Winter 2009

January 2010
6th Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries - IRCDL 2010, 28-29

Scientific event

January 2010, Padua, Italy. IRCDL is a yearly event designed specifically for Italian researchers on Digital Libraries (DL) related topics. As DLs mature, more emphasis needs to be placed on more effective and personalised access to information for users, while improving interoperability between the different systems available. In particular, special attention needs placing on organisational aspects for advanced access to truly interoperable systems. Now a self-sustainable event, IRCDL conferences were originally launched and sponsored by DELOS, an EU FP6 Network of Excellence on DLs together with the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Padua.Two DL.org talks were delivered during the event and papers subsequently published by Springer.

Title: Making Digital Library Content Interoperable
Authors: Leonardo Candela, Donatella Castelli, and Costantino Thanos, Institute of Information Science & Technologies, National Research Council of Italy (CNR-ISTI).
Abstract: The demand for powerful and rich Digital Libraries able to support a large variety of interdisciplinary activities has increased the need for “building by re-use” and sharing, especially when dealing with the content space. Interoperability is a central issue to satisfy these needs. Despite its importance, and the many attempts to address it done in the past, the solutions to this problem are today, however, still very limited. The main reasons for this slow progress are the lack of any systematic approach for addressing the issue and a scarce knowledge of the adopted solutions. Too often these remain confined to the systems they have been designed for. In order to overcome this lack, this paper proposes an Interoperability Framework for describing and analyzing interoperability problems and solutions related to use of content resources. It also dis- cusses the many facets content interoperability has and provides a comprehensive and annotated portfolio of existing approaches and solutions to this challenging issue.

Title: An Event-centric Provenance Model for Digital Libraries
Authors: Cristina Tang, Donatella Castelli, Leonardo Candela, Paolo Manghi, Pasquale Pagano, and Costantino Thanos, Institute of Information Science & Technologies, National Research Council of Italy (CNR-ISTI)
Abstract: Provenance is intended as the description of the origin and/or of the descendant line of data. In the last decade, keeping track of provenance has be- come crucial for the correct exploitation of data in a wide variety of application domains. The rapid evolution of Digital Libraries (DLs), which become today advanced systems for the integration and management of cross-domain digital objects, recently called for models capturing the aspects of data provenance in this application field. However, there is no common definition of DL provenance and existing solutions address the problem only from the perspective of specific application scenarios. In this paper we propose a provenance model for digital libraries, inspired by approaches and experiences in the e-Science and cultural heritage worlds and based on the notion of event occurred to an object. The model aims at capturing the specificities of provenance for DL objects in order to provide practitioners and researchers in the field with common DL-specific provenance description languages.

December 2009

REPRISE Workshop, 5th International Digital Curation Conference, 2-4 December 2009, London UK

Scientific event


Kevin Ashley, Digital Curation Centre and member of the Policy Working Group served as a DL.org testimonial at the REPRISE (Repository Preservation Infrastructures) Workshop, which was co-hosted by OGF-Europe, D-GRID/WISSGRID and DReSNet during the 5th International Digital Curation Conference in London, 2-4 December 2009. Workshop speakers include internationally renowned experts in the digital repository space, such as Andrew Treloar, Australian National Data Services (ANDS); John Kunze, Californian Digital Library; Ross King, Austrian Institute of Technology and representative of the European Planets project; Paolo Missier, University of Manchester, as well as Kevin Ashley.
The Workshop, which was chaired by Andreas Aschenbrenner, Göttingen University, Germany, focused on responsibilities of trusted repositories that embrace both technical & organisational aspects, in order to discuss organisational requirements for technical infrastructure and foster discussion between the e-Infrastructure & Curation communities. Specifically, the workshop investigated digital repository interoperability, architecture and metadata challenges to inform an Architecture Study and Metadata Use Case Collection in the drive towards interoperable digital repositories and facilitate their exploitation in distributed environments. The Study has been published by the Digital Repository Research Group within the Open Grid Forum.

 

Cultural Heritage Online, 15-16 December 2009, Florence, Italy

Networking Event

During the Cultural Heritage Online conference, 15-16 December 2009 in Florence, DL.org promoted the project with a stand displaying the project poster alongside the distribution of the project flier. The event was attended by over 300 people. Over 50 fliers and 25 Booklets from the 1st DL.org Workshop were distributed. The conference also offered opportunities to network with representatives from Europeana and EuropeanaConect, DARIAH, the Library of Congress, university librarians and publishers.