Journal of Digital Information (Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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252 research outputs found
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Kindura: Repository services for researchers based on hybrid clouds
No full textThe paper describes the investigations and outcomes of the JISC-funded Kindura project, which is piloting the use of hybrid cloud infrastructure to provide repository-focused services to researchers. The hybrid cloud services integrate external commercial cloud services with internal IT infrastructure, which has been adapted to provide cloud-like interfaces. The system provides services to manage and process research outputs, primarily focusing on research data. These services include both repository services, based on use of the Fedora Commons repository, as well as common services such as preservation operations that are provided by cloud compute services. Kindura is piloting the use of the DuraCloud2, open source software developed by DuraSpace, to provide a common interface to interact with cloud storage and compute providers. A storage broker integrates with DuraCloud to optimise the usage of available resources, taking into account such factors as cost, reliability, security and performance. The development is focused on the requirements of target groups of researchers
Document Viewers for Non-Born-Digital Files in DSpace
No full textAs more institutions continue to work with large and diverse type of content for their digital repositories, there is an inherent need to evaluate, prototype, and implement user-friendly websites -regardless of the digital files\u27 size, format, location or the content management system in use. This article aims to provide an overview of the need and current development of Document Viewers for digitized objects in DSpace repositories -includign a local viewer developed for an newspaper collection and four other viewers currently implemented in DSpace repositories. According to the DSpace Registry, 22% of institutions are currently storing "Images" in their repositories and 21% are using DSpace for non-traditional IR content such as: Image Repository, Subject Repository, Museum Cultural, or Learning Resources. The combination of current technologies such as Djatoka Image Server, IIPImage Server, DjVu Libre, and the Internet Archive BookReader, as well as the growing number of digital repositories hosting digitized content, suggests that the DSpace community will probably benefit with an "out-of-the-box" Document Viewer, especially one for large, high-resolution, and multi-page objects
Building a Community of Curatorial Practice at Penn State: A Case Study
No full textThe Penn State University Libraries and Information Technology Services (ITS) collaborated on the development of Curation Architecture Prototype Services (CAPS), a web application for ingest and management of digital objects. CAPS is built atop a prototype service platform providing atomistic curation functions in order to address the current and emerging requirements in the Libraries and ITS for digital curation, defined as “... maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for future and current use; specifically, the active management and appraisal of data over the entire life cycle” (Pennock, 2006)[7]. Additional key goals for CAPS were application of an agile-style methodology to the development process and an assessment of the resulting tool and stakeholders’ experience in the project. This article focuses in particular on the community-building aspects of CAPS, which emerged from a combination of agile-style approaches and our commitment to engage stakeholders actively throughout the process, from the construction of use cases, to decisions on metadata standards, to ingest and management functionalities of the tool. The ensuing community of curatorial practice effectively set the stage for the next iteration of CAPS, which will be devoted to planning and executing the development of a production-ready, enterprise-quality infrastructure to support publishing and curation services at Penn State
Beyond The Low Hanging Fruit: Data Services and Archiving at the University of New Mexico
No full textOpen data is becoming increasingly important in research. While individual researchers are slowlybecoming aware of the value, funding agencies are taking the lead by requiring data be made available, and also by requiring data management plans to ensure the data is available in a useable form. Some journals also require that data be made available. However, in most cases, “available upon request” is considered sufficient. We describe a number of historical examples of data use and discovery, then describe two current test cases at the University of New Mexico. The lessons learned suggest that an instituional data services program needs to not only facilitate fulfilling the mandates of granting agencies but to realize the true value of open data. Librarians and institutional archives should actively collaborate with their researchers. We should also work to find ways to make open data enhance a researchers career. In the long run, better quality data and metadata will result if researchers are engaged and willing participants in the dissemination of their data
DAR: A Modern Institutional Repository with a Scalability Twist
