Fedora 2.1 Released
Fedora 2.1 ReleasedWith New Security Architecture, Service Framework
The Fedora Development Team has announced that Fedora v2.1 is available for download.
Fedora 2.1 is a very significant release of Fedora since it introduces the new Fedora security architecture (with pluggable authentication and XACML-based policy enforcement), the Fedora Service Framework, and many other new features. The introduction of the new security architecture resulted in a significant amount of code refactoring, therefore, Fedora 2.1 has been tested with an extensive suite of new JUnit tests. The codebase and supporting libraries have also been updated making Fedora 2.1 compatible with Java 1.5. Some of the system documentation is still evolving. Most documentation is complete, but several documents are still being enhanced and improved.
Coinciding with this release is the publication of the Community-Developed Tools page on the Fedora web site. This is a clearinghouse for community-developed, open-source applications, tools, and services that work with Fedora repositories.
Fedora open source software gives organizations a flexible service-oriented architecture for managing and delivering their digital content. At its core is a powerful digital object model that supports multiple views of each digital object and the relationships among digital objects. Digital objects can encapsulate locally-managed content or make reference to remote content. Dynamic views are possible by associating web services with objects. Digital objects exist within a repository architecture that supports a variety of management functions. All functions of Fedora, both at the object and repository level, are exposed as web services. These functions can be protected with fine-grained access control policies.
This unique combination of features makes Fedora an attractive solution in a variety of domains. Some examples of applications that are built upon Fedora include library collections management, multimedia authoring systems, archival repositories, institutional repositories, and digital libraries for education.
Fedora home: www.fedora.info/
Fedora Community-Developed Tools: www.fedora.info/tools
2006 Horizon ReportIdentifying and Describing Emerging Technologies
The 2006 Horizon Report is now available. The 2006 edition of the Horizon Report, a collaboration between The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), is now available online. The Horizon report is an annual report of the work of the NMC's Horizon Project, a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a significant impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education.The 2006 Horizon Report highlights six technologies that the underlying research suggests will become very important to higher education over the next one to five years. The six technologies highlighted this year are:
- 1.
Social computing.
- 2.
Personal broadcasting.
- 3.
The phones in their pockets.
- 4.
Educational gaming.
- 5.
Augmented reality and enhanced visualization.
- 6.
Context-aware environments and devices.
The 32 page report is available free of charge at: www.nmc.org/pdf/2006_Horizon_Report.pdf
The New Media Consortium (NMC) is an international not-for-profit consortium of nearly 200 leading colleges, universities, museums, corporations, and other learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies. NMC member institutions are found in almost every state in the USA, across Canada, and in Europe, Latin America, and Japan. The consortium serves as a catalyst for the development of new applications of technology to support learning and creative expression, and sponsors programs and activities designed to stimulate innovation, encourage collaboration, and recognize excellence among its member institutions.
New Media Consortium: www.nmc.org/
OpenDOAROpen Access to Research Information
OpenDOAR – the Directory of Open Access Repositories – has announced the release of its primary listing of open access archives, available from www.opendoar.org
OpenDOAR is a joint collaboration between the University of Nottingham in the UK and Lund University in Sweden. Both institutions are active in open access initiatives. Lund operates the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.DOAJ.org),which is known throughout the world. Staff at Lund University Libraries have created the initial OpenDOAR technical set-up and carried out repository review and classification.
OpenDOAR classifies archives holding research papers, conference papers,theses and other academic materials that are available as "open access". This means that anyone with an internet connection has access to this information without paying any charges. Open access to information has grown rapidly as researchers and scholars increasingly put their work on the web for free in these repositories. Some of these archives hold material on a single subject: others are based in universities and hold information from across many different subjects.
Leading universities in the UK, Sweden, Germany, France and across Europe,Australia, India, the USA and world-wide have built an expanding international network of archives. Repositories have been built by research funders, like the US National Institutes for Health or the UK-based Wellcome Trust. There are now large numbers of archives of different sizes, composition and scope and new repositories are regularly established. Keeping track of these repositories and the range of information that they hold is a challenge.
Although most open access repositories have been designed to allow information about them to be gathered automatically, discrepancies can creep into the system. Therefore, each of the OpenDOAR repositories has been visited by project staff to check the information that is gathered. This in-depth approach gives a quality-controlled list of repository features. In addition,while reviewing these archives, project staff are building a picture of the world-wide development of open access repositories, noting new features and directions. This information is being analyzed to create the next version of the listing, with further information and categories being noted for each repository. In the meantime, the newly released list will continue to grow as new repositories are added.
The aim is to create a bridge between repository administrators and the service providers which "harvest" repositories. A typical service provider would be a search engine, indexing the material that is held. General search often brings back too many "junk" results. Information from OpenDOAR will enable the search service to provide a more focused search by selecting repositories that are of direct interest to the user – for example, all Australian repositories, or all repositories that hold conference papers on chemistry.
