Aquifer

New Report Evaluates Tools for Improving Metadata in Aggregations

2009-02-04T12:44:00.000-08:00

The Digital Library Federation has just released a tools inventory and evaluation that captures the state of software and services available to improve metadata for aggregations--collections that are brought together for ease in finding and using them.

Greta de Groat researched and wrote the report, which was sponsored by DLF Aquifer and funded by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

The report is organized according to user tasks and services, and what metadata would be needed to support those tasks and services.

From the executive summary, "Tools were evaluated for general applicability across digital library and other cultural heritage environments. The results of the research show that a handful of tools are usable as-is, but many tools need more work to be generally applicable in a variety of environments."

The report may be of interest to digital library developers and project managers as well as metadata specialists in cultural heritage organizations.

The report is now available as a PDF from the DLF website at http://www.diglib.org/aquifer/dlf110.pdf. A print version will also be available for purchase soon.

New Service: MODS and Asset Actions Explorer

2009-02-03T07:49:00.000-08:00

The MODS and Asset Actions Explorer is an experimental web service that allows anyone to upload MODS XML files, including modsCollection files, and verify that uploaded MODS records comply with the MODS XML Schema and also to check the uploaded records against the MODS Levels of Adoption Guidelines. In addition to MODS records, the service also allows the upload of Asset Action Packages which is another experimental format being developed by the DLF Aquifer project. An Asset Action Package is an XML file containing a defined set of actionable URIs for a digital resource that delivers named, typed actions for that resource.

Anyone is welcome to get an account and upload their MODS records for validation and checking.

Preparing for the Next Phase--Aquifer/American Social History Online "IPO"

2008-09-30T09:51:00.000-07:00

While this may not be the ideal time to make an initial public offering, the Digital Library Federation is moving forward with a plan to find a new home for American Social History Online. Of course this is not an IPO in the strict sense of the word. DLF is a not for profit organization and the American Social History Online Web site is based on openly accessible collections and services created with open source software. Nonetheless, DLF is creating a process for incubating innovation through collaboration, as has been done with Aquifer--the initiative that produced American Social History Online. Once the bulk of the development is done, DLF would like to move a potentially sustainable, successful package to an organization that provides services as part of its core mission.

The model DLF is experimenting with is something like an IPO process. An Aquifer "prospectus" describes the active elements of the initiative and offers suggested business models for sustainability and future development. Interested parties are invited to submit responses to a survey, indicating their interest in taking on responsibility for the American Social History Online Web site, or other elements of Aquifer that fit with their organization's mission. DLF will host a community meeting and q&a for prospective new hosts, and to discover which elements of the Aquifer initiative DLF members would like to keep active within the Digital Library Federation. The community meeting will be held at DLF Fall Forum 2008 in Providence, R.I. in November.

More information about Aquifer and American Social History Online is available on the project wiki.

Harvest Enhanced MODS Metadata from DLF ASHO Portal

2008-09-24T10:12:00.000-07:00

Enhanced metadata may now be harvested from the DLF Aquifer American Social History Online (ASHO) portal using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesteting (OAI-PMH). The baseURL for this service is http://www.dlfaquifer.org/oai. In addition to oai_dc, the supported metadata formats are mods which is the enhanced metadata in the MODS format, and mods_orig which is the unenhanced metadata as originally harvested in MODS format. The enhanced metadata includes a relatedItem type host which has an xlink OAI GetRecord URL to retrieve the associated collection record from the DLF collections registry. The enhanced metadata also includes an 'asset action package' extension element that points to the associated asset action package. (This is an experimental feature and is not be entirely reliable.) In addition, there are dlf_geo_gazer, dlf_temper, and dlf_user_tagging subject elements, for our value-added geographic, temporal, and social tagging. The data are organized into OAI sets based on the collection of origin of the records.

