Ex Libris (http://www.exlibrisgroup.com) is a leading provider of automation solutions for academic, national, and research libraries. Offering the only comprehensive product suite for electronic, digital, and print materials, Ex Libris provides efficient, user-friendly products that serve the needs of libraries today and will enable them to transition into the future. Ex Libris maintains an impressive customer base consisting of thousands of sites in more than 70 countries on six continents. Dynamic candidates with relevant education, experience, and technical skills are invited to join our team of over 400 professionals in the fields of programming, information sciences, support, implementation, sales, marketing and administration at 8 offices worldwide.

To support our growing customer base we are seeking enthusiastic and motivated individuals to extend our European Professional Services Team and fill the following positions:

Implementation and Training Consultant (m/f)

The role:

You will be a member of our European project implementation team and will take specific responsibilities and tasks during the implementation phase of our customer projects. Depending on the project scope you will provide e.g. system configuration, trainings, workshops, customer support, system analysis or conversion specification. You will also be involved in creating and maintaining training materials and implementation documentation.

Trainings and workshops will give you the opportunity to visit customer sites which are located in various European countries so travel will be required. Project languages are French and English.

What we are looking for:

highly developed communication skills

excellent analytical skills and enthusiasm for technical work and solution finding

talents in carrying out onsite or web based training sessions and presentations

team player with the ability to work independently with only little supervision

fluent French and English language skills

familiarity with industry standards such as UNIMARC, MARC21, Dublin Core, Z39.50, OAI

MS office skills

the following are desirable:

o Knowledge of HTML, XML, XSL

o Further language skills

o Experience with UNIX/LINUX and databases

Experience required:

Degree in Library or Information Science or equivalent work experience

At least 2 years of library (or related) experience

Experience in training delivery is appreciated

What we are offering:

Interesting and challenging position in information industry

Wide ranging responsibilities and challenging tasks with scope for personal development

Committed colleagues in an enthusiastic team

Intensive introduction and initial training

International work environment

The position is full time and based at our Paris office (France)

CVs and covering letters should be sent by traditional mail, fax or e-mail to

Ex Libris (Deutschland) GmbH

Ms Bianca Jarske

Gasstrasse 18, Haus 2

22761 Hamburg

Germany

Phone: +49 / (0)40 / 89 809 0

Email: bianca.jarske@exlibrisgroup.com

Sunt o fetita tunata si bine dotata….te uiti la mine vrei….pusy pusy hei

“Neagra mami ca un cas de caldare te frecasi”

Cine cine oare cine arata mai bine ca mine…..cu picioare lungi si buze umfalte

Université de Versailles St Quentin en Yveline

Recrutement d’un(e) chargé(e) de système d’information documentaire.

L’agent est adjoint de la responsable du pôle du système d’information documentaire et de l’édition numérique au sein du Service Commun de la Documentation de l’université de Versailles Saint-Quentin : il participe, en relation directe avec la responsable du pôle, à la mise en place des outils informatiques du SCD et assure l’administration du système d’information documentaire. Il travaillera en étroite collaboration avec la Direction des Systèmes informatiques.

Poste à pourvoir à compter du 1er/12/2009, CDD d’un an, 37h30 par semaine.

Service Commun de la Documentation,

St-Quentin-en-Yvelines.

Présentation

Les missions que vous aurez à mener à bien sont :

Système d’information documentaire :

Suivi des fonctionnalités du nouveau système d’information,

Intégration de ces fonctionnalités dans un processus de travail existant,

Administration du système d’information documentaire (configuration, paramétrage, suivi de cohérence et de qualité des bases de données documentaires et bibliographiques, formation et assistance aux usagers…),

Plateforme de dépôt institutionnel (projet ORI-OAI) :

Participation à la définition des fonctionnalités et workflows de la plateforme de dépôt institutionnel,

Participation à l’administration de cette plateforme (validation des métadonnées de gestion, gestion des habilitations,…),

Participation à l’élaboration des modalités de stockage, référencement et accessibilité des textes intégraux des documents acquis ou produits par l’université sous forme électronique,

Assistance à l’utilisation de cette plateforme.

Gestion des outils de diffusion de l’information, dont le site web du SCD, évaluation et suivi de l’évolution de ces outils.

Veille technologique sur les méthodes et outils adaptés aux besoins de l’information scientifique et technique : technologies émergentes, suivi d’évolution de produits, … (administration de l’outil ad hoc).

Prise en charge de la gestion et des évolutions du parc informatique (équipement matériels et logiciels) du SCD.

A l’horizon 2010, participation au projet de ré informatisation (changement de SIGB).