OpenDOAR is jointly funded by four agencies, led by the international Open Society Institute (OSI). The UK higher education funding committee, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has provided support, along with funding from the UK-based Consortium of Research Libraries (CURL) and from SPARCEurope– an alliance of European research libraries, library organizations, and research institutions.
OpenDOAR project web site: www.opendoar.org
OA LibrarianNew Blog on Open Access Launched
OA Librarian, a blog which focuses on Open Access scholarship, was launched in November 2005. The stated purpose of the blog is "to gather together major search sources for freely available information in library and information science" to act as a combined pathfinder/news resource blog. "Postings are on topics relating to open access that are particularly relevant for libraries and librarians: comments on open access activities from our perspectives, thoughts about what librarians will be doing in an open access world, celebrations of OA library accomplishments and stories about OA advocate librarians."
The blog is managed by an international team including: Marcus Banks, Anita Coleman, Dean Giustini, Ilkay Holt, Heather Morrison, Kumiko Vezina, Andrew Waller and Lesley Perkins, Blogmaster.
OA Librarian blog: http://oalibrarian.blogspot.com/
NSF Announces New Director of OCIReleases New Draft of Cyberinfrastructure Vision and Strategic Plan
Daniel Atkins to be Director of OCI
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has named distinguished computer scientist Dr Daniel E. Atkins to head its newly created Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI). Dr Atkins will join NSF on June 5 as Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure.
Dr Atkins, a professor in the School of Information and in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,has made major contributions to high-performance computer architecture, and led or participated in the design and construction of seven experimental machines including some of the earliest parallel computers. Dr Atkins served as Chair of NSF's Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure. In early 2003, the panel issued a highly influential report, titled Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure, that recommends a major program in cyberinfrastructure-enhanced science and engineering research and allied education for the nation under the leadership of NSF.
As computer and communication systems merged in the early 1980s, Dr Atkins shifted his focus from traditional computer architecture to the technical and social architecture of distributed knowledge communities. He was co-founder of an interdisciplinary research group of social and computer science faculty at the University of Michigan who were pioneers in the area of computer-supported cooperative work and related topics in human-computer interaction.
Dr Atkins has been project director for several large interdisciplinary NSF-sponsored projects to develop principles for the design and evaluation of IT-enabled scientific "collaboratories," or "centers without walls"in which researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location, interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, and accessing information and data in digital libraries and repositories. These flagship collaboratory projects, primarily focusing on atmospheric and space science, also included outreach to middle and high school science education and helped create the conditions for the current cyberinfrastructure/e-science movement in support of both research and education.
In addition, Dr Atkins led workshops to develop the NSF Digital Library Initiative including joint programs with the European Commission and later became project director of the UM Digital Library Project. He helped pilot the Mellon Foundation sponsored JSTOR Project (www.jstor.org)now in wide use in academic libraries. These projects laid the foundation for UM leadership in digital library production activities.
In 1992, Dr Atkins became the founding Dean of the University of Michigan School of Information (www.si.umich.edu). This professional graduate school (MS and PhD) is committed to learning,research and societal engagement through a combined social-humanistic-technical approach to "bringing people, information and technology together in more valuable ways."
New draft of cyberinfrastructure plan available for comment
NSF's Cyberinfrastructure Council has initiated a comprehensive strategic planning process to guide the agency's future investments in cyberinfrastructure– the IT-based infrastructure increasingly essential to science and engineering leadership in the twenty-first century. The agency's plans are being developed in a document entitled NSF's Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery.
NSF invites community comments on a new draft of this document. Comments should be provided via email to: ciinput@nsf.govFuture drafts of the document will be released as the agency's plans are shaped by community input, and as new chapters are developed. NSF plans to release the first complete version of this living document in the Spring of 2006.
Draft for comment: www.nsf.gov/od/oci/ci_v5.pdf
Mind the GapLong-Term Management of Valuable Digital Assets
A "state of the nation" report reveals that less than 20 percent of UK organizations surveyed have a strategy in place to deal with the risk of loss or degradation to their digital resource – despite a very high level of awareness of the risks and potential economic penalties. With the release in February 2006 of the report, Mind the Gap: assessing digital preservation needs in the UK, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) aims to help government, public institutions and private companies turn high awareness into concerted action.
The survey reveals that the loss of digital data is commonplace – it is seen as an inevitable hazard by some – with more than 70 percent of respondents saying data had been lost in their organization. Awareness of the potential economic and cultural risks is high, with 87 percent recognizing that corporate memory or key cultural material could be lost and some 60 percent saying that their organization could lose out financially. In 52 percent of the organizations surveyed there was management commitment to digital preservation– but only 18 percent had a strategy in place.