Inspiration

2008-07-15T11:13:00.000-07:00

Jenn Riley's Wordle creation for FRBR inspired me to create one from the draft of a paper I'm writing about Aquifer and American Social History Online for the Library Assessment Conference coming up next month.

Speaking of Jenn, she and several members of the metadata working group, John Chapman, Sarah Shreeves, Laura Akerman, and Bill Landis have had their article, "Promoting shareability: Metadata activities of the DLF Aquifer initiative" accepted for publication in the Journal of Library Metadata. Look for it in the next issue. Congratulations--and thanks for a job well done!

New Features! New Collections!

2008-07-07T12:00:00.001-07:00

An updated release of American Social History Online with new features and new collections is now available. The front page offers browsing short cuts by place, time, and broad subject category. A new map view offers visualization through a Google maps mashup. Do a search, then select map view to see results displayed by geographic location.

Browse through collections to see what is new, including contributions from Columbia and Northwestern. Try a simple search on "immigration" or "railroads" to see what combining these rich collections from different libraries offers. It is not too late to submit collections to be included in the next update! Consult the "about" page on the American Social History Online Web site to find out how.

Preparing for Assessment

2008-06-05T10:00:00.000-07:00

The Aquifer Services Working Group is organizing the assessment activities for American Social History Online. Members of the Services Working Group will use a variety of methods to gather information about how scholars use the Web site and how well it and the services associated with it works for them. The methods include a survey, focus groups, interviews and observation to compare the effectiveness of the American Social History Online Web site with a commercial search service. Zotero integration with the Web site will be studied with a group using American Social History Online over a semester in a course. Usability of the federated search that is integrated with American Social History Online as well as the Sakai integration will be assessed through observation.

Follow the assessment process as it develops at Deborah Holmes-Wong's poster session at the American Library Association meeting in Anaheim, CA, Saturday, June 28, 2008, 11:00 am – 12:30 pm and at the Library Assessment Conference in Seattle, where I will review all the elements that have gone into keeping the project focused on the user in a talk on August 5th. In the mean time, follow the assessment process as it unfolds on the Services Working Group public wiki. Comments and questions are welcome.

Aquifer and American Social History Online at DLF Spring Forum

2008-04-25T10:24:00.000-07:00

There was a flurry of Aquifer and American Social History Online activity at DLF Forum in Minneapolis this week. The DLF Board meeting before the Forum included an open discussion about Aquifer's future. Will DLF have a continued interest in Aquifer elements that have been well received by the digital library community, such as the MODS Guidelines and asset action work? If so, what might DLF support look like? Might some of the work be picked up in other activities and initiatives such as Bamboo while other pieces transition to other organizations for ongoing maintenance? While nothing was settled, several people stated that it would be worth keeping an existing sandbox rather than starting again from scratch. We'll also be developing an open and transparent process (but lightweight!) to encourage an organization or organizations with service capacity to take over hosting for American History Online next year.

Several people twittered about asset actions during the BoF. People are beginning to see what kinds of services can be enabled if asset actions are available and were interested in asset actions as an implementation of OAI-ORE. It might be interesting to experiment with generating asset actions as a service for data providers, making them available for harvesting so they could be deployed in the local environment as well as the aggregation.

The panel on agile development sparked some comments too. People were especially enthusiastic about the Google maps mashup on the development server that will go live in a few weeks. The Technical Advisory Group that keeps us on track congratulated the team for scoping the project in a way that allowed us to develop useful and interesting services. It was a good meeting, despite the snow flurries early in the week!