Activités associées :

Mise en place des indicateurs d’évaluation et d’usage du système d’information documentaire,

Organisation de formations des personnels aux nouveaux outils et nouvelles procédures,

Accompagnement de l’évolution des pratiques professionnelles.

Compétences souhaitées :

Formation initiale DUT, Licence ou Master,

Connaissance du traitement de l’information et des systèmes d’information, de la technologie de l’Internet, de la publication électronique,

Intérêt pour les langages informatiques liés au web, aux bases de données et aux serveurs,

Connaissance des concepts du web sémantique,

Intérêt pour les logiciels libres,

Intérêt pour le développement web (possibilité de formation),

Capacité à travailler en équipe, mais aussi en interaction avec les autres services de l’université et sens du relationnel.

Rémunération : 2042.57 € brut mensuel primes incluses.

Les candidatures sont à adresser :

Université de Versailles – St Quentin en Yvelines

DRH – Samuel HAYE

55, Avenue de Paris – 78035 Versailles cedex

Recrutement@uvsq.fr

Source : Univ. de Versailles

During the week of October 13, 2009, a very rewarding informal meeting of digital law library developers, administrators, and researchers took place at Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute. The gathering was graciously hosted by Dr. Tom Bruce. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a number of issues respecting free access to law, legal information institutes, and digital law libraries. Photos of the meeting are available here and here. Among the participants were:

• Professor Daniel Poulin, Director of CANLII & LexUM Laboratory;
• Marc-André Morissette, Chief Analyst at LexUM Laboratory;
• Pierre-Paul Lemyre, Head of Products and Business Development at LexUM Laboratory and a Ph.D. student at University of Montreal Faculté de Droit, studying the effects on legal systems of free access to law & legal information institutes;
• Daniel Shane, Software Developer at LexUM Laboratory;
• Elmer Masters, Director of Internet Development at CALI;
• John Joergensen, Reference & Circulation Librarian at the Rutgers University Camden Law Library, and developer of the Rutgers University Camden Law Library Digital Collections;
• Stuart Sierra, Assistant Director of the Program on Law & Technology at Columbia Law School and developer of AltLaw: The Free Legal Search Engine; and
• Sara Frug, Brian Hughes, Daniel Nagy, & David Shetland of Cornell’s Legal Information Institute.

On October 14-15, the following topics were discussed:

• Professor Poulin, Marc-André Morissette, Pierre-Paul Lemyre, & Daniel Shane discussed information acquisitions, text-processing methods, the treatment of images in court decisions, and administrative matters, respecting CANLII;
• Dr. Bruce, Daniel Nagy, & Sara Frug of Cornell’s LII, & Elmer Masters of CALI discussed their use of Drupal to present a variety of types of content, their text processing methods, and the costs and benefits of cloud computing;
• Dr. Bruce, Daniel Nagy, Elmer Masters, and Tim Stanley & Nicolas Moline of Justia discussed using OpenID & OAuth to enable streamlined authentication & access to online legal resources;
• Dr. Bruce, Professor Poulin, and others discussed various methods of legal metadata standardization, including encouraging courts, legislatures, and administrative agencies to adopt publishing standards, and the development and promotion of OAI4Courts as a means of standardizing metadata for court documents, to enable sharing and aggregation of such metadata in open repositories;
• Stuart Sierra described his methods for automated acquisition of US Federal Court decisions, as well as his text processing and data management techniques at AltLaw;
• John Joergensen described his methods for automated acquisition of court decisions, text processing, procedures for digitizing print and microfiche legal documents, and digital preservation techniques, at the Rutgers University Camden Law Library’s digital collections.

On October 16, the following topics were discussed:

