This announcement is being sent to multiple lists; please excuse any duplication.
The DLF Aquifer Metadata Working Group is happy to announce the availability of two new resources aimed at helping Aquifer participants prepare metadata for aggregation.
1) An FAQ for institutions implementing the DLF/Aquifer Implementation Guidelines for Shareable MODS Records.
http://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/confluence/x/MYAH
The FAQ is designed to supplement the DLF/Aquifer Implementation Guidelines for Shareable MODS Records http://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/confluence/download/attachments/28330/DLFMODS_ImplementationGuidelines_Version1.pdf and MODS Guidelines Levels of Adoption http://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/confluence//x/q24, to help institutions understand the rationale behind the metadata guidelines designed by the Aquifer project. The Aquifer Metadata Working Group plans to add to this FAQ over time. Please do not hesitate to contact any Working Group member http://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/confluence/x/Sm8 with suggestions.
2) The DLF Aquifer MARCXML to MODS XSL Stylesheet, version 2007-08-10.
http://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/confluence//x/K4AQ
The Aquifer stylesheet for record conversion is based on the MARCXML to MODS stylesheet for
MODS version 3.2 made available by the Library of Congress on the MODS website http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/MARC21slim2MODS.xsl, and is based on a version incorporating LC's revisions up to number 1.15. We are grateful to the Library of Congress for providing and maintaining this document and for their help in preparing our version.
Our goal in making this version available is to make it easier for institutions having digital content they wish to contribute metadata to the DLF Aquifer project, American Social History Online. For institutions with MARC records, the stylesheet may help to convert their metadata to MODS records in a way that we believe better meets the requirements and recommendations of the Aquifer Guidelines. Our changes address the needs of the Aquifer project, specifically the requirements and recommendations of the Aquifer Implementation Guidelines for Shareable MODS Records, but may be useful to consider for other aggregators who are mapping MARCXML to MODS or other formats for OAI sharing.
More information about these changes can be found in an Introduction http://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/confluence//x/MYAQ, comments on specific changes at the beginning of the stylesheet, and the "Mapping" "MARC to MODS" section of the Aquifer FAQ page mentioned above. The latter document will be updated as new questions are answered.
Please note that content standards and practices using MARC vary between institutions, and sometimes within an institution over time or between types of collections or materials. No one stylesheet can deal appropriately with all variations in the use of MARC. The mapping decisions underlying the changes we have made, as well as the decisions underlying the LC stylesheet (documented at http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/mods-mapping.html), should be studied by an institution and tested on sample records to determine whether the results are as desired or whether the institution needs to modify the stylesheet for a particular collection of records.
Questions about the stylesheet may be addressed to any Metadata Working Group member; addresses can be found in the Roster of members http://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/confluence/x/Sm8. The members of the MARC to MODS subcommittee were Laura Akerman, John Chapman and Tracy Meehleib.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
MWG FAQ and Stylesheet Announcement
The MWG has published the Aquifer-tailored MARCXML2MODS stylesheet on the public Wiki, and distributed the following announcement about it and the FAQ to various listservs.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
The Value Proposition
The current round of conversations I am having with Aquifer participant library directors is allowing me to perfect my Aquifer "elevator speech", as Paul Courant at Michigan calls it. As we develop American Social History Online, we are also planning for Aquifer's future. Where we head with Aquifer depends largely on the value Aquifer adds.
Value for participant libraries and cultural heritage organizations
We fully expect to add value for collection contributors with our strategies for exposing collection metadata to commercial search services, making digital collections more visible and driving traffic to library websites. Aquifer pays attention to page rank so individual contributors don't have to. Aquifer boosts cultural heritage organizations' return on investment by promoting quality collections that remain tucked away in the far corners of the web.
Value for scholars
Assessment activities for American Social History Online will tell the story. Did scholars know these collections existed? Are they useful? Are they useful in aggregate? Is a themed collection useful? Is it useful to link from citation management software that suggests how primary digital material should be cited--a problem logged in The Impact of Digital Resources on Humanities Research study done at Rice University? What other material needs to be included to make Aquifer a useful set of collections and services?
Assessment begins next week with rapid prototyping feedback from scholars and will continue throughout the course of the project. Our goal: to develop Aquifer into a suite of resources and tools that every Americanist scholar needs.
Value for participant libraries and cultural heritage organizations
We fully expect to add value for collection contributors with our strategies for exposing collection metadata to commercial search services, making digital collections more visible and driving traffic to library websites. Aquifer pays attention to page rank so individual contributors don't have to. Aquifer boosts cultural heritage organizations' return on investment by promoting quality collections that remain tucked away in the far corners of the web.