Ruby on Rails Upgrade Woes

2008-03-15T21:34:00.000-07:00

We were having mysterious seg faults with some long-running Rails tasks on our server, so I thought it might time for some software updates. Nothing too radical just Ruby 1.8.5 -> 1.8.6 and Rails 1.2.3 -> 1.2.6. In the process I discovered that a new version of RubyGems was available, so I thought it might be good to upgrade it at the same time, Gem 0.9.4 -> 1.0.1. The Ruby, Gem, and Rails upgrades went fine, but ultimately the Gem upgrade proved to be a bad idea. The upgrade seemed to have lost all my installed Gems, except for the just upgraded Rails and its dependencies. Some minor dismay, but no big deal I thought, I've got a list of the Gems we needed, so I'll end up updating all the Gems at the same time too. Everything seemed to be going OK, until I discovered that the ruby-openid Gem had a dependency on a method from the older versions, namely Kernel#require_gem was removed and replaced with just Kernel#gem. As far as I can tell this was nothing but a name change which begs the question why do this when it is almost guaranteed to break a bunch of other code. Anyway, I had to revert back to a previous version of RubyGems, 0.9.5, which seems to have fixed the problem. All in all a rather nerve wracking undertaking.

As I type this, a task which was previously throwing seg faults has been running for about 30 minutes without error, so my hope is that all this trouble has at least solved that problem.

Compiling ruby-xslt on Windows

2008-03-13T13:00:00.000-07:00

After much head bashing I've gotten the ruby-xslt gem to compile on Windows. Roughly, here are the steps I went through:

Make sure libxml-ruby is working. See my previous blog post on installing it for Windows.
'gem install ruby-xslt' this downloads the gem and attempts to compile and install. It fails, but it leaves all the files in your ruby\lib\...\gems folder. I got 0.9.5 version of ruby-xslt
Download the latest versions of libxml2, libxslt, and libiconv with all the binaries, includes, and libs for Windows. I copied the *.dll files into my windows\system32 folder.
Now the trial and error began. I had to tweak the Makefile to get the include and lib paths correct for my system.
I was using the MS Visual Studio (VS) tools NMAKE and CL. A major issue was the version of these tools. I started off with the VS 2005, but discovered that it links to a different version of the C runtime that is not compatible with the dependent DLLs, like libxml2.dll, etc. I had to install VS 6.0, and this seemed to solve the problem.
Next I needed to make some modifications to the xslt_lib.c file. It seemed to be using some non-ANSI C constructs that MS C compiler didn't like. These seemed to be C99 compliant stuff like dynamically allocated arrays, but apparently VS does not support C99.
Finally, got a compiled and linked version that works. Since by this time I didn't feel like messing with gem install scripts, I just manually moved all the files into their normal ruby directories.

xslt_lib.so => \ruby\lib\ruby\site_ruby\1.8\i386-msvcrt\xml folder
xslt.rb => \ruby\lib\ruby\site_ruby\1.8\xml

The changed files plus the pre-compiled DLL (xslt_lib.so) are available from the Aquifer SourceForge site.

Messing with Metadata

2008-02-27T16:05:00.000-08:00

The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation has provided support for DLF Aquifer to perform an inventory and evaluation of metadata tools that have been created to standardize metadata or change metadata from one format to another. We seek a metadata librarian to work part time for six months to identify and test existing tools and to evaluate how feasible it might be to combine various tools into a metadata improvement workflow. This is a great opportunity to connect with the digital library community by working with the Aquifer Metadata Working Group. Details about the projec t and the position are posted on the Digital Library Federation website. Review of applications will begin March 10, 2008.

The date normalization utility developed at the California Digital Library has already been shown to be effective in improving consistency in the way dates are represented in metadata as collections are added to American Social History Online. Improving consistency of date formats allows for services like viewing search results by date, using the Simile Timeline, to behave reliably, providing a better user experience. The goal of the Delmas funded project is to identify and evaluate other tools that could be used to improve metadata and services, whenever collections are pooled.

What is the difference between DLF Aquifer and American Social History Online?

2008-01-23T14:35:00.000-08:00

As we come to the end of the first year of the American Social History Online project within DLF Aquifer, we are thinking ahead to what it will take to sustain American Social History Online and what it will take to sustain Aquifer. While the names, DLF Aquifer and American Social History Online have often been used interchangeably, they are not really one and the same. Currently, American Social History Online is a suite of products and services for scholars, enabled through generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, emerging from a segment of the digital library community working on interoperability that is DLF Aquifer.

