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EPrints 3.0: New Capabilities for Maturing Repositories
No full textThere are now a large number of repositories in the world, contributing a significant amount of content to the world\u27s scholars and scientists. The landscape has changed since the emergence of the Open Archiving Initiative: as well as Open Access, we have seen Multimedia Scholarly Collections, Teaching, Scientific Data, Preservation, Research Management and Assessment emerging as key drivers for repository adoption and development across the world. A new version of the EPrints repository software has been developed to address the growing demands on repositories to accommodate a wider variety of digital objects and metadata, to integrate with a wider range of services and applications and to support higher deposit rates to serve the needs of the whole institution. Already described by one reviewer as ?a significant milestone towards ideal repository software?, EPrints 3.0 provides new features for well-managed, high quality, high value repositories
Technology and Culture: Integration or Disintegration?
No full textThis paper deals with the problems of weakening of human memory due to the increasing use of machine memories in many ways. It enumerates the advantages of machine memory as stated by computer people as opposed to human memory. The paper then briefly discusses the reliance on human memory in such activities as oral history and oral archive, enumerates some institutions working on Iranian history based on oral history or archive, and then presents some suggestions
An Innovative Integrated System for Editorial Processes Management: The Case of Firenze University Press
No full textFirenze University Press was born in 2003 with the mission to provide dissemination of the intellectual output of the University of Florence, Italy. Its strategy aims to enhance visibility of editorial production and to attract authors by a high-quality professional support coupled with low-cost production and the opportunity to keep copyright. Firenze University Press has also a role in innovating publishing models in the Italian academic environment and market. In the next two years, its efforts will concentrate on adopting recent scholarly communication paradigms coupled with advanced technologies, in order to offer better services to the academic community. The adoption of the Open Access model for electronic versions of published works is sustained through sales of paper copies. The implementation of an integrated system for the management of all editorial processes will allow economies of scale and a more efficient use of resources. The platform is based on a modular architecture and makes use of available open-source software, developed in advanced contexts and spread in large communities all over the world; details of the system are described in the paper. These choices enhance sustainability and allow extended customization opportunities. The exploitation of technologies, linked to the use of XML and recent protocols for document treatment and preservation and for metadata exchange, will keep Firenze University Press abreast of the most advanced trends in electronic publishing. This project provides an example of sustainable solutions for up-to-date small publishers and university presses
Ten Years of ElPub: An Analysis of its Major Trends
No full textThis paper presents partial results of a study that reflects on ten years of the annual International Conference on Electronic Publishing ? ElPub. The rich content available in the proceedings of the nine previous conferences, plus the material available through ?pre-10th conference? provided the data from which a number of aspects were looked at. This includes data on authors, papers, countries, institutions, keynotes, themes, conference organisation, conference websites, conference organisers (the so-called ElPubers!) and so forth. The analysis was based on both qualitative and quantitative (mostly) approaches. Results were, therefore, obtained through a content analysis entirely based on the proceedings (1st to 9th ElPub) and Scix?s database (10th ElPub), using Excel. Several questions have been asked on the quantitative data gathered, in order to provide a well-built picture of the conference. These questions relate to such issues as most productive authors, most actively participating countries, most influential areas of knowledge, most representative type of institutions (academic, governmental or entrepreneurial), most approached topics and so forth. In terms of qualitative data, the study looks at conference and session themes, the variety in the type of sessions, the environment within which topics presented are set in (academic, industrial, governmental, entrepreneurial) as well as its concerned focus, the field of knowledge from which keynotes and organising chairs have come from along with the focus of their speech, the influence of the host country in the number of local authors contributing to the conference at hand and the following ones, the major pattern of authorship (individual or collaborative), the composition of the Programme Committee in terms of country or continent represented (and perhaps the obvious greater presence of natives in it), field of knowledge, seniority and gender. Major conclusions will be presented at the conference. Partial results are provided
