CNI: Coalition for Networked Information

Cornell’s DCAPS: A New Model for Delivery and Support of Digital Services

H. Thomas Hickerson
Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies and Special Collections
Cornell University

Digital Consulting and Production Services (DCAPS) at Cornell University provides a unified framework for developing and managing a suite of services necessary to support the life cycle of digital information. Now nearing a year in operation, DCAPS incorporates a growing array of services to provide clients with a single integrated solution to the needs of libraries, faculty, publishers, and others. Presently including digitization, metadata, technology support, electronic publishing, and copyright services, DCAPS is innovative in its managerial, operational, and marketing approaches and in its economic model. While challenging conventional patterns of library organization and financing, the model is being developed to enable further partnerships with other campus service providers.

Web Page:
http://www.library.cornell.edu/dcaps/

Presentation:
Cornell’s DCAPS (PowerPoint–large file)

Digital Library Architecture based on MPEG-21 DIDL, the OAI-PMH, and the OpenURL

Herbert Van de Sompel
Technical Staff Member, Research Library
Los Alamos National Laboratory

For the past year, the Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team of the Los Alamos National Laboratory has architectured and created an initial implementation of a repository infrastructure aimed at ingesting, storing, and disseminating a vast collection of locally held digital scholarly materials. In the architecture, complex digital objects are represented using an XML wrapper structure that is compliant with a profile of the MPEG-21 Digital Item Description Language. Each batch of ingested digital objects is stored as an individual OAI-PMH repository. An OAI-PMH Federator is introduced as a single point of access to the multitude of OAI-PMH repositories. Downstream applications can access the OAI-PMH Federator to obtain feeds of DIDL objects, and use those, for example, to build discovery services based on contained items. The OAI-PMH Federator disseminates DIDL objects either as stored or with transformations applied to them. For the dissemination of an individual item contained in a DIDL object, the architecture builds on the extended expressivness offered by the upcoming NISO OpenURL Framework Standard. Through an OpenURL Resolver, an individual item contained in a DIDL object, or a transformation thereof, can be requested. Dissemination of the item can be handled in a context-sensitive manner, e.g. different requesters can receive different disseminations of the same item.
Although the architecture has been defined for deployement within the context of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, its core properties seem to offer some potential for the creation of a context-sensitive infrastructure to access items stored in distributed digital libraries.

Web Page:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november03/bekaert/11bekaert.html

Presentation:
Using MPEG-21 DIDL, the OAI-PMH, and the OpenURL as building blocks for storing and disseminating complex digital objects

Digital Preservation and Library Periodicals Expenses: Variance between Non-Subscription Costs for Print and Electronic Formats on a Life-Cycle Basis

Eileen Gifford Fenton
Executive Director, Electronic-Archiving Initiative
JSTOR

Roger Schonfeld
Research Associate
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Recently there has been discussion on LibLicense and other e-mail lists about the economics of archiving electronic scholarly resources. Several criteria have been identified as necessary for a trusted archive, but there remains significant concern and uncertainty about how the community can fund a robust archiving solution that includes an appropriate level of redundancy. Developing such a solution is a matter of increasing urgency, as most academic libraries are undergoing a transition in their choice of format for the scholarly journals to which they subscribe. Libraries are in increasing numbers licensing electronic versions. To better understand the economic context, JSTOR’s Electronic-Archiving Initiative launched a study to examine whether non-subscription expenditures for periodicals are higher or lower in the electronic format. (Non-subscription expenditures include everything from collection development and subscription processing to cataloging, storage, and ongoing access). We collected new data on these expenditures from eleven U.S. academic libraries and utilized a life-cycle analysis to study the longer-term cost implications. This briefing reviews our methodology and findings and considers the implications for developing a sustainable solution for the archiving of electronic scholarly resources.

Presentation:
Digital Preservation and Library Periodicals Expenses

Documenting Text Encoding Practices for Academics: The Women Writers Project's TEI Encoding Guide

Julia Flanders
Associate Director, Textbase Development
Scholarly Technology Group
Brown University

The Women Writers Project (WWP) at Brown University is a text encoding research project whose publication, Women Writers Online, is a scholarly digital resource focusing on early women’s writing in English. The WWP is also one of the few small scholarly projects that has achieved financial success through digital publication. An early adopter of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, the WWP has spent over a decade researching and documenting methods of intensive text encoding to support scholarly textual research.

While most digital library projects create very lightly-encoded collections to support basic retrieval, as digital research tools and their users become more sophisticated it is becoming clear that higher-quality text encoding is essential to support the digital scholarship of the future. With substantial grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the WWP is now engaged in a two-year project to publish its documentation and methods in the form of an encoding guide for scholars and scholarly projects, to complement the TEI Guidelines and assist scholarly projects in developing encoding practices that match their own needs. This briefing will review the WWP’s progress to date and examine scholarly research needs as they affect the design of digital resources.

Web Page:
http://www.wwp.brown.edu

Presentation:
Documenting Text Encoding Practices for Academics (PowerPoint)

Documenting Text Encoding Practices for Academics: The Women Writers Project’s TEI Encoding Guide

Julia Flanders
Associate Director, Textbase Development
Scholarly Technology Group
Brown University

The Women Writers Project (WWP) at Brown University is a text encoding research project whose publication, Women Writers Online, is a scholarly digital resource focusing on early women’s writing in English. The WWP is also one of the few small scholarly projects that has achieved financial success through digital publication. An early adopter of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, the WWP has spent over a decade researching and documenting methods of intensive text encoding to support scholarly textual research.

While most digital library projects create very lightly-encoded collections to support basic retrieval, as digital research tools and their users become more sophisticated it is becoming clear that higher-quality text encoding is essential to support the digital scholarship of the future. With substantial grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the WWP is now engaged in a two-year project to publish its documentation and methods in the form of an encoding guide for scholars and scholarly projects, to complement the TEI Guidelines and assist scholarly projects in developing encoding practices that match their own needs. This briefing will review the WWP’s progress to date and examine scholarly research needs as they affect the design of digital resources.

Web Page:
http://www.wwp.brown.edu

Presentation:
Documenting Text Encoding Practices for Academics (PowerPoint)

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