Over time, it is possible to imagine American Social History Online as a "stand-alone" product. Not in the sense that it would be monolithic, rather that American Social History Online components will be seen as a places scholars go to do their work rather than as a digital library interoperability experiment. DLF Aquifer, having grown and released American Social History Online could join the next round of interoperability work in the community, building on lessons learned from American Social History Online.

What organizational models would support this kind of flow? I remain quite taken by the model outlined by Raymond E. Miles, Grant Miles and Charles C. Snow in Collaborative Entrepreneurship published in 2005 by Stanford University Press. Miles and colleagues describe a small, nimble entrepreneurial organization that spins off ideas and partially developed products to individual companies that participate in the collaboration.

After reading the book, I contacted Miles by e-mail. He was gracious enough to offer some tips about the kinds of problems companies are collaborating to solve such as working together to convince upstream vendors, which they all use to comply with standards. This is certainly a problem that applies equally to libraries. Miles also noted that, "the collaborative skills we discuss imagine a deeper level of learning than occurs within most teams and intra-firm networks, and we are enjoying the challenge of trying to reach that level." Something to think about in our community.

What organizations in the current research library landscape might serve as entrepreneurial hubs and what organizations might ultimately nurture and support the products and services the innovation incubators generate? In addition to ad hoc collaborations and consortia organized by geography or class of library, examples of organizations that do sponsor or generate new development include OCLC Research, the Digital Library Federation, the Council of Library and Information Resources, NISO and Ithaka. Other initiatives with less organizational structure and a more specific focus might include the Open Archives Initiative and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. Operating collaborative initiatives from a small, nimble organization that is perceived to be neutral does have advantages in getting things done, although obtaining resources for collaboration from participants can be challenging.

There is some overlap between innovation incubators and organizations with infrastructure to nurture and support products and services including OCLC, Ithaka, individual libraries that host services for their own constituencies and consortia that run services for groups. Other initiatives such as DSpace, Fedora and LOCKSS have grown their organizations along with their technologies. Upstream suppliers of software also run systems and services, most of which are developed for a range of customers with less community participation than would be available in a true collaboration.

In the book, Miles et al. make a distinction between collaboration and cooperation,

"...we suggest that collaboration differs from... cooperation in two main ways. First, cooperation is motivated by the benefits each party expects to receive from sharing ideas, information or resources. Therefore, while cooperative behavior may be enjoyable in its own right, it is primarily extrinsically motivated. Second, because cooperative behavior ultimately involves the pursuit of self-interest, it requires periodic or even continual assessment by each participant of the amount of trust and commitment of the other party. In collaborative relationships, on the other hand, each party is as committed to the other's interests as it is to its own, and this commitment reduces the need for the continual assessment of trust and its implications for how rewards will be divided." p.40

If DLF Aquifer is a collaborative interoperability innovation generator, it could keep running under the auspices of any organization committed to leveraging digital library resources through collaboration. American Social History Online might spin-off more fully, moving to a host that is set up to run services and support business models that can sustain them, a library or a service provider. The generate and spin-off process would be a small test case for Collaborative Entrepreneurship in the research library sector.

Expanding the pool, installing new faucets

2008-01-15T11:41:00.000-08:00

Lately, my use of water metaphors to describe Aquifer progress has been judicious, but I can no longer resist. We are on the cusp of adding significant additional resources to the pool from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Columbia University, Harvard University and the California Digital Library. At the same time, the Sakai and federated search "outlets" are under development.

Watch the American Social History Online website regularly for new content and new features. Be sure to try the enhancements to search that allow search results to be re-sorted and that enable search results to be broken down by subject, topic, place, name, genre, decade, year, collection, language or media type. This is functionality our early testers said they would like to see. Let us know what you think.