• Prof. Poulin discussed the former challenges of adding secondary sources to CANLII, the new possibilities of adding commentary and user generated content to CANLII, and his desire that CANLII be a generative system, in Professor Jonathan Zittrain’s sense of that term in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It;
• Dr. Bruce, Prof. Poulin, Elmer Masters, and all the participants discussed their plans for sustaining innovation in the coming years at LII, CANLII, & CALI, and for developing business models and strategies;
• Dr. Bruce emphasized the need to develop standards to enable sharing of metadata and legal information objects among digital repositories, and to educate reporters of decisions about the need to enable information sharing in legal digital publishing;
• The LexUM team discussed two different approaches to taxonomies that they have tested respecting CANLII;
• Pierre-Paul Lemyre demonstrated several LexUM Web 2.0 projects, including Le Code civil du Quebéc annoté, which allows users to add annotations, and the CANLEX set of APIs for CANLII, including the RefLex API, which hotlinks legal citations in a user’s document. Prof. Poulin & Pierre-Paul also discussed Lexacto, a search engine enabling practitioners to index and retrieve content on particular legal topics, whether that content is located within or outside their firm. Some of this new technology will be tested at the Supreme Court of Canada;
• Marc-André Morissette demonstrated a drop-down table of contents-based document management system for legislative materials, called LexView, with the Canadian Criminal Code as a prototype. He said that similar technology would be applied to the Nova Scotia Annotated Civil Procedure Rules and continuing legal education materials for British Columbia;
• Dr. Bruce, Elmer Masters, John Joergensen, and the Cornell LII team discussed implementation of OpenID, the possible sharing of taxonomies, and possible collaboration respecting data for updating the U.S. Code;
• In a wrap-up discussion, each participant identified the most valuable information they acquired during the meeting. John Joergensen initiated a new discussion about the need for the legal information institutes to consider new issues in light of the institutes’ maturation and acceptance as key actors in the legal information infrastructure, and underscored digital preservation as one such issue. Dr. Bruce & Prof. Poulin reflected on their careers leading legal information institutes and how their personal roles had changed as their organizations had grown and matured.
• The participants agreed to meet again next autumn, either in Ithaca or in Montreal. Everyone thanked Dr. Bruce and the Cornell LII team for their gracious hospitality.

Many thanks to Dr. Bruce & his team for their gracious hospitality and stimulating discussion.

L’Ircam propose un CDD pour effectuer la migration de son catalogue bibliothéconomique, cœur de son dispositif de bibliothèque physique et numérique, inscrit dans le Portail de la musique contemporaine et partenaire d’Europeana.

DESCRIPTION DU POSTE

La personne (h/f) recrutée sur ce poste effectuera une étude du paramétrage et des fonctionnalités existantes et souhaitées, puis la migration des contenus (contenus de la base Loris) et des interfaces (de catalogage, de circulation, de consultation et de moisson) vers le nouveau logiciel (Flora). Elle bénéficiera d’une formation sur les deux logiciels (source et cible) et sur les outils de migration.

PROFIL RECHERCHÉ

Connaissances requises

bonne connaissance d’un logiciel bibliothéconomique (de préférence : Loris et/ou Flora).

formats bibliothéconomiques (Unimarc en particulier).

Connaissances souhaitées

programmation Web (XML, PHP, MySQL, Javascript).

protocoles OAI, RSS.

formats Dublin Core, MODS.

Capacités

autonome, capable d’apprendre rapidement.

rigoureux, structuré et méthodique.

aisance relationnelle et capacité de travail en équipe.

CANDIDATURE

Prière d’envoyer une lettre de motivation et un CV détaillant le niveau d’expérience/expertise dans les domaines mentionnés ci-dessus (ainsi que toute autre information pertinente) à l’adresse électronique indiquée ci-contre : Michel.Fingerhut@ircam.fr

Référence : Flora

TYPE DE CONTRAT

Durée (CDD) : 10-12 mois (selon expérience et compétences)

Disponibilité : immédiate

Lieu de travail : Paris centre.

Michel Fingerhut

Ircam – Centre Pompidou

Directeur de la Médiathèque

1, place Igor-Stravinski

75004 Paris

Bei meiner zweiten Vorstellung geht es um Opus Anima Investigation, die Pocket-RPG auskopplung zu Opus Anima.

Opus Anima Investigation könnt ihr beim Roland oder direkt von Prometheus Games erstehen.

Omni's new ex-Air France/Air Holland/Zoom Boeing 767-328 is now registered N225LF (msn 27136) at Miami in the new livery. It should become N342AX. Copyright Photo: Wade DeNero.

Omni Air International-OAI (Tulsa) is adding Boeing 767-300 ERs to its fleet. It is also taking the opportunity to update its livery.

If you are not satisfied with the simple OAI provider service that Fedora provides by default, you need to move to new provider service based on ‘PROAI’.

To upgrade your Fedora repository with the new OAI Provider service based on PROAI – follow the steps below:

Pre-requisites

1. Make sure you are running your fedora repository with resource index ‘ON’ and
2. Make sure your fedora configuration file ‘fedora.fcfg’ contains – “retainPIDs” element with value=”demo”. This is so you can try out the demo files that comes with ‘oaiprovider.war’ webapp.

Main Tasks:

1) Download a copy of the oai provider service webapp – named ‘oaiprovider.war’ from Fedora download website (Note: Browse for all packages and look under Version 3.0 category). Also, download the oaiprovider source directory.
2) Deploy the oaiprovider.war on your web server. Once its deployed, look for the configuration file that controls various aspects of PROAI inside the ‘oaiprovider’ webapp folder. The configuration file should be placed in  webapps/oaiprovider/WEB-INF/classes/ and is named proai.properties.

