Digital Libraries and Contributed by Organizations or Campuses

This article reviews available cost-effective options libraries have for updating and maintaining pathfinders such as subject guides and course pages. The paper discusses many of the available options, from the standpoint of a mid-sized academic library which is evaluating alternatives to static-HTML subject guides. Static HTML guides, while useful, have proven difficult and time-consuming to maintain. The article includes a discussion of open source database-driven solutions (such as SubjectsPlus, LibData, Research Guide, and Library Course Builder), Wikis, and social tagging sites like del.icio.us. This article discusses both the functionality and the relative strengths and weaknessess of each of these options.

Stephen G. Nichols tells of creating a digital library of manuscripts of the <i>Romance of the Rose</i>, the most popular vernacular French romance of the Middle Ages. The scholarly rationale for the digital library project proved the easy part. Nichols also shares the complex, technical steps of digitizing the manuscripts.

Charles Henry raises fundamental questions about the nature of the university now that
communication and scholarship are so ingrained in academe.

New cyberinfrastructures require not only collaboration across
disciplines, but collaboration across organizations. In The Virtual
Observatory Meets the Library, G. Sayeed Choudhury tells of the lessons
learned - academic, technological, and sociological - when Johns Hopkins
University created an astronomical database.

In April 2007, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the British Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) held an invitational workshop on data-driven science and data-driven scholarship, co-chaired by Ronald Larsen and William Arms, who jointly authored the final report. The report used the term cyberscholarship to describe new forms of research that become possible when high-performance computing meets digital libraries. | [1] Elsewhere in this issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing, Ronald Larsen describes the workshop and its conclusions. In this article, William Arms gives a personal view of the motivation behind the workshop and the roles of libraries and publishing in achieving its goals.

Technologists and librarians are discovering that intelligent organizational overlap is the route to the digital library of the future.

The key to a successful repository is sustained deposits, and the key to sustained deposits is community engagement. This article looks at deposit profiles automatically generated from OAI harvesting information and argues that repositories characterised by occasional large-volume deposits are a sign of a failure to embed in institutional processes. The ideal profile for a successful repository is discussed, and a new service that ranks repositories based on these criteria is implemented.

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).