperability. Experts in the field believe that exploring the commonalities in different architectures and metadata handling could be a major push to the interoperability of digital repositories and ease their exploitation in distributed computing environments.

OGF-Europe

Background information & References
DuraSpace is a group formed last year by a merger of two groups that produce software to manage digital repositories—the DSpace Foundation, which started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Fedora Commons, which began at Cornell University.

OGF-Europe is the European Chapter of the Open Grid Forum funded by the European Commission and aligned with OGF’s mission of fostering the pervasive adoption of distributed computing for innovation in enterprise and science through open standards while ensuring Europe gains a stronger, collective voice in the distributed computing arena.

March 2010 eAnnouncement on Federating Digital Repositories to better Serve Community Contexts by OGF-Europe

Effort will Help Libraries Put Academic Papers in Data ‘Cloud’, Jeff Young for The Chronicle of Higher Education