EDUCAUSE | Contributed by Organizations or Campuses; Articles, Papers, and Reports; and Metadata

Enhancing Search and Browse Using Automated Clustering of Subject Metadata

ckeller — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 16:42:08 -0500

The Web puzzle of online information resources often hinders end-users from effective and efficient access to these resources. Clustering resources into appropriate subject-based groupings may help alleviate these difficulties, but will it work with heterogeneous material? The University of Michigan and the University of California Irvine joined forces to test automatically enhancing metadata records using the Topic Modeling algorithm on the varied OAIster corpus. We created labels for the resulting clusters of metadata records, matched the clusters to an in-house classification system, and developed a prototype that would showcase methods for search and retrieval using the enhanced records. Results indicated that while the algorithm was somewhat time-intensive to run and using a local classification scheme had its drawbacks, precise clustering of records was achieved and the prototype interface proved that faceted classification could be powerful in helping end-users find resources.

Metadata for All: Descriptive Standards and Metadata Sharing across Libraries, Archives and Museums

drupal — Fri, 04 May 2007 11:50:00 -0500

Integrating digital content from libraries, archives and museums represents a persistent challenge. While the history of standards development is rife with examples of cross-community experimentation, in the end, libraries, archives and museums have developed parallel descriptive strategies for cataloguing the materials in their custody. Applying in particular data content standards by material type, and not by community affiliation, could lead to greater data interoperability within the cultural heritage community.

In making this argument, the article demystifies metadata by defining and categorizing types of standards, provides a brief historical overview of the rise of descriptive standards in museums, libraries and archives, and considers the current tensions and ambitions in making descriptive practice more economic [1].

Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library

drupal — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 12:31:31 -0600

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).

Repository Librarian and the Next Crusade: The Search for a Common Standard for Digital Repository Metadata

drupal — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 14:16:49 -0600

"Metadata is an exceedingly broad category of information covering everything from an object's title and date of origin to information about layout, presentation, and rights. Within libraries and digital object repositories, metadata is the cornerstone of the infrastructure required for exchange and use of information. While metadata standards abound, and acceptance and use of these standards is equally widespread, agreement on a common standard is much harder to find."

Moving Towards Shareable Metadata

drupal — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 12:25:31 -0500

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.

Automated Capture of Thumbnails and Thumbshots for Use by Metadata Aggregation Services

drupal — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 15:28:20 -0600

The practice of including thumbnails in short record displays, increasingly common in local implementations, is being adopted by metadata aggregation service providers as well. In addition, thumbnails and Web thumbshots have begun appearing as part of Web search results. This article reports on a project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to make more comprehensible heterogeneous resources available on the UIUC CIC metadata portal by incorporating thumbnails and thumbshots of image and Webpage resources in the context of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. In addition to thumbnails provided by partner data providers, UIUC has developed an automated process to generate thumbnails and thumbshots from the Webpages resources pointed to by the metadata records.

Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?

drupal — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 12:28:52 -0600

"In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. We begin by looking at the issue of "sloppy tags", a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this "tidying up" approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular."

Open Access Federation for Library and Information Science

drupal — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 16:46:14 -0600

Self-archiving, the practice of depositing one's works in an OAI-compliant archive, is a key strategy for innovating scholarly communication and achieving open access. DL-Harvest, a subject service for Library and Information (LIS), based on the aggregation of OAI-PMH compliant metadata from both institutional and disciplinary digital repositories, including dLIST, is described. Additionally, results from two studies that explored LIS journal publishers' stances towards self-archiving as expressed in copyright transfer agreements (CTAs) and the scholarly communication behaviors of LIS scholars, with regard to self-archiving and searching, are presented and some implications for the development of federated subject services are highlighted

What Is a Digital Library Anymore, Anyway?

drupal — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 12:37:45 -0600

The authors explore how digital libraries have evolved over the years and what form they have now taken."This paper describes an information model for digital libraries that intentionally moves "beyond search and access", without ignoring those basic functions, and facilitates the creation of collaborative and contextual knowledge environments. This model is an information network overlay that represents a digital library as a graph of typed nodes, corresponding to the information units (documents, data, services, agents) within the library, and semantic edges representing the contextual relationships among those units. The information model integrates local and distributed information integrated with web services, allowing the creation of rich documents (e.g., learning objects, publications for e-science, etc.). It expresses the complex relationships among information objects, agents, services, and meta-information (such as ontologies), and thereby represents information resources in context, rather than as the result of stand-alone web access. It facilitates collaborative activities, closing the loop between users as consumers and users as contributors."

Descriptive Metadata for Copyright Status

drupal — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 10:20:14 -0500

The need to express the intellectual property rights of digital materials has focused on access and usage permissions which must be granted by the rights holder. A key set of permissions not acknowledged by these rights expressions is inherent in the legal copyright status of the item. Digital libraries can hold and provide access to many items for which copyright status is the sole governor of use. This article proposes a small set of descriptive data elements that should accompany digital materials to inform potential users of the copyright status of the item.