We were excited to learn that Colin Koteles, a student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UIUC is doing a thesis on Existing Conformance to DLF/Aquifer MODS Implementation Guidelines. His analysis will be useful in many ways, including setting expectations for legacy collection readiness for Aquifer aggregation and areas to focus on in training development for metadata creation for shared collections.

Leveraging effort through collaboration continues to be the Aquifer MO. Collaboration among participants of course but also collaboration with complementary initiatives. The technology working group continues to monitor OAI/ORE work, looking for points of intersection and is pursuing ways to improve the way American Social History Online works with Zotero.

Much to look forward to in 2008.

New OAI Static Repository Gateway

2007-12-17T14:57:00.000-08:00

A new OAI Static Repository Gateway is now available. To any potential Aquifer collection providers who were holding out because they did not have an OAI data provider: here is your chance to participate.

If you would like to add your static repository just issue an initiate request:

http://imlsdcc.grainger.uiuc.edu/gateway.net/oai.aspx?initiate=your_static_url_goes _here

The gateway will validate your repository and email you with some confirmation instructions. For details on how initiate works refer to the OAI Static Repository specification:

http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-static-repository.htm#SR_initiating

Also for anyone who would like to host their own OAI Static Gateway Service the code is open source and can be downloaded from the UIUC OAI Metadata Harvesting Project SourceForge site. The code is available from the SourceForge SVN or as a ZIP file:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=47963&package_id=256028

New Energy, New Horizons

2007-11-19T09:45:00.000-08:00

Aquifer core team members barely took a breather after a good showing for American Social History Online at DLF Fall Forum in Philadelphia. Look for our presentations, Realizing Benefits for Scholars and the Digital Library Community through DLF Aquifer to be linked from the web version of the conference schedule soon after Thanksgiving.

Everyone seems eager to get on to the next thing, getting the SRU components in place for the Sakai and federated search integrations, working on facets, fixing bugs, adding collections, integrating asset actions more tightly, planning the assessment activities, getting the word out. If you have collections to contribute, please let us know!

We are particularly cognizant that Chick's tenure with us ends in March 2009 so we want to be sure the architecture is well established and documented by then. Based on some discussions with Erik Hatcher at the Ruby Conference he attended pre-forum, Chick plans some re-engineering tweaks before getting back to facets--but I'll let him fill in the detail on that work.

As we continue development, we also continue to look for and cultivate relationships with other projects and organizations in an effort to leverage what we are doing for scholars and in the digital library community. Our commitment to collaboration and to generating useful services has inoculated us against "not invented here" syndrome. In addition to the collection registry integration mentioned in an earlier post, the MIT Simile Timeline and a date normalization tool from the California Digital Library have also been incorporated in the portal. This adaptive re-use mixed in with terrific energy, teamwork and focus is what moves us along.

Ending the Radio silence with American Social History Online Portal release

2007-10-29T15:47:00.000-07:00

Much has been quiet on the blogging front as the core team for American Social History Online works feverishly to get the new portal ready to show at the upcoming DLF Forum in Philadelphia. The portal is looking good and you can check it out at www.dlfaquifer.org. Be warned that it is still under construction so you may experience some unpredictable results. Try it with Firefox and check out the Zotero integration. Take a look at the integration with the DLF Collections registry by clicking on the collection descriptions link and view the headings for each collection as a tag cloud by selecting "view headings". Our early evaluators asked for more visual approaches to searching and browsing, thus the SIMILEtimeline integration.

Kudos to the core team, Chick Markley, Kat Hagedorn, Susan Harum and Tom Habing for getting this done and to all the members of the Aquifer working groups who have spent countless hours organizing information for the team to use, testing and giving feedback and cheering the core team on through the development process.