Serving Innovation in Scholarly Communication with the Open Platform ?Digital Peer Publishing"
No full textThe internet causes a continuous emergence of novel forms of scholarly communication and collaboration. Electronic publishing provides a means for representing eventual outcomes of these processes, i.e. all types of content such as papers and advanced forms of media. Electronic journals are often chosen as an adequate publishing format because they simultaneously deliver content in a well-known manner but, at the same time, allow extending traditional publishing with innovative features. The initiative Digital Peer Publishing (DiPP) provides technological, organizational and legal frameworks and tools that help to incubate and proliferate such innovative publishing projects. The hosting platform reflects principles of a Service Oriented Architecture. It combines, via Web Services, already established components such as an OAI repository (Fedora) and a Web Content Management System (Plone) with customized workflows for document processing, conversion and distribution. As an open platform it is capable of integrating external tools and services or acts itself as a service provider. It is therefore disposed for supplementing research infrastructures with electronic publishing
Towards a Union Catalogue of Encoded Manuscript Descriptions
No full textThe recent work of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) in developing an XML standard for manuscript description has provided an opportunity to explore methods of making such information more widely available through a web-based system. The emergence of native XML databases as a viable storage mechanism has made web delivery of XML-encoded material easier and more efficient.
The presentation discusses a prototype system developed as part of a research project carried out at the University of Copenhagen\u27s Arnamagn?an Institute in the summer of 2005. The Arnamagn?an Manuscript Collection, which derives its name from the Icelandic scholar and antiquarian ?rni Magn?sson (1663-1730), comprises the single most important collection of early Nordic manuscripts in the world, in all some 3000 items, the bulk of them Icelandic. The collection is divided between sister institutes in Copenhagen and Reykjav?k.
In 1997, representatives of the two Arnamagn?an institutes began looking into the possibility of reuniting the two halves of the collection virtually, in particular through the development of a searchable web-based catalogue. From January 1999 through June 2001, the Arnamagn?an Institute in Copenhagen participated in the MASTER project, an EU-funded project whose goal was to define and implement a general purpose standard for the description of manuscript materials using XML. Since then, encoding work has proceeded apace at both institutes, if at times only slowly, and there are now at least minimal records for the entire collection. There has not, however, until now, been a suitable system for searching and browsing these records, and the goal of the research project was to create a such a system.
Using PHP and the eXist native XML database, a three-tier web database application was developed. Users are provided with a facility for executing queries on the database through a web form designed to allow complex query formulation involving many different criteria. The web system is multi-lingual and places an emphasis on usability, standards-compliance and the use of open-source software.
The realisation of this resource demonstrates a method by which other institutions may undertake similar projects involving XML-encoded source material. Because the manuscript records are encoded in standardised TEI XML and have a known and consistent structure, the potential exists for integrating records from this project with those from other collections, thereby creating a larger and more complete catalogue. Indeed, this could easily be the first step toward a (virtual) union catalogue of manuscripts in European repositories. And by allowing users to combine many different search criteria, it also has the potential to change the way people do research into manuscripts. The presentation will comprise a demonstration of the web resource, including examples of XML source material, the eXist database system, application code, and the web interface
Weaving the Web of Science. HyperJournal and the Impact of the Semantic Web on Scientific Publishing
No full textIn this paper we present HyperJournal, an Open Source web application for publishing on-line Open Access scholarly journals. In the first part (sections 1, 2 and 3) we briefly describe the project and the software. In sections 4 and 5, we discuss the weaknesses of the current publishing model and the benefits deriving from the adoption of Semantic Web technologies, outlining how the Semantic Web vision can help to overcome the inefficiencies of the current model. In the last two sections (6 and 7), we present two experimental applications, developed on top of HyperJournal, with the purpose of demonstrating how the technologies can affect the daily work of scholars. The first application is a tool for graphically visualizing the network of citations existing between articles and their authors, and for performing bibliometric measurements alternative to the ISI Impact Factor. The second is a tool for automatically extracting references from non-structured textual documents, which is part of a tool-chain for the extraction of hidden semantics