No full textThe Digital Assets Repository (DAR) is an Institutional Repository developed at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to manage the full lifecycle of a digital asset: its creation and ingestion, its metadata management, storage and archival in addition to the necessary mechanisms for publishing and dissemination. DAR was designed with a focus on integrating DAR with different sources of digital objects and metadata in addition to integration with applications built on top of the repository. As a modern repository, the system architecture demonstrates a modular design relying on components that are best of the breed, a flexible content model for digital objects based on current standards and heavily relying on RDF triples to define relations. In this paper we will demonstrate the building blocks of DAR as an example of a modern repository, discussing how the system addresses the challenges that face an institution in consolidating its assets and a focus on solving scalability issues
FISHNet: encouraging data sharing and reuse in the freshwater science community
No full textThis paper describes the FISHNet project, which developed a repository environment for the curation and sharing of data relating to freshwater science, a discipline whose research community is distributed thinly across a variety of institutions, and usually works in relative isolation as individual researchers or within small groups. As in other “small sciences”, these datasets tend to be small and “hand-crafted”, created to address particular research questions rather than with a view to reuse, so they are rarely curated effectively, and the potential for sharing and reusing them is limited. The paper addresses a variety of issues and concerns raised by freshwater researchers as regards data sharing, describes our approach to developing a repository environment that addresses these concerns, and identifies the potential impact within the research community of the system
Visualizing Research Data Records for their Better Management
No full textAs academia in general, and research funders in particular, place ever greater importance on data as an output of research, so the value of good research data management practices becomes ever more apparent. In response to this, the Innovative Design and Manufacturing Research Centre (IdMRC) at the University of Bath, UK, with funding from the JISC, ran a project to draw up a data management planning regime. In carrying out this task, the ERIM (Engineering Research Information Management) Project devised a visual method of mapping out the data records produced in the course of research, along with the associations between them. This method, called Research Activity Information Development (RAID) Modelling, is based on the Unified Modelling Language (UML) for portability. It is offered to the wider research community as an intuitive way for researchers both to keep track of their own data and to communicate this understanding to others who may wish to validate the findings or re-use the data
Repositories post 2010: embracing heterogeneity in AWE, the Academic Working Environment
No full textThe organizers of the fifth international conference on Open Repositories list nine polar dichotomies that represent “The Grand Integration Challenge” for the repository community/movement. In this paper we take up the challenge. We do so in the context of a program of work being undertaken in our institute to build infrastructure for the academy in general, working towards a modular \u27Academic Working Environment\u27 (AWE) which encompasses both teaching and learning on one hand and research on the other. Repositories and the ecosystem of services and workflows that surround them play a key role in this emerging system
Redocumenting computer-mediated activity from its traces: a model-based approach for narrative construction
No full textOur activities are becoming more and more computer-mediated. For documenting these activities, it is no longer sufficient to automatically record their traces. In this paper we introduce the redocumentation process of computer-mediated activity as a narrative construction that ties together the content of activity traces and the users’ knowledge in describing their activities in new easily exchangeable documents. We present a generic semi-automatic approach for this process, which is based on rhetorical structure theory. This approach uses formal models for process input and output, and handles the process through two main phases: an automatic phase to generate a fragmented document from traces as a first description of the activity and an interactive phase to allow the user to tailor this first description according to his particular needs and choices. We also present ActRedoc, a tool developed for text-based redocumentation, for which a first evaluation was conducted
Making the Semantic Web usable: interface principles to empower the layperson
No full textBefore the overall volume of Semantic Web data will ever approach the order of magnitude of the original Web, tools must be available that allow non-technical laypeople to readily contribute. Both the concepts and surface syntax of RDF are daunting to newcomers, and this threatens to prevent nonprofessionals from having an appreciable impact. We discuss the key features of a tool designed specifically to help novices generate semantic information, with a primary focus on instance data. This paradigm of interaction enables users to make valid RDF assertions while shielding them from many of the complexities of syntax and of resource lookup. We also present the results from a focused empirical study of the behavior of novice users as they created data with the tool. This study sheds light on the usability of specific features, and illuminates some surprising behavioral trends in Semantic Web authoring that should help guide the design of next generation of user applications