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The Open URL Standard

December 2, 2002

Tony Hammond
Architect, Linking & Structures
Advanced Technology Group
Elsevier Science

Herbert Van de Sompel
Digital Library Research & Prototyping
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Eric Van de Velde
Director of Library Information Technology
California Institute of Technology

OpenURL is an enabling technology to provide services pertaining to resources. With OpenURLs, it becomes possible to provide links that are:

  • Multi-valued: link a single referenced resource to many services
  • Context-sensitive: links that adapt to the “context” in which they are traversed

The extensibility mechanisms of Version 1.0 OpenURL extend the reach of OpenURL beyond the scholarly-information community to any other networked-information community. Implementing communities will have at their disposal a variety of methods to introduce new metadata formats, and new identifier name spaces, appropriate to their specific application domain. As a result, Version 1.0 OpenURL provides a rich information structure for invoking context-sensitive services.

In this session, Herbert Van de Sompel and Tony Hammond will introduce the key concepts of the emerging OpenURL Standard Version 1.0. Eric Van de Velde will discuss the Committee’s plans for a trial of Version 1.0 with selected parties from the scholarly community.

Web Links:
OpenURL

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2002 Project Briefings, Metadata, Standards
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An Overview of the Internet Scout Project and the Scout Portal Toolkit

December 2, 2002

Edward Almasy
Technical Director
Internet Scout Project

Rachael Bower
Director
Internet Scout Project

The Internet Scout Project, located at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, focuses on developing better tools and services for finding, filtering and presenting online information and metadata. This presentation will provide a brief overview of current work and a more in-depth look at The Scout Portal Toolkit (SPT) project, which was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. SPT is a near-turnkey software package that allows an organization, with a minimum of technical expertise and resources, to set up a digital library collection. Version 1.0 of the SPT software was released in October 2002.

Web Links:
The Internet Scout Project
The Scout Portal Toolkit
Handout:
The Scout Portal Toolkit (PDF file)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2002 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Metadata
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A Resource Discovery Service for the Library of Texas: Requirements, Architecture, and Interoperability Testing

December 2, 2002

William E. Moen
Texas Center for Digital Knowledge
University of North Texas

Kathleen R. Murray
Texas Center for Digital Knowledge
University of North Texas

In the past several years, a number of states have initiated virtual library projects to enhance access to resources available through libraries and other information resource providers. Typically the resulting virtual library is deployed as a Web-based portal through which users may identify and access selected resources. Recent work at the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge (TxCDK) at the University of North Texas is demonstrating how attention to requirements, standards, architecture, and interoperability testing can provide the foundation for an extensible, services-oriented virtual library.

Handout:
A Resource Discovery Service for the Library of Texas
(MS Word document)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2002 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Standards
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Security Issues for Licensed Resources

December 2, 2002

Kevin Guthrie
President
JSTOR

Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information

CNI members include many institutions that license a wide array of content for their communities, and many of our members also produce licensed content. Recently we are seeing the emergence of complex new threats to the security of licensed content on the network. Institutions will need to consider new measures to honor their responsibility to thwart unauthorized access and large scale copying of licensed resources and develop new strategies in conjunction with resource suppliers. This session will describe the current situation and provide a discussion forum to shape community responses.

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2002 Project Briefings, Intellectual Property, Scholarly Communication
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The Shibboleth Approach to Web Access for Digital Content Becomes a Reality

December 2, 2002

David Millman
Director, Research & Development, Academic Information Systems
Columbia University

Shibboleth, a project of Internet2/MACE, is a set of architectures, policy structures, practical technologies, and an open source implementation to support inter-institutional sharing of Web resources subject to access controls. Production code was released in the fall of 2002 as a component of the NSF Middleware Initiative, and the first deployments included higher education content providers. This session will feature the experiences of an early adopter and Shibboleth demonstrations.

Web Links:
Shibboleth Project

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2002 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval, Intellectual Property
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Specialized OAI Service Providers: Sheet Music Harvester–A Work in Progress

December 2, 2002

Kristine Brancolini
Director, Digital Library Program
Indiana University

Stephen Davison
Music Librarian, Special Collections
University of California, Los Angeles

Curtis Fornadley
Digital Library Lead Programmer
University of California, Los Angeles

Cynthia Requardt
Kurrelmeyer Curator of Special Collections
Johns Hopkins University

Stpehen H. Schwartz
Head, Library Information Systems/Development
University of California, Los Angeles

To move beyond basic OAI services requires community agreement on potential user needs, data standards, special software capabilities, and data conversion and mapping strategies to support a useful Service Provider. This project tests collaboration in designing a specialized OAI Service for Sheet Music. It will also test the value of such a service as a research tool for music and other communities.