3) Exploring the proai.properties file is very simple, most elements are self explanatory. The items that you need to change for now to get the oai provider service talking to your fedora repository are:

a) proai.db.url = jdbc:mysql://localhost/proai?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8&autoReconnect=true   — change this to the database you are using. I have set it up to use mysql as you can see.

b) proai.db.driverClassName = com.mysql.jdbc.Driver — again, change this for your database

c) proai.db.username = proai and proai.db.password = proai —- you have to add a user proai with appropriate permission within your database, update these accordingly

d) com.mysql.jdbc.Driver.ddlConverter = proai.util.MySQLDDLConverter — select appropriate ddlConverter based on your database and comment others

e) com.mysql.jdbc.Driver.backslashIsEscape = true   — change this to suit your database config

f) driver.fedora.baseURL = http://localhost:8080/fedora/ — change this to your repository url

g) driver.fedora.user = fedoraAdmin

h) driver.fedora.pass = fedoraAdmin  — change this to your repository password

4) Save the changes and restart your webserver

Test:

1) Unzip the oaiprovider source directory we downloaded earlier

2) Start the fedora-admin GUI client or use the command line utility to ingest demo objects from the [oaiprovider-src]/src/demo and [oaiprovider-src]/src/test/foxml directories

3) Now go to

http://yourhost:yourport/fedora/oai?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc or

http://yourhost:yourport/fedora/oai?verb=Identify or

http://yourhost:yourport/fedora/oai?verb=ListMetadataFormats or

http://yourhost:yourport/fedora/oai?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=test_format [if you ingested the demo objects you can query test_format metadata prefix.

Change the yourhost and yourport with your repository details. If everything went as planned, you should see a list of all records you just ingested.

4) Hurray ! You have successfully managed to get OAI provider service working with your Fedora repository.

In my last post I suggested that Repository News would be mothballed now that the final report has been submitted (still not published but soon!). However, our JISC funding was for a start-up project and we are still very much nurturing our neonate repository which, like a human infant, still has a lot of growing up to do.  I enjoy blogging and it seems rather artificial to start again so, like an infuriating parent sending a round-robin at Christmas, here is my first update of the new era.

All in all the little fella is doing very well though we were very disappointed to miss out on enhancement funding from uncle JISC – bid feedback was positive and stressed just how competitive the call had been. All is not lost, however, and we’ve just learned of institutional success in the recent JISC call for the Open Educational Resources programme; Unicycle will be underway very soon and will necessarily use our intraLibrary repository which should put us in a very good position with respect to JORUM – also based on intraLibrary of course – and I’ve already implemented the JORUM metadata template (with permission). The repository will also be an integral component of the PC3 project funded under the e-Learning Capital programme which is already underway.  In addition,  we intend to submit a bid for the rapid innovation call – the #jiscri projects are relatively small scale timetabled for just 6 months, but it would be very nice to get one; the deadline is Wednesday so it’s fingers crossed (again!).  Finally, there may also be a project in the pipeline with the NHS looking at deposit into multiple repositories using SWORD.

The difficulty is knowing where to start!  In terms of OA research the search interface still needs a lot of work to integrate advanced search; we also need to ensure that we are properly indexed by Google and I’m ashamed to say that I am yet to register with the Open Archives Initiative. Then there is the small matter of advocacy and full text content.  We also need to integrate with SFX, our URL resolver.

I want to look at using the repository for the CLA digitisation service emulating what Keele are doing with intraLibrary and a functioning PowerLink to the VLE would be nice, something like MrCute2 and more work around the conceptual PERSoNA outputs.

We have a meeting next week to discuss priorities and project management activities over the coming months which promises to be a headache inducing affair.

Massilia Sound System un groupe qui a bercé mon adolescence vient une fois de plus par l’intermédiaire de Gari Greu de confirmer son statuts “Militant pour toujours” en dénonçant la loi HADOPI et en expliquant que la seule raison  a cette loi est de protéger les Majors et en aucun cas les artistes.

Ils mettent toujours autant le ÒAI et c’est ca qui est bon !!!!!!!!

Allez a leurs concerts, supportez ces artistes/artisans du bon son ça vos le detour !

J’en profite pour faire un BIGUP à l’eternel  Lux B qui nous a quitté  …AIOLIIII!

Sources :

Interview a lire sur le site de la Provence

le site du groupe

La Quadrature du Net (site d’information sur la realité d’HADOPI)

SHERPA is an unique body that holds tremendous projects and hosted by University of Nottingham, is developing open-access institutional repositories in universities in U.K to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research. It is investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication.