Value for scholars
Assessment activities for American Social History Online will tell the story. Did scholars know these collections existed? Are they useful? Are they useful in aggregate? Is a themed collection useful? Is it useful to link from citation management software that suggests how primary digital material should be cited--a problem logged in The Impact of Digital Resources on Humanities Research study done at Rice University? What other material needs to be included to make Aquifer a useful set of collections and services?
Assessment begins next week with rapid prototyping feedback from scholars and will continue throughout the course of the project. Our goal: to develop Aquifer into a suite of resources and tools that every Americanist scholar needs.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Seeking additional content
As the team prepares the portal/website for the first round of evaluation by scholars, we are also working on obtaining more publicly available materials to include. The value to the collection contributor should be higher visibility for the collection. We are researching the best ways to expose Aquifer metadata to commercial search services using their rules, rather than expecting them to adapt to our way of doing business. The richer the pool of resources DLF Aquifer offers, the more useful the resource is likely to be to scholars.
DLF Aquifer is currently focused on aggregating collections pertaining to American culture and life by harvesting MODS records using OAI-PMH. The metadata working group has been hard at work creating guidelines, faqs and crosswalks from MARC and EAD to make collection contribution easier. Get more information from the DLF Aquifer wiki in the shared resources area.
DLF Aquifer is currently focused on aggregating collections pertaining to American culture and life by harvesting MODS records using OAI-PMH. The metadata working group has been hard at work creating guidelines, faqs and crosswalks from MARC and EAD to make collection contribution easier. Get more information from the DLF Aquifer wiki in the shared resources area.
Monday, August 6, 2007
Goings on with core team and working groups
As Chick mentioned in his Chicks Bit Brick Headings post on Saturday, Citrus Studios will design the user interface for the Aquifer portal. Citrus has a great track record in the cultural heritage arena. Their CEO, Kalika Yap worked at the Getty before starting her own firm. Citrus continues to do work for the Getty such as the award-winning Mexico: From Empire to Revolution website. They did the Archival Research Center website for the University of Southern California and are working on a user interface design for the Parker on the web collaboration between Corpus Christi College and Stanford University. Bringing in a team of professionals seemed like a better bet than trying to find a developer with UI and design expertise. Citrus has formed their team and will be in touch with their project plan this week.
Chick has released his pre-alpha portal for the core team to test. The next couple of weeks will be busy with continued development and eventual move to a more powerful server. Scholars will get their first look at a very early version of the portal at the end of August, although the Citrus UI will not be ready for integration until October. Mix in strategy for exposing collections in the portal to crawling by commercial search services and asset action integration and we are looking at a very active couple of months.
The services working group list carried a lively discussion about possible tools for scholar evaluators to use as they assess the American Social History Online collections for content and ease of use. Prompted by DLF Executive Director Peter Brantley's recent post, Working in Facebook on O'Reilly Radar the discussion explored marketing and assessment and concluded with an observation that we will likely use multiple tools and will settle on which ones to employ when we have the portal (and later, the local implementations) ready to show beyond the internal team.
Bill Landis at Yale has started working with the metadata working group to get an EAD to Aquifer MODS crosswalk developed. Having such a crosswalk available really will enable hidden cultural heritage collections to be brought to light through Aquifer. We have a slow, steady movement to add collections with the expectation that we will add at least four new content providers in the next couple of months.
Chick has released his pre-alpha portal for the core team to test. The next couple of weeks will be busy with continued development and eventual move to a more powerful server. Scholars will get their first look at a very early version of the portal at the end of August, although the Citrus UI will not be ready for integration until October. Mix in strategy for exposing collections in the portal to crawling by commercial search services and asset action integration and we are looking at a very active couple of months.
The services working group list carried a lively discussion about possible tools for scholar evaluators to use as they assess the American Social History Online collections for content and ease of use. Prompted by DLF Executive Director Peter Brantley's recent post, Working in Facebook on O'Reilly Radar the discussion explored marketing and assessment and concluded with an observation that we will likely use multiple tools and will settle on which ones to employ when we have the portal (and later, the local implementations) ready to show beyond the internal team.
Bill Landis at Yale has started working with the metadata working group to get an EAD to Aquifer MODS crosswalk developed. Having such a crosswalk available really will enable hidden cultural heritage collections to be brought to light through Aquifer. We have a slow, steady movement to add collections with the expectation that we will add at least four new content providers in the next couple of months.
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