Sheet music is a rich resource for scholars in a number of disciplines, but unlocking its potential has proved a daunting task for the custodians of these collections. Resources have been expended to provide access to sheet music on a local level, and it is the interoperability with this existing metadata, as well as new data with digital images linked, that this project addresses. Other questions addressed include:

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2002 Project Briefings, Metadata, Standards
Tagged With: ,

Today’s Web for Tomorrow’s Generation: Web Preservation at the Library of Congress

December 2, 2002

Gina Jones
Digital Conversion Specialist
Library of Congress

An ever-increasing amount of the world’s cultural and intellectual output is presently created in digital formats and does not exist in any physical form. Such materials are colloquially described as “born digital.” This born digital realm includes open access materials on the World Wide Web. The MINERVA Web Preservation Project was established to initiate a broad program to collect and preserve digital primary source materials. A multi-disciplinary team of Library staff representing cataloging, legal, public services, and technology services is studying methods to evaluate, select, collect, catalog, provide access to, and preserve these materials for future generations of researchers. This session will report on the Library of Congress Web harvesting activities, describing experiences to date selecting, capturing, and providing access to topic-based collections, including: the U.S. Presidential Election 2000; September 11, 2001; the 2002 Olympics; and the 2002 Election.

Web Links:
MINERVA

Handout:
Today’s Web for Tomorrow’s Generation: Web Preservation at the Library of Congress
(MS Word document)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2002 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation
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Transformative Assessment in the Educational Process

December 2, 2002

Colleen Carmean
Director of Consulting Services for Information Technology
Arizona State University West and EDUCAUSE NLII Fellow

Joan Lippincott
Associate Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information

Robin Zuniga
Associate Director, The Flashlight Program
The TLT Group

Many institutions seek to collect data on the impact that their large investments in information technology have made on their campuses. The Transformative Assessment Project (TAP) provides a framework for institutions to develop assessment strategies tailored to their institutional missions and programs. The project encourages institutional teams who are assessing the impact of technology on teaching and learning to align their assessment activities with institutional goals. Through an in-person focus session and online course/community, institutions participated in the first offering of TAP in the spring of 2002.

The project was developed as a collaborative initiative of EDUCAUSE’s National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII), CNI, and the Flashlight Program of the TLT Group. This session will include a discussion of the concept of transformative assesment, a description of the project, and a report on one campus’s implementation of TAP.

Web Links:
Transformative Assessment Project

PowerPoint Presentations:
Transformative Assessment at ASU West

Colleen Carmean
Transformative Assessment
Joan Lippincott

Filed Under: Assessment, CNI Fall 2002 Project Briefings
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The UT Digital Knowledge Gateway

December 1, 2002

Mark McFarland
Assistant Director, University Libraries
The University of Texas at Austin

Daniel A. Updegrove
Vice President for Information Technology
The University of Texas at Austin

In March 2002, University of Texas President Larry Faulkner announced that “the University is setting the goal of providing a digital Knowledge Gateway to all Texans. We will provide access for every citizen, via a personalized Internet window, into the resources of our libraries, collections, museums, and much more. Our target is to establish an online service that exceeds anything else of its kind, permitting Texans everywhere to access, use, and benefit from the core materials at the heart of our University. The great treasures of this institution belong to all citizens of the state.”

This session provides a progress report on this ambitious, multi-year effort.

Web Links:
University of Texas Digital Knowledge Gateway

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2002 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries
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A Web Service for Transforming Metadata Schemas

December 1, 2002

Carol Jean Godby
Consulting Research Scientist
Online Computer Library Center, Inc.

OCLC is interested in facilitating the exchange of information in metadata records that have been encoded in formats commonly used in digital library projects, including MARC, Dublin Core, LOM and EAD. The outcome will be a Web service that permits a software client to submit a record in one format and request a full or partial translation in another format. The service derives its power from metadata schemas and crosswalks that have been submitted to our intake function by experts in standards communities. It can evolve into a utility for discovering relationships among metadata elements that grows more valuable as more crosswalks are formalized and absorbed by our system.

Handout:
A Web Service for Transforming Metadata Schemas (MS Word document)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2002 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Metadata
Tagged With: ,