DOAR – Directory of Open Access Repositories (managed by University of Nottingham). The Directory of Open Access Repositories – OpenDOAR has over 1200 listings a SHERPA project, runs a full-text search service which searches all of the quality-assessed repositories that it lists in the OpenDOAR Directory. RoMEO , JULIET, SHERPA Search are the other services of SHERPA.

JULIET complements the RoMEO service provided by SHERPA for authors and repository administrators, which lists summaries of publishers’ copyright transfer agreements as they relate to archiving. Further information on Open Access is available for authors, including links to contacts and repositories which may be able to take eprints to fulfil funders’ requirements and recommendations. 

RoMEO provides the summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher’s copyright transfer agreement.

JULIET provides a summary of policies given by various research funders as part of their grant awards. Information about JULIET,  and the breakdown of funders’ policies is mentioned in the key.

CURL is the funding agency for JULIET development.

SHERPA Search SHERPA presents a trial search service for the full-text of material held in UK open access repositories, as listed in OpenDOAR. This has been made possible through the recent launch by Google of its Custom Search Engine, which allows SHERPA to define a search service based on all UK repository contents.

All the repositories and service providers of SHERPA could be found at the link http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/repositories/.

Various projects undertaken by SHERPA for academic and research repositories and SHERPA Resources could be viewd at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ 

Open Access Journals: Other partner of OpenDOAR, Lund University, run the  Directory of Open Access Journals - DOAJ, which is the standard directory in this area, listing over 2000 peer-reviewed open access journals. The DOAJ also facilitates access to a growing number of individual articles from some of these journals.

The Open J-Gate indexes articles from 3000+ academic, research and industry journals. More than 1500 of them are peer-reviewed scholarly journals.

Various other Organizations and initiatives linked to SHERPA are mentioned below:

CURL (Consortium of Research Libraries) a groupe of the UK’s major research libraries which initiated the SHERPA project, eprints.org that provides free software “dedicated to the freeing of the refereed research literature online through author/institution self-archiving, Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model, “a conceptual framework for an archival system dedicated to preserving and maintaining access to digital information over the long term”, Open Archives Initiative (OAI), “develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content”, OSI The Open Society Institute (OSI), is a private grantmaking foundation, promoting democratic governance, human rights, and economic, legal, and social reform. The OSI is active in the area of Open Access to information and funds conferences, initiatives and projects in the area, RIN The Research Information Network gives strategic leadership in the UK to establish a national framework for research information provision, and to generate effective and sustainable arrangements for meeting the information needs of the professional research community, SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), “an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations built as a constructive response to market dysfunctions in the scholarly communication system.”

JISC, SPARC Europe, 7 Capacities, RLUK (Research Libraries U.K), WELLCOME Trust are the main funding agencies for SHERPA Projects.

Award Winning SHERPA brought revolution in Open Access.

ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repository) contains a total of 1226 Repositories according to the Geographical Region (Country), the Content type and System software are also mentioned.

Let us hope such Repository projects  and developements be carried out in all the Universities of Developing Countries.

Digital Libraries are all about Metadata.  You can think of metadata fields as the parts that should be filled out for each record in an electronic card catalog.  The thing about metadata though is that it is a nebulous concept that would be difficult to share without a bit of additional structure.

To provide this structure, multiple organizations have issued sets of metadata standards to help organizations create and share records.

Primary among these (in educational circles) is the Dublin Core standard issued by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DC and DCMI respectively).  DC defines a standard set of fields to describe objects.  While there are other formats that also do this (IEEE’s Learning Object Metadata for one), DC is by far the most widely implemented.

One of the reasons DC is so widely implemented is that it is very easy.  There are only a few core fields that should be filled in (Title, Description, Creator, etc.), although there are many optional fields to help describe resources in depth.  Additionally, there is no hierarchy in the XML (for base fields), which simplifies matters for the non-technical.  Finally, it is extensible.  This is important so that the institutions with technical expertise can customize it with qualified vocabularies and specialized fields to fit their needs.

Another reason DC is so widely implemented is that it is the only format required by repositories supporting the Open Access Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), most commonly referred to as OAI.  As nearly all archives interested in sharing metadata records support this standard, DC has become the lingua franca among educational digital libraries.

Here is an example of 4 fields from a very simple DC record:

  <dc:title>The Oklahoma Daily</dc:title>
  <dc:description>OU's campus newspaper.</dc:description>
  <dc:publisher>University of Oklahoma</dc:publisher>
  <dc:identifier>http://oudaily.com/</dc:identifier>

If you ignore the dc: stuff, you’ll see that it’s just a way of storing the title, description, publisher, and location of the object. By defining these things in predictable ways, computers can automate the exchange of these records.