New postings on the wiki

2007-10-05T17:08:00.000-07:00

Everyone,

I've gone ahead and posted the updated project plan, as well as the initial draft of the architectural spec on the wiki. The project plan needs just a smidge of work, however the spec will need some additional updates, etc.

Alison

Cyberscholarship, structures for collaboration and sustainability

2007-10-04T14:41:00.000-07:00

Reading the recently released NSF/JISC report, The future of scholarly communication just before talking with Emory colleagues Katherine Skinner and Martin Halbert about their new nonprofit, Educopia has rekindled my obsessive thinking about collaboration. Coincidentally, I started a doctoral program in human systems and organizational development at Fielding Graduate University. My first research question for the introductory doctoral competencies course takes an evolutionary psychology perspective and asks, “What hardwired human behavior influences the capacity people have for collaboration in the workplace?”

There are other factors than hardwired human behavior at play in what makes collaboration succeed or fail, of course. The NSF/JISC report mentions competition between universities for students, faculty, outside funding and exposure as an obstacle and suggests a federal level coordinating committee to foster collaboration and make the international links needed for large scale innovation. Skinner and Halbert have approached the problem from a different angle, forming a lightweight not for profit, separate from Emory University where they both work, to "hold the bag" for collaborative ventures. They don't foresee Educopia ever becoming a very large organization, rather expecting the initiatives it fosters (either spawns or hosts) to rest on their own bottoms. Educopia was purposely set up as a not for profit that is not a membership organization with the notion of keeping it as free as possible from members' agendas.

Membership notwithstanding, the Digital Library Federation, where the Aquifer project is now based spawns numerous collaborative activities, many of which have reached beyond the DLF membership. These activities rise and fall, wax and wane as issues are resolved and others come in to take their places. Some initiatives take hold and seem worth sustaining. However, the organizations that catalyze collaboration and innovation are not always prepared to transform into organizations that maintain and sustain. Because we are in a time of tremendous change in the business of scholarly communication, we have many projects and experiments that may merit test runs as production tools or sets of services.

A number of organizations and initiatives are experimenting with organizational and economic models for sustaining innovative systems and services. As we continue to develop DLF Aquifer, we are also looking at the best models for sustaining it if the services it offers to scholars are as useful as we anticipate they will be. Would an existing service provider be interested in incorporating Aquifer into its other offerings? Might Aquifer become a self-sustaining entity within Educopia or one of the participant libraries?

The NSF/JISC report mentions the continued importance of the private sector in stimulating innovation but cautions against putting all faith in entities that are motivated by profit first and foremost. It seems early days to settle on a one-size fits all path from innovation to production level support for cyberscholarship. Fostering a diverse ecology to support innovation and new service development will require collaboration, which can be fostered despite inherently competitive relationships between organizations. I was quite taken a few years ago by a little book called Collaborative entrepreneurship that models a method for competitors to collaborate to innovate. While the book was written for business, with innovation for wealth generation as the goal, the concepts could apply equally to the business of scholarship.

Getting libxml-ruby working under Windows

2007-10-02T12:54:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately the 'gem install libxml-ruby' doesn't seem to work under Windows because of missing dependencies. However, the following web site has a pre-compiled Windows binary:

http://cfis.savagexi.com/articles/2007/02/09/ruby-libxml-and-windows
http://cfis.savagexi.com/files/libxml_so.so

Following is the process I went through to get it working.

Save the libxml_so.so file (which is essentially a windows DLL) into the ruby\lib\ruby\site_ruby\1.8\i386-msvcrt\xml directory. This installs the low-level libxml library wrapper which can be accessed by

require 'xml/libxml_so'

This library defines all of the basic objects and methods needed for libxml.