NARCIS: The Gateway to Dutch Scientific Information
No full textNARCIS, National Academic Research and Collaborations Information System, is a project in the Netherlands to build a portal for research information which combines structured research information with information from OAI repositories (publication and other scientific results), websites, and news pages of research institutes. The main goal of NARCIS is to create a central place for searching all these types of data. The research data in NARCIS have been collected via the administrative processes of the different participating institutes within the work flow process. Different techniques are being used to combine the current research information and the research results. The idea for the project has been developed within the DIO-platform (National Platform Data Infrastructure Research Information) and has been realised with a subsidy of the Dutch programme DARE (Digital Academic REpositories) coordinated by SURF. SURF is the higher education and research partnership organisation for network services and information and communications technology (ICT). Partners in the NARCIS project are The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU), and the Information Centre of the Radboud University of Nijmegen (METIS). The implementing of NARCIS took one year
Introduction to Digital Libraries - Memex of the Future
No full textAfter Johann Gutenberg\u27s fabulous invention, in the middle of the 15th century, libraries, as we know them, slowly started to appear. At first as private collections but in the 17th and 18th century developing into college and university libraries, as well as libraries of scientific societies. Libraries were created to supply library patrons with relevant material, collecting and protecting books and manuscripts. The texts just started to add and add and add... During the 17th century more then one million titles were printed and in the same century, a number of scientific societies were established in Europe. In the following century they multiplied but also became more specialised. The societies adjusted to how science diverged into new aspects and new fields of academic study, each with its own agenda and methods that not necessarily were comprehensible to specialists in other branches. It?s during the expansive and experimental 18th century, that voices of complaints are raised more and more often regretting the flood of scientific literature that seemingly have no end. Laymen and scientist alike were drowning in a flood of information that just seemed impossible to handle. And that was not enough! Complaints about difficulties getting hold of primary sources and the low general quality of scientific output were not uncommon either [1]. Does it sound familiar? Since the 18th century complaints of info-overload have been legio. Contemporary scientific society tried to handle the problem by exchanging abstracts, constructing bibliographies and by publishing scholarly journals. Today the problem is more or less the same. It has not gone away. Instead we have invented new tools and technologies for dealing with the problem. With the coming of computers in the mid 20th century visionary people proposed ideas and solutions for how to solve the info overload dilemma. One of these was Vannevar Bush
Paving the Way for the Next Generation Cultural Digital Library Services: The Case Study of \u27Fortuna visiva of Pompeii\u27 within the BRICKS Project
No full textThe BRICKS EU Project (http://www.brickscommunity.org) is constructing a distributed, scalable, and safe infrastructure that will provide open-source technology for the European Digital Memory. This infrastructure, known as the ?Foundation?, has been implemented through the integration of independent software units called ?Bricks?, which are developed on the architecture nodes. A Brick is an independent building block whose functionality is made available through a formally defined interface. Bricks can be put together to provide richer functionality, and may encapsulate Content. In order to test and validate the Foundation infrastructure and demonstrate how to build value-added services overlapping such infrastructure, some significant added-value ?Pillar? applications have been developed and made available, addressing the ?Greek temple metaphor?. The intention is to use such applications for validating the Foundation services and, at the same time, those applications will constitute the basis of the future advancement of the BRICKS sustainability concept and be an attractive feature for the creation of a future Cultural Heritage Community. The ?Fortuna Visiva of Pompeii? Pillar application has been developed as a case study within the ?Archaeological site? Pillar. By using most of the Bricks created within the overall framework, demonstrates how the final users will be provided with services designed to enable them to use Pompeii\u27s Archaeological Digital Library and Geographic Information System for learning, research and cultural tourism. Final users have been largely involved from the very beginning in the design phase of the case study applications, ensuring that such application matched the initial requirements (?vertical integration?), thus contributing to bridge the gap between users\u27 community and advanced ICTs in the Cultural Heritage domain