When you’re talking about exchanging millions of records, like the NSDL does, that becomes quite important.

Next time I’ll talk a bit more about controlled vocabularies and qualified metadata standards.

Forwarding on behalf of Carl Lagoze & Herbert Van de Sompel:

Over the past eighteen months the Open Archives Initiative
(OAI), in a project called Object Reuse
and Exchange (OAI-ORE), has gathered
international experts from the publishing, web, library, and eScience
community to develop standards for the identification and description of
aggregations of online information resources. These aggregations,
sometimes called compound digital objects, may combine distributed
resources with multiple media types including text, images, data, and
video. The goal of these standards is to expose the rich content in
these aggregations to applications that support authoring, deposit,
exchange, visualization, reuse, and preservation. Although a motivating
use case for the work is the changing nature of scholarship and
scholarly communication, and the need for cyberinfrastructure to support
that scholarship, the intent of the effort is to develop standards that
generalize across all web-based information including the increasing
popular social networks of “web 2.0″.

The beta version of the OAI-ORE specifications and implementation
documents are released to the
public on June 2, 2008. These documents describe a data model to
introduce aggregations as resources with URIs on the web. They also
detail the machine-readable descriptions of aggregations expressed in
the popular Atom syndication format, in RDF/XML, and RDFa.

The table of contents page with links to the following other documents
is located at .

The full press release for this beta release is located at
http://www.openarchives.org/ore/documents/oreBetaPressRelease.pdf.

Carl Lagoze – Cornell University
Herbert Van de Sompel – Los Alamos National Laboratory

The Open Archives Initiative, commonly abbreviated as OAI, is a “body that promotes standards in archiving which allow systems to operate successfully together and exchange information.” (Dictionary of Information and Library Management) Founded by Michael Nelson, Carl Lagoze, and Herbert Van de Sompel, the OAI first launched in October of 1999. The Initiative’s funding comes from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Coalition for Networked Information, Digital Library Federation, Microsoft Corporation, and the National Science Foundation. (Reitz, Open Archives Initiative) Since its inception, the Initiative has been linked conceptually to the idea of open access in scholarly publishing and the creation of institutional repositories. For this reason it has garnered considerable support from information and library science professionals. However, increasingly effective, mainstream alternatives to the OAI’s framework have resulted in published authors not participating in the Initiative. As well, vendors may be dissuaded from participating in OAI repositories due to digital copyright concerns.

Although the above definition for OAI is good for a general understanding of the Initiative, it does not provide a comprehensive understanding of the topic. At its core, the OAI promotes interoperability between different systems by supplying a rigorous set of standards that facilitate the sharing of digital information. While the name OAI suggests the idea of a permanent repository for digital or digitized media, the word “archive” is in fact used as a synonym for “e-prints”. (Reitz) The two definitions of archive should not be confused, because while the former is focused on artifacts and artifactual value, the latter’s goal is to increase scholarly communication by creating easier digital access to research. Although the two are not mutually exclusive, this distinction is vital to properly understanding the OAI.

The OAI’s main vehicle for increasing scholarly communication is OAI-PMH, or the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. (Metadata is, at its most basic, information about information.) Metadata harvesters locate and aggregate metadata from different data sets. While this at first may seem confusing, there are many easy-to-understand examples. If I wanted to integrate MBooks, Google Books, and CMU’s Million Book Project into my own catalogue, all I would have to do is “point” my metadata harvester at their repositories to gather the information. With the OAI, Dublin Core is usually used as the scheme for metadata. Afterward, when searching my OPAC, users would be able to locate the metadata – in record form – within my catalogue and be linked to the content at the original repository’s site. This is impressive not only because it can widely diversify an institution’s collection, but also because none of the files (besides metadata) have to be stored locally. The largest OAI catalogue is OAIster, which provides access to approximately 15 ½ million records. (University of Michigan) The search engine indexes material from over 900 contributors. (University of Michigan)

I am skeptical, however, of OAI-PMH. First of all, acquiring metadata is not as simple as pointing your harvester at an information source. Permission must be asked and granted, and there is no guarantee that more contemporary and valuable information will come without a fee. The majority of the works in the digital repositories listed above are either in the public domain or have been digitized as “orphan works”. They may lack currency, not reflect advances in science and society, and not represent a holistic collection of knowledge. Also, scholarly material, especially in the hard sciences and articles being prepared for publishing,may not be as likely to be freely available.