However, there is also the libxml.rb file. This file can be installed to ruby\lib\ruby\1.8\xml directory. This file itself requires the 'xml/libxml_so', and it can in turn be accessed by

require 'xml/libxml'

The libxml.rb adds some aliases and convenience methods such as enumerators and array accessors [] to the API already defined by the 'xml/libxml_so' library. This is why the classes imported from the 'xml/libxml_so' behave slightly differently from the classes imported from the 'xml/libxml'. This was a bit of a stumbling point until I realized what was happening. Most libraries expect the 'xml/libxml' and not the 'xml/libxml_so'.

You can get the libxml.rb file by downloading the tarball from http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/15237/libxml-ruby-0.3.8.4.tar.gz. Or, if you have attempted the

> gem install libxml-ruby --version 0.3.8.4

Even if it fails, the libxml.rb file is in the ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\libxml-ruby-0.3.8.4\ext\xml directory.

The libxml.rb file should then be copied into the ruby\lib\ruby\1.8\xml directory.

Hopefully this will help anyone trying to get libxml working under Windows.

What does sharing publicly accessible material mean?

2007-09-14T13:31:00.000-07:00

From the time a distributed open digital library was a glimmer in the eye of Digital Library Federation leaders, the words "shared collections" rarely appear in DLF writings without being modified by "publicly accessible" or "openly accessible". We are now implementing services for shared collections and asking contributing libraries to sign a submission agreement as we include their collections in Aquifer. The submission agreement is broad and asks libraries to agree to allow both metadata and digital objects to be aggregated within Aquifer. Some libraries have pushed back on agreeing that the objects can be collected and have marked up the submission agreements, restricting aggregation to metadata only. At this point, we can accept the restricted agreements. Currently, we are only aggregating metadata.

However, it is clear that to meet our goal of making material easier to use as well as find and identify, we will need to pool or cache more than descriptive metadata--likely some kind of surrogate for the item, as defined by asset actions. Although it is unlikely that we would need to aggregate copies of the objects themselves, future plans to enable object re-use begin to call into question what exactly we mean when we talk about "publicly accessible" or "openly accessible" collections. Do we mean that anyone can view the object or that anyone can capture the object for educational use or for commercial use? Are there any restrictions on further distribution, re-use or re-mixing?

Within the Aquifer initiative, we are considering a variety of activities to help with definitions, including a discussion session at DLF Fall Forum and possible experimental mapping of the MODS accessCondition statement for some collections to Creative Commons licenses. One goal would be to confidently re-expose Aquifer collections as open educational resources. More generally, we want to enable scholars to quickly and easily determine how these digital materials can be used. We welcome ideas and suggestions for other activities and approaches we should consider.

Glossary update

2007-09-06T10:01:00.000-07:00

I've slightly modified the Aquifer glossary and added a few new terms as they relate to the ASHO website. It's posted as a background document in the Project Management area of the Aquifer wiki.

I'm still wrestling with defining the term "facet" and I'd appreciate any feedback on that one.

Please also let me know if there are other terms that you think should be included at this time.

Thanks!

Zotero Integration with the Aquifer Portal

2007-09-05T06:47:00.000-07:00

Here are some miscellaneous notes on Integrating Zotero into the Aquifer portal:

Initially what we want is for Zotero to be able to easily slurp citations from the portal. Secondly we want the digital objects themeselves to be importable into Zotero. It appears there are several options for doing this.

1) Write a custom Zotero translator just for our portal site. This seems to be the most complex solution, plus the portal web site is undergoing constant changes right now, so this doesn't seem like the best solution. There may be some benefit to eventually doing this once the portal is solidified, but probably not.

2) The path of least resistance appears to be using COinS, so this was my initial solution. COins are OpenURL Context Objects inside of HTML span tags. For example:

<span class='Z3988' title='ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Adc&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fdlfaquifer.org%3Aportal&rft_id=info:oai/oai%3Aoai.dlib.indiana.edu%3Aarchives%2Fcushman%2FP10267&rft.title=St.%20Gaudens%27%20Lincoln%20in%20Lincoln%20Park%20Chicago&rft.identifier=http%3A%2F%2Fpurl.dlib.indiana.edu%2Fiudl%2Farchives%2Fcushman%2FP10267'></span>

The COinS contains the encoded metadata for the citation. Zotero is able to parse COinS from any web page and import them as citations into its database. A disadvantage of COinS is that OpenURL Context Objects do not support the full fidelity of metadata that might be desired, for example there is no way to embed the abstract.

