Contributed by Organizations or Campuses; Articles, Papers, and Reports; Digital Libraries; and OAI
Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library
| Title: | Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library (ID: CSD4754) | | Author(s): | Martha Brogan (University of Pennsylvania) | | Origin: | Contributed by Organizations or Campuses (2006) | | Type: | Articles, Papers, and Reports | | Abstract: | Martha L. Brogan's Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library is a major contribution to the Digital Library Federation's (DLF) suite of work that focuses on the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). With generous funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, DLF has harnessed deep OAI expertise from the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Emory University to prototype "next-generation" OAI services informed by advisory panels of scholars and technical experts; to build registries of providers to aid in the creation of new OAI-based services; and to formulate best practices for sharable metadata that focus what we have learned collectively for innovative library services. The best practices work has received intellectual and practical support from our colleagues at the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), a service of the National Science Foundation (NSF). | | View this resource: | |
Moving Towards Shareable Metadata
| Title: | Moving Towards Shareable Metadata (ID: CSD41643) | | Author(s): | Sarah Shreeves (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) | | Origin: | Contributed by Organizations or Campuses (2006) | | Type: | Articles, Papers, and Reports | | Abstract: | A focus of digital libraries, particularly since the advent of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, is aggregating from multiple collections metadata describing digital content. However, the quality and interoperability of the metadata often prevents such aggregations from offering much more than very simple search and discovery services. Shareable metadata is metadata which can be understood and used outside of its local environment by aggregators to provide more advanced services. This paper describes shareable metadata, its characteristics, and its importance to digital library development, as well as barriers and challenges to its implementation. | | View this resource: | |
De–unifying a Digital Library
| Title: | De–unifying a Digital Library (ID: CSD4004) | | Author(s): | Arthur H.J. Sale (University of Tasmania) | | Source: | First Monday | | Origin: | Contributed by Organizations or Campuses (2005) | | Type: | Articles, Papers, and Reports | | Abstract: | The University of Tasmania decided to explore using a unified digital library for all its research output: journal articles, conference papers, higher degree theses, and other types. This decision is in advance of the state of the Australian national indexing systems. The digital library also uses OAI–PMH protocols for harvesting, which one of the national repositories does not as yet. The paper describes the context, reasons for the University's decision, consequences and outcomes, and the development of software to talk to the Australian Digital Theses Program. | | View this resource: | |
Federated Searching Interface Techniques for Heterogeneous OAI Repositories
| Title: | Federated Searching Interface Techniques for Heterogeneous OAI Repositories (ID: CSD3098) | | Origin: | Contributed by Organizations or Campuses (2003) | | Type: | Articles, Papers, and Reports | | Abstract: | Federating repositories by harvesting heterogeneous collections with varying degrees of metadata richness poses a number of challenging issues: (1) how to address the lack of uniform control for various metadata fields in terms of building a rich unified search interface, and (2) how easily new collections and freshly harvested data in existing repositories can be incorporated into the federation supporting a unified interface? This paper focuses on the approaches taken to address these issues in Arc, an Open Archives Initiative-compliant federated digital library. At present Arc contains over 1M metadata records from 75 data providers from various subject domains. Analysis of these heterogeneous collections indicates that controlled vocabularies and values are widely used in most repositories. Usage is extremely variable, however. In Arc we solve the problem by implementing an advanced searching interface that allows users to search and select in specific fields with data we construct from the harvested metadata, and also by an interactive search for the subject field. As the metadata records are incrementally harvested we address how to build these services over frequently-added new collections and harvested data. The initial result is promising, showing the benefits of immediate feedback to the user in enhancing the search experience as well as in increasing the precision of the user's search. | | View this resource: | |
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