A second concern hinges on digital preservation and continual access. If institutions are simply collecting metadata about e-prints and other information resources, this means that there may only be one institution with an actual electronic copy. If that copy and its backups were lost, access to the full text – one of the main concerns of the OAI – would be undermined. Author David Weinberger advocates an item being in more than one place at the same time in Everything is Miscellaneous through the use of metadata; however, it may make more sense for an item to be in more than one place literally, through duplicate electronic copies. A related concern is that the status of currently free full-text materials owned by private and/or corporate institutions may change. As a result, access to such materials would disappear overnight. This is significant because most high-profile mass-digitization projects are being spearheaded by companies such as Google, rather than consortia of libraries, archives, and academic institutions. A possible solution to these problems is the LOCKSS (“Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe”) project. Like the name implies, redundant (and decentralized) storing of information could allow for more permanent and reliable access to this information, something that the Open Archives Initiative inherently neglects by its metadata-centered design.

So far I have addressed predominantly digitized book collections in relation to OAI metadata harvesting. However, the original and continued focus of the OAI is on e-prints, or research and journal articles. As Peter Suber stated, “OAI-compliant archives are already here and already useful”. (Suber, May 2) So why then have they not challenged commercially offered databases? The answer is that scholars must not only be convinced of the value of OAI to include their works, but also that OAI repositories must be filled with quality materials that exploit the benefits of the OAI standards.

Depositing research in an OAI compliant repository is arguably not a priority or norm in the scholarly world. In OAIster, I searched for several of my instructors from library school. Of the five, only three had articles in the catalogue. For many authors, putting a paper on their personal website can be seen as the equivalent of depositing in a repository. Not only have they achieved open access, but using Google, or some future search engine with similar functionality, will allow users worldwide to find their work. The argument against this is that OAI’s use of fielded metadata allows for precision searching. (Suber, March 2) However, relevancy algorithms and properly executed XML effectively perform the same function as fielded searches. The question of whether search engines or OAI catalogues are superior is a highly contentious one, and there is little besides opinion in the scholarly literature to substantiate one side over the other. Peter Suber points to the following statements as examples of library and information science professionals’ unfounded preference for OAI:

“But OA-OAI archiving enhances visibility more than Google indexing does.” […] “Scholars doing serious scholarly research look in specialized scholarly tools and resources before they look in Google.” […] “Archiving will give an eprint a permanent or persistent URL.” […] “OAI-compliant searching tools refresh their indices faster than Google.” (Suber, March 2)

These assertions are flawed for many reasons. First, they ignore the use of e-prints by non-scholars. Second, they make broad, sweeping generalizations about Google, scholarly research methods, and OAI searching tools; these statements do not hold true in all cases. For every assertion of the OAI’s superiority, Suber – a proponent of the OAI – can find many convincing exceptions.

When a persuasive argument cannot be made for one tool over the other, why should scholars participate in an OAI compliant system? The answer is that a service like Google does not detract from the value of OAI, that the systems need not be mutually exclusive, and that OAI has the potential to offer a superior search experience should mass-collaboration be achieved. (Suber, March 2) Were mass-collaboration achieved, users would have access to substantial, cross-disciplinary databases of scholarly literature. Inappropriate materials would be excluded, decreasing the information overload so often experienced by users of search engines. This would also reduce the likelihood that users not versed in information literacy would utilize incorrect or flawed information resources. While David Weinberger suggests that information professionals “give up control” and “filter on the way out, not on the way in”, the OAI intends to do the exact opposite. (105, 102) In doing so, they hope to create bastions of knowledge known not only for their intellectual integrity, but supreme usability.

To enhance the value of OAI compliant repositories, Suber identified ten goals which information professionals should work toward. They include: working against the Ingelfinger Rule (a stipulation in contracts that prevents publishing of already available research), persuading all open access journals to participate, persuading publishers to supply metadata for their materials regardless of whether the documents are copyrighted or not in electronic formats, archiving “raw and semi-raw data, not just articles that interpret or analyze data”, and finally creating an open access citation index. (Suber, March 2) Other goals Suber listed have already been achieved in part, including making “postprint archiving […] a condition of research funding” (now true of government-funded research) and the depositing of theses and dissertations (true of many colleges/universities). (Suber, March 2) While these measures would predominantly ensure a steady flow of current material, I think that the most exciting goals are those involving publishers and the creation of a citation index. These two factors will make OAI compliant catalogues discovery tools par-excellence by creating a massive, deep (predominantly full text) index of serials and monographs, effectively removing the need for sloppy federated search engines which are inhibited by the proprietary structure of commercial databases.

