First technical advisory group meeting

Helpful review on Wednesday from American Social History Online technical advisory group chaired by Sayeed Choudhury with able assistance from Tim DiLauro. Sandy Payette and Carl Lagoze were also in attendance and reminded us to stay connected with the broader community through NSDL and ORE.

Good questions about how we plan to enable object re-use (TBD) and about ideas for optimizing the website for commercial search service discovery. In addition to creating a sitemap, linking to the website and to individual objects from blogs and social networking software like facebook has the potential to raise relevancy ranking for these specialized objects and collections. Definitely aligned with the DLF Aquifer tagline Bringing collections to light through the Digital Library Federation.

Just a quick note to let you know that the new and improved Aquifer Project plan has been posted at http://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/confluence/display/DLFAquifer/Project+Management

Let me know what you think about the display of the plan. It's a slight change from it's previous incarnation.

Levels of Adoption available

The MWG has stabilized the MODS Guidelines Levels of Adoption and posted them on the Aquifer public Wiki. We sent the following announcement to the MODS, metadatalibrarians, AUTOCAT, DIGLIB, DLF-ANNOUNCE, and OAI-GENERAL lists:

The Digital Library Federation Aquifer Metadata Working Group is proud to announce the release of the DLF Aquifer MODS Guidelines Levels of Adoption .

The Levels of Adoption document is intended to supplement the Digital Library Federation / Aquifer Implementation Guidelines for Shareable MODS Records , released in November 2006 under the auspices of the DLF Aquifer initiative . The Shareable MODS Guidelines represent a record-centric view of Aquifer's goals, whereas it is often helpful to set priorities for metadata creation with a user- and use-centric view. The newly-released Levels of Adoption document describes five general categories of user functionality that are likely to be supported by following specific recommendations from the Guidelines. It attempts to provide additional guidance to MODS implementers in the planning process by documenting what sorts of functionality is possible when certain elements of the Guidelines are followed.

These documents, together with an FAQ for implementation (forthcoming - stay tuned!), were written primarily to assist institutions preparing metadata for aggregation via the DLF Aquifer initiative, but the Working Group expects they could also be useful in preparing metadata for other aggregations, or for using MODS in a local environment. Comments on the Levels of Adoption are welcome, and can be sent to any Working Group member. Contact information for Working Group members is available from the Levels of Adoption page.

Progress on all fronts

Lots happening...

DLF Aquifer poised to add collections

Tom Habing has modified the DLF Collections Registry with feedback from Kat Hagedorn and Jenn Riley, so that the registry can be used as a workflow support tool for adding collections to DLF Aquifer.

MODS Guidelines levels of adoption have joined the implementation guidelines themselves on the DLF Aquifer Public Metadata Documents page of the new wiki described below.

General information for organizations with collections to contribute to Aquifer will post to the wiki next week.

Enhanced Confluence-based wiki hosted by Indiana University

The public page is set up to share Aquifer information of general use to the community and over time, provide workflow information for collection contributors, links to information about getting and installing software from SourceForge and help for people who want to find and use Aquifer content.

The password protected project support areas will replace the BaseCamp collaborative software the working groups have been using.

New web-services oriented portal in development

Track the development and related Aquifer work through the Aquifer blog aggregation. The new portal will support commercial search service crawls, so contributing collections to Aquifer may offer broader exposure for collections that are hidden in their native environments. Consider contributing yours!

This new development will also support American Social History Online local scenarios; Sakai integration at Indiana University, federated search development at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Zotero integration.

Vote for your favorite

Aquifer participants suggested a number of names for the Aquifer blog aggregation. Vote for your favorite by July 20, 2007.

DLF Aquifer MODS Implementation guidelines in context

Sarah Shreeves of UIUC, former DLF Aquifer metadata working group chair and current MWG member talked about the DLF Aquifer MODS implementation guidelines at the American Library Association meeting in Washington, DC on June 25th. Her talk, Creating rich shareable metadata was part of a LITA Standards Interest Group program on metadata standards.

The presentation describes the service context in which the DLF Aquifer metadata working group developed the MODS implementation guidelines and includes contact information for potential collection contributors. Added background on the decision to adopt MODS for Aquifer and the Mellon funded American Social History Online project provide an excellent overall project status update with an emphasis on descriptive metadata.