3) Zotero also supports unAPI. This is a simple API for discovering and retrieving digital objects associated with a given web page. It is similar to COinS in that it embeds identifiers in special HTML tags (in this case abbr tags), but this API also requires a web service component which is able to retrieve the identified digital objects in different formats. This API probably holds the most promise for the long term, but requires some additional server side coding. We might be able to directly import MODS using unAPI, but I still need to investigate this.

4) A fourth option is embedding RDF metadata directly in the web pages. This has some potential in that it might support the full richness of metadata that we desire, but in my opinion is not quite as clean or simple as either the COinS or unAPI solutions.

So, right now we have implemented COinS, but the likely long term implementation will done using unAPI.

MWG FAQ and Stylesheet Announcement

2007-08-29T06:06:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

The Value Proposition

2007-08-28T16:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Seeking additional content

2007-08-23T10:21:00.000-07:00

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.

Goings on with core team and working groups

2007-08-06T13:42:00.000-07:00

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.

First technical advisory group meeting

2007-07-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-07-19T16:03:00.001-07:00

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

2007-07-16T17:29:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-13T08:44:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-09T12:43:00.000-07:00

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.

Hearing from scholars

2007-06-26T10:30:00.000-07:00

Last week I was fortunate to be part of a panel called Collaborative Digitization Projects with Diverse Partnerships - Advantages, Challenges, Rewards at the 48th annual RBMS Preconference, From Here to Ephermerality: Fugitive Sources in Libraryies, Archives and Museums.

One of the plenary sessions at the conference featured Scholarly Uses of Ephermera, two engaging views of the kind of information that is not typically found in published material and may not be systematically collected by libraries, museums and archives.

Jon Solomon (Department of the Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) provided a dynamic and entertaining walk through eBay as a resource for his research on the 19th century novel, Ben Hur by Lew Wallace. Solomon sees Ben Hur as the first example of a work that created significant commercial spin-offs, paving the way for SpongeBob SquarePants. A cascade of collectibles discovered, not in archives, museums and libraries but on eBay proved his point. The presentation made me think about the value of including eBay as a search target along with access to our own archival material.

American Social History Online--off to a great start

2007-06-19T09:33:00.000-07:00

Core team for DLF Aquifer's American Social History Online project met in Ann Arbor last week. The techniccal team met first to settle on architecture, hardware and software needs. The rest of the team joined the meeting to map out development workflow, workflow for adding collections to American Social History Online, deliverables and dates.

We also mapped out a new communication infrastructure, including this blog, a blog aggregation at www.personalbee.com/1967 and an expanded wiki, hosted by Indiana University. Migration to the new infrastructure will take place over the next couple of weeks.

Prep for A2

2007-06-11T13:19:00.000-07:00

Good phone meeting of project managers, Susan, Barrie and Alison this morning in prep for A2 meeting. Alison and Barrie had agreed some time ago to standardize on Fast Track Scheduler for project management. Susan will get that software too.

With the new SourceForge project setup and the Confluence reconfiguration at IU about ready for unveiling, we will finally be able to migrate to the robust set of tools we've been aiming for.

Aquifer updates

2007-06-06T14:31:00.000-07:00

Trying to get the project plan in decent shape before the Ann Arbor meeting next week. Trying to gauge where the translator tools will fit in to the mix.

Will revisit the milestones area of basecamp tomorrow and update what I can.

Checking out Second Life a little. Not sure I'm a convert yet!

Created this blog for Aquifer. We can keep this private within the group, and I think there may be value with just a little oversight. Your thoughts?