The Open Archives Initiative relies on standards, which Roy Tennant has gone so far as to describe as the “engine of interoperability”. By utilizing such standards to organize information, the OAI is working to increase access to scholarly materials. Although the system has flaws and has not yet gained mainstream acceptance, it is clear that the potential exists for OAI-compliant technologies to radically transform the publication of academic research and, as a result, scholarly communication. Hopefully this transformation will mirror the value which served has guided the Initiative over time, open access to information.

Bibliography:

• “Open Archives Initiative”. Dictionary of Information and Library Management, 2006. Retrieved March 28, 2008 from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/6525181
• Open Archives Initiative. Open Archives Initiative. Retrieved April 16, 2008, from http://www.openarchives.org
• Reitz, Joan M. ODLIS: Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science. Libraries Unlimited. http://lu.com/odlis/odlis_o.cfm#oai (28 March 2008).
• Suber, Peter. “The Case for OAI in the Age of Google.” SPARC Open Access Newsletter, May 3, 2004. Retrieved March 28, 2008 from http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/05-03-04.htm#oai-google
• Suber, Peter. “Top 10 priorities for the OAI community.” SPARC Open Access Newsletter, March 2, 2004. Retrieved March 28, 2008 from http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/03-02-04.htm#oai-priorities
• Tennant, Roy. “The Expanding World of OAI.” Library Journal, 15 February 2004, 32.
• University of Michigan (2008). OAIster | Home. Retrieved April 16, 2008, from http://www.oaister.org
• Weinberger, David. Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York: Times Books, 2007.

Miło mi poinformować, że serwis Linux.pl dołączył do OAI – Otwartej Agencji Informacyjnej. Treści w nim udostępnione będą na licencjach GNU FDL i Creative Commons Uznanie autorstwa 2.5 Polska. Więcej informacji w dziale O nas na Linux.pl. Jednocześnie zapraszam do wzięcia udziału w projekcie OAI, szczegóły w podanym wyżej linku do WikiNews.

Circa un anno fa abbiamo parlato del semantic web e del fatto che il 2007 rappresentava probabilmente l’anno in cui questa tecnologia avrebbe preso piede o sarebbe collassata definitivamente. I problemi erano: mancanza di applicazioni killer, scarsa chiarezza sulle procedure, impossibilità di applicare la semantica pura (RDF e simili) ai miliardi di pagine web già online, il fallimento di alcuni sogni impossibili relativi all’intelligenza artificiale e altre cose così.

ReadWriteWeb ha dedicato negli ultimi mesi analisi approfondite al problema e ci permette di riparlarne grazie al suo ultimo post, Semantic web: what is the killer app?, che intanto con la sua stessa esistenza sfata la previsione del successo o morte del semantic web, e poi ci permette forse di guardare con sempre maggiore fiducia a quei linguaggi paralleli che forse potrebbero tirare la volata al semantic web, molto più di quanto non siano riusciti finora a fare linguaggi come Rdf e Owl. Da notare intanto la causa per la quale secondo ReadWriteWeb il sw non si è ancora affermato:

People don’t care about math, they care about utility and even more, about fun. What the Semantic Web needs, then, is a killer app.

Poi vengono elencate alcune delle applicazioni o degli ambiti che hanno qualche chance di affermarsi come killer (ma non ultimate, aggiungo io) apps. Tra le altre: i (soliti) motori di ricerca intelligenti, gli agenti che comprendono il linguaggio umano, gli shortcuts (vedi AdaptiveBlue – anche se in una mia presentazione di qualche tempo fa auspicavo per le biblioteche qualcosa come “un Blue Organizer (l’applicazione di AdaptiveBlue) realmente semantico”…). La conclusione dell’articolo è però che (grassetto dell’autore):

We are still waiting for the killer app for Semantic Web, something that can get viral and turn semantics into a marketing term. Problems like natural language understanding still remain difficult to solve, and the solutions do not appear to be on our horizon right now. It also appears that a semantic search engine, at least based on the ones we have seen to date, does not have a substantial advantage over Google. We are seeing the rise of early Semantic Knowledge Databases, but while we expect them to get better and more interesting, they are more likely to be the stepping stones to the killer app, rather than the app itself.

In the mean time, we are seeing the rise of shortcut technologies, which leverage the basic semantics of the content, like URL and simple context analysis, to deliver relevant information, links, and media directly into the page. While still very early, these technologies hold the most promise because they are simple and useful. We expect that the next generation of these technologies in conjunction with personalization will deliver an interesting alternative to search — contextual discovery. We will discuss this alternative in more detail in a future post.

Dunque il punto è sempre che l’idea di sovrapporre o inframmezzare un livello semantico puro rispetto al web attuale rende semplicemente