New portal for educational resources

With funding from the Hewlett Foundation, the Creative Commons team is working to develop a portal for open educational resources.

At the moment, the project is just aiming to grab basic records with simple metadata - “a central collection of URLs and keyword annotations”.

Rather than grab complex metadata, the idea is to grow quickly with these simple records.

It will be interesting to see how open is defined. Does this include the many digitisation projects that have publicly available metadata but have the resources hidden behind toll / subscription / institutional barriers. Relatedly, there are plenty of digitisation projects that have complex licensing deals that do not sit easily the Creative Commons ethos.

There is some, but not complete, overlap with the Intute project in the UK , which hand crafts catalogue records of educational resources (whether open access or not) and divides portals by broad subject areas.

JSTOR / Research Information Network event in Edinburgh

JSTOR and the Research Information Network

Thursday 13 September 2007 , 09.00 to 12.00.  Digital Content and the Researcher
(Immediately prior to the Sustaining the Digital Library Symposium)

St. Trinneans Room in St. Leonards on the Pollock Halls, University of Edinburgh http://www.ed.ac.uk/explore/places/buildings/pollock-halls.html

How have scholars and librarians responded to the opportunities and challenges of digital scholarship? What are their expectations for the future development of online information resources? How is research practice changing in the digital environment?

To address these questions, the Research Information Network (RIN) – in collaboration with JSTOR – is holding a workshop in Edinburgh on 13 September 2007. A distinguished panel of speakers drawn from both JSTOR and the library community in the UK will provide updates and reports on new projects and recent studies.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly literature and extend access to the archive as broadly as possible. The key role of the RIN is to give the strategic leadership required to establish a national framework for research information provision, and to generate effective and sustainable arrangements for meeting the information needs of the professional research community.

Programme

9.00        Registration

9.15        JSTOR Update
Mike Spinella
Executive Director, JSTOR

9.30        19th Century Pamphlet Digitisation Project
John Kiplinger
Director of Production, JSTOR
&
Chris Fowler
Head of IT Strategy, University of Southampton

10.15      Questions and Discussion

10.30      Break

10.50      RIN Studies of Researchers
Michael Jubb
Director, RIN

11.10      Questions and Discussion

11.20      JSTOR/Ithaka Faculty & Librarian Studies
Mike Spinella
Executive Director, JSTOR
&
Bruce Heterick
Director of Library Relations, JSTOR

11.50      Questions and Discussion

12.00      Close

There is no registration fee for this workshop, but space is limited. If you are interested and available to attend, please RSVP by contacting David McTaggart of the National Library of Scotland by 11th September 2007.  D.mctaggart@nls.uk

Gluing digital collections together: current terminlogy services

Last year UKOLN, a research group at the University of Bath, wrote an excellent state of the art review on Terminology Services.

It defines them as a set of services that present and apply vocabularies, both controlled and uncontrolled, including their member terms, concepts and relationships. This is done for purposes of searching, browsing, discovery, translation, mapping, semantic reasoning, subject indexing and classification, harvesting, alerting etc.

Basically, it gives a review of tools that make metadata interoperable. Such services have a vital role to play in bringing together many of the disparate digitised collections now in existence. The two websites on the Scots language mentioned in my previous blog post could well make use of some specialised terminology services to bring them together. Both websites can be intelligently searched on its own, but they cannot be cross-searched in any sophisticated way.

Crivens! Scots Corpus of Texts online

The University of Glasgow has recently finished a phase of funding which has allowed it to add four million words to The Scottish Corpus of Text and Speech, providing instances of usages of the Scots language from 1945 onwards. Burn, chute, braw and brae all feature

This complements the already existing Dictionary of the Scots Language from the University of Edinburgh

Why Digitise at a High Resolution?

Digitisation project managers are sometimes keen to digitise at a lowish resolution, creating digital images that will work well for current needs, but maybe not in the future. It can be difficult to convince them that there is benefit in digitising at a higher resolution; that choosing 600dpi rather than 400dpi is more than an unnecessary luxury.

A report by JISC on future display technologies shows that the capabilities of monitors, screen and other such hardware are progressing rapidly. Faced with screens of bigger size and better resolution, images digitised to a high level will look significantly better than those digitised at a lower level. Those digitisation managers that have taken the risk and created large will be the ones who see the dividends.

The report is a useful piece of evidence and worth bearing in mind when pondering what standards and settings to use in an image capture project.

Digital Humanities Infrastructure in Ireland

The Irish Government has recently announced (Word doc) four-years worth of funding, totally around £2.5m (3.5m Euro) for a Digital Humanities Observatory to manage and co-ordinate the increasingly complex e-resources created in the arts and humanities.

Initiatives like this in Ireland, the Digital Humanities Initiative in the States and the German development of digitisation infrastructure all rather put the AHRC’s decision to end funding of the UK’s AHDS to shame.

Different flavours of Office XML

JISC has just published a report comparing the between XML flavours of standards for office documentation (ie. word processing files and all). It compares ODF with the Microsoft-supported OOXML.

To the layman, the differences seem rather arcane. The real danger seems to be, according to the report, the simple fact that there will be two standards, with different capabilities, in place. This doesn’t make life on the computer as straightforward as it should be.

Metadata Extraction Tool

The National Library of New Zealand (Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa) is pleased to announce the open-source release of version 3.2 of its Metadata Extraction Tool.

The Metadata Extraction Tool programmatically extracts preservation metadata from a range of file formats including PDF documents, image files, sound files, office documents, and many others. It automatically extracts preservation-related metadata from digital files, then outputs that metadata in XML. It can be used through a graphical user interface or command-line interface.

The software was created in 2003 and redeveloped this year. It is now available as open-source software from http://meta-extractor.sf.net/ under the terms of the Apache Public License.

To find out more:

* Visit the project homepage: http://meta-extractor.sf.net/

* Read the information sheet: http://meta-extractor.sourceforge.net/meta-extractor-info-sheet.pdf

* Download the software: http://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=189407