Prior to the survey, a number of high profile cases had helped raise awareness of the risks of digital data loss. In a recent judgment in the USA,Morgan Stanley had more than $1 billion awarded against them as a result of their failure to preserve and hand over some documents required by the courts. The Securities and Exchange Commission in the USA is also looking at fining the same bank over $10 million – specifically for failing to preserve email documents.
The data tapes from the 1975 Viking Lander mission to Mars were recently discovered to have deteriorated despite careful storage, and scientists also found that they could not decode the formats used and had to rely on the original paper printouts.
The BBC's 1986 Domesday project is another example of the unique fragility of digital material. Designed to capture a picture of Britain in 1986, the collection of photographs, maps and statistical information was recorded onto 30cm laserdiscs. But less than 20 years on, the laserdiscs and player are obsolete. The data were only rescued thanks to a surviving laserdisc player and more than a year's effort by specialist teams.
According to the DPC-commissioned report, the principal risks to digital material are: the deterioration of the storage medium; obsolescence of hardware,software or storage format; and failure to save crucial document format information (a common example is preserving tables of numbers without preserving an explanation of their meaning).
The report identifies 18 core needs, each of which has recommendations which will address them. Recommendations are addressed to organizations, government,and funding bodies. Among the key needs: awareness of digital preservation issues needs to be more commonplace, particularly amongst data creators;organizations need to take stock of their digital materials (55 percent of the respondents to the survey do not know what digital material they hold); and projects need to be funded from the outset with the long-term value of the information produced and the cost of retention taken into account. There needs to be funding for more digital archives.
This UK Digital Preservation Needs Assessment study, carried out by the software services company Tessella, looked at digital preservation practice in government bodies, archives, museums, libraries, education, scientific research organizations, pharmaceutical, environmental, nuclear, engineering, publishing and financial institutions.
A PDF version of the report is available: www.dpconline.org/docs/reports/uknamindthegap.pdf
Digital Preservation Coalition: www.dpconline.org/
Digital Curation and PreservationDefining the Research Agenda
The final report and recommendations of the Warwick Workshop on "Digital Curation and Preservation: Defining the research agenda for the next decade"is now freely available online. The British Library/CCLRC/DCC/JISC sponsored Warwick Workshop, held in November 2005, focused on three main strands in parallel breakout sessions and group discussions. Each breakout group considered one of the following topics:
Curation services and technologies.
Drivers and barriers (policy issues).
Data life cycle management (process issues).
Each session was chaired by a leading expert on the topic and the groups were asked to consider the topic in relation to the following categories: the scope and definition of each topic, the current state of play nationally and internationally; what the vision was likely to be over the next five to ten years; what needed to be done to achieve this vision; what were the dependencies on which achievement of the vision would be based, and what were the priorities. National and international experts across the full spectrum of the digital lifecycle assisted this process by mapping out the current state of play and future agenda and provided valuable input to the working group.
The breakout groups are described in more detail in the report appendices;each group tackled and presented their work in the way which was felt to be most appropriate. The report brings the results of all the groups together in section 2, outlining a number of policy development topics and the common research areas– which will bring benefits to multiple areas. Many specific research topics are identified.
AriadneCelebrates Ten Years of Publication
Ariadne is a web magazine for information professionals in archives,libraries and museums in all sectors. Since its inception it has attempted to keep the busy practitioner abreast of current digital library initiatives as well as technological developments further afield. It concentrated originally on reporting in depth to the information community at large on progress and developments within the UK Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib), covering matters such as information service developments and information networking issues worldwide. It now additionally reports on newer JISC-funded programmes and services as well as developments in the field of museums, libraries and archives within the UK and abroad.
Ariadne is now ten years old, having begun life on 16 January 1996. The decennial issue offers a range of articles from leading practitioners on the progress made during the Ariadne's lifetime together with their views on the shape of things to come. Among the featured articles:
Derek Law (Centre for Digital Library Research, University of Strathclyde)looks at the progress the debate on Open Access has made in the last ten years and looks forward.
John MacColl (Edinburgh University Library) analyses the reactions many academic libraries may be having to the range of tools Google is currently rolling out and outlines a strategy for institutions in the face of such potentially radical developments.
Clifford Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information) looks at how the emergence of e-research has changed our thinking about the future of research libraries on both sides of the Atlantic.
Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC) considers how the digital library environment has changed in the ten years since Ariadne was first published.
Ariadne Magazine: www.ariadne.ac.uk/
Google's NewsletterFor Librarians
In December 2005, Google launched Google's Newsletter for Librarians. The stated goal of the newsletter is to highlight ways that Google and librarians can work together to fill their similar missions of organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful for patrons students and users. Anyone can sign up to receive the newsletter at the Google Librarian Center as well as accessing archived copies.
The inaugural issue features an article written to address one of the most frequent questions Google heard from librarians: How does Google index the web,and, more important, how does it rank the results? Matt Cutts, an engineer in their quality group, explained the basics of indexing and shed some light on some of the algorithms used to determine where a site should appear on results pages.
In the spirit of dialog that Google hoped the newsletter would encourage communication between librarians and Google, the second issue features an article by a librarian as well a Google staff, responding to questions raised by the article in the first issue. Karen Schneider, director, Librarians Internet Index and Matt Cutts tackle issues related to determining trust as it relates to web site ranking.
Google Librarian Center Home: www.google.com/services/librarian_center.html
Southeast Asia VisionsCornell Releases New Digital Collection
Cornell University Library has announced the completion of the IMLS funded project "Southeast Asia Visions". Southeast Asia Visions is a digital collection of European travel accounts of pre-modern (1613-1920s) Southeast Asia from Cornell University Library's John M. Echol's collection many of which are housed in the Asia Rare collection. The collection web site provides contextual information as well as access to full text and image descriptions for more than 350 books and journal articles written in English and French. The works in the collection were selected for the quality of their first-hand observations and,together, provide a comprehensive representation of Southeast Asia. Along with their narratives, these accounts include some 10,000 images, drawings,photographs, prints and maps, many of them in color. The goals of developing this digital collection are both to meet the curricular needs of courses taught at Cornell University and to make these texts and images accessible via the Internet to students and scholars worldwide.
More than 40 library staff and students worked over the last three years on the project digitizing and creating the images, creating the collection web site and creating electronic resource records which are available in the CU catalog. Former Echols Collection curator Allen Riedy was the initial Principal Investigator of the grant project that began in December 2002 and David Block became PI after Allen's departure from CUL in 2003. Technical information on the project, including copyright information, digitization process and delivery and access processes are available form the project web site.
Southeast Asia Visions web site: http://seasiavisions.library.cornell.edu
Project pages: http://dlxs.library.cornell.edu/s/sea/project.php
LISTA DatabaseFree to All Interested In Libraries and Librarianship
EBSCO Publishing is providing the Library, Information Science &Technology Abstracts (LISTA) database as a free resource to anyone interested in libraries and information management. LISTA provides coverage on subjects such as librarianship, classification, cataloging, bibliometrics, online information retrieval, information management and more. Delivered via the EBSCOhost platform, LISTA indexes more than 600 periodicals plus books, research reports,and proceedings. With coverage dating back to the mid-1960s, it is the oldest continuously produced database covering the field of information science.
LISTA: www.libraryresearch.com
Bowker and AquabrowserTeam up for Fiction Connection
Bowker has announced the debut of Fiction Connection, a new readers' advisory tool for BooksInPrint.com customers. Fiction and biography books published in the USA can now be identified through Fiction Connection, which allows patrons or librarians to search similar titles by entering the title of a book they already know they enjoy, or browsing by location, topic, character, genre,timeframe, or setting. The user will then be provided with a comprehensive list of suggested reading that has characteristics matching their original search criteria.
The technology powering Fiction Connection was developed specifically for Bowker by Medialab Solutions, using the AquaBrowser software and featuring its signature word cloud. The data displayed within Fiction Connection is pulled from fiction and biography profiles developed by Syndetic Solutions, which identify key traits and characteristics that define a particular title.
Fiction Connection will be available as a complimentary resource to all BooksInPrint.com library and bookseller customers. Fiction Connection was unveiled at the 2006 Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association, held January 20-23, 2006 in San Antonio.
Aquabrowser: www.medialab.nl/
Fiction Connection web site: www.FictionConnection.com
Serials SolutionsPreviews Developments in E-Resource Discovery, Management
Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest Information and Learning, has announced a new development project in e-resource discovery. Serials Solutions is licensing Vivísimo's Clustering Engine for integration into its federated search product, Central Search. The combined federated search and clustering solution will dramatically streamline the information retrieval and presentation process for librarians and patrons alike.
Central Search allows patrons to search a wide variety of resources from a single, easy-to-use interface. The application combines industry-leading search technology with results handling designed to provide a clear starting point for research at a library. Vivísimo's award-winning Clustering Engine is part of the Vivísimo Velocity Enterprise Search Platform, the only enterprise software that combines search, federate search and dynamic clustering.
Serials Solutions introduced the updated version of Central Search which incorporates Vivísimo's Clustering Engine at the 2006 ALA Midwinter Meeting in San Antonio, Texas in January.
Also previewed at the Midwinter Meeting was Serials Solutions' COUNTERcounter initiative, a new tool for helping libraries manage their e-resource collections. The new solution enables librarians to store and analyze COUNTER compliant statistics from multiple vendors and then combine that data with local cost and overlap data. COUNTERcounter will take full advantage of SUSHI, once that vendor statistics sharing protocol is finalized and available from content providers.
