Journal of Digital Information (Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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252 research outputs found
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Hypertext in the Open Air: A Systemless Approach to Spatial Hypertext
No full textThis paper presents a personal spatial hypertext authoring system called The Frame Stack Project, implemented as a lightweight set of classes in the generic object framework Morphic, available in the programming environment Squeak. Morphic provides a kind of off-the-shelf toolkit of objects and behaviors extremely relevant to spatial hypertext. In this project, run-time vs. authoring behavior is a state property of individual objects in a highly granular way. A key goal is the support of feral structure, in which objects can be created loose on the desktop, without assigning them any structural destination. This provides an implementation of an interactive version of the poet’s notebook. The granular approach to object authoring supports “interactive writing” in the truest sense of the word
Pliny: A model for digital support of scholarship
No full textScholars in the Humanities have been far less engaged in the adoption of digital methods to support their research than what already committed practitioners in the Digital Humanities (DH) have expected. The author of this article claims that one reason for this is that the digital technologies and tools promoted by the DH community work (including the provision of digital resources delivered to the user by the WWW) connect only with a part of what humanities scholarship is all about: reading of many documents, responding to that reading, analysing and developing a personal interpretation of these materials, and the publication of this interpretation.
Pliny is prototype software that explores what a tool would be like that supported humanities scholarship in more of its aspects. It is a desktop application that integrates with the World Wide Web, and provides functions that support all the aspects of scholarship outlined above. This article describes Pliny’s design and explains why we have designed it in the way that it is
Building the Hydra Together: Enhancing Repository Provision through Multi-Institution Collaboration
No full textIn 2008 the University of Hull, Stanford University and University of Virginia decided to collaborate with Fedora Commons (now DuraSpace) on the Hydra project. This project has sought to define and develop repository-enabled solutions for the management of multiple digital content management needs that are multi-purpose and multi-functional in such a way as to allow their use across multiple institutions. This article describes the evolution of Hydra as a project, but most importantly as a community that can sustain the outcomes from Hydra and develop them further. The data modelling and technical implementation are touched on in this context, and examples of the Hydra heads in development or production are highlighted. Finally, the benefits of working together, and having worked together, are explored as a key element in establishing a sustainable open source solution
Preserving and delivering audiovisual content integrating Fedora Commons and MediaMosa
No full textThe article describes the integrated adoption of Fedora Commons and MediaMosa for managing a digital repository. The integration was experimented along with the development of a cooperative project, Sapienza Digital Library (SDL). The functionalities of the two applications were exploited to built a weaving factory, useful for archiving, preserving and disseminating of multi-format and multi-protocol audio video contents, in different fruition contexts. The integration was unleashed by means of both repository-to-repository interaction, and mapping of video Content Model\u27s disseminators to MediaMosa\u27s Restful services. The outcomes of this integration will lead to a more flexible management of the dissemination services, as well as to economize the overproduction of different dissemination formats
Repository as a Service (RaaS)
No full textIn his oft-quoted seminal paper ‘Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure For Scholarship In The Digital Age’ Clifford Lynch (2003) described the Institutional Repository as “a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.” This paper seeks instead to define the repository service at a more primitive level, without the specialism of being an ‘Institutional Repository’, and looks at how it can viewed as providing a service within appropriate boundaries, and what that could mean for the future development of repositories, our expectations of what repositories should be, and how they could fit into the set of services required to deliver an Institutional Repository service as describe by Lynch
REDDNET and Digital Preservation in the Open Cloud: Research at Texas Tech University Libraries on Long-Term Archival Storage
No full textIn the realm of digital data, vendor-supplied cloud systems will still leave the user with responsibility for curation of digital data. Some of the very tasks users thought they were delegating to the cloud vendor may be a requirement for users after all. For example, cloud vendors most often require that users maintain archival copies. Beyond the better known vendor cloud model, we examine curation in two other models: inhouse clouds, and what we call "open" clouds—which are neither inhouse nor vendor. In open clouds, users come aboard as participants or partners—for example, by invitation. In open cloud systems users can develop their own software and data management, control access, and purchase their own hardware while running securely in the cloud environment. To do so will still require working within the rules of the cloud system, but in some open cloud systems those restrictions and limitations can be walked around easily with surprisingly little loss of freedom. It is in this context that REDDnet (Research and Education Data Depot network) is presented as the place where the Texas Tech University (TTU)) Libraries have been conducting research on long-term digital archival storage. The REDDnet network by year\u27s end will be at 1.2 petabytes (PB) with an additional 1.4 PB for a related project (Compact Muon Soleniod Heavy Ion [CMS-HI]); additionally there are over 200 TB of tape storage. These numbers exclude any disk space which TTU will be purchasing during the year. National Science Foundation (NSF) funding covering REDDnet and CMS-HI was in excess of 850,000 earmarked toward REDDnet. In the terminology we used above, REDDnet is an open cloud system that invited TTU Libraries to participate. This means that we run software which fits the REDDnet structure. We are beginning to complete the final design of our system, and starting to move into the first stages of construction. And we have made a decision to move forward and purchase one-half petabyte of disk storage in the initial phase. The concerns, deliberations and testing are presented here along with our initial approach
Cloud as Infrastructure at the Texas Digital Library
No full textIn this paper, we describe our recent work in using cloud computing to provision digital library services. We consider our original and current motivations, technical details of our implementation, the path we took, and our future work and lessons learned. We also compare our work with other digital library cloud efforts
Chempound - a Web 2.0-inspired repository for physical science data
No full textChempound is a new generation repository architecture based on RDF, semantic dictionaries and linked data. It has been developed to hold any type of chemical object expressible in CML and is exemplified by crystallographic experiments and computational chemistry calculations. In both examples, the repository can hold >50k entries which can be searched by SPARQL endpoints and pre-indexing of key fields. The Chempound architecture is general and adaptable to other fields of data-rich science
Sheer Curation of Experiments: Data, Process, Provenance
No full textThis paper describes an environment for the “sheer curation” of the experimental data of a group of researchers in the fields of biophysics and structural biology. The approach involves embedding data capture and interpretation within researchers\u27 working practices, so that it is automatic and invisible to the researcher. The environment does not capture just the individual datasets generated by an experiment, but the entire workflow that represent the “story” of the experiment, including intermediate files and provenance metadata, so as to support the verification and reproduction of published results. As the curation environment is decoupled from the researchers’ processing environment, the provenance is inferred from a variety of domain-specific contextual information, using software that implements the knowledge and expertise of the researchers. We also present an approach to publishing the data files and their provenance according to linked data principles by using OAI-ORE (Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange) and OPMV
CLIF: Moving repositories upstream in the content lifecycle
No full textThe UK JISC-funded Content Lifecycle Integration Framework (CLIF) project has explored the management of digital content throughout its lifecycle from creation through to preservation or disposal. Whilst many individual systems offer the capability of carrying out lifecycle stages to varying degrees, CLIF recognised that only by facilitating the movement of content between systems could the full lifecycle take advantage of systems specifically geared towards different stages of the digital lifecycle. The project has also placed the digital repository at the heart of this movement and has explored this through carrying out integrations between Fedora and Sakai, and Fedora and SharePoint. This article will describe these integrations in the context of lifecycle management and highlight the issues discovered in enabling the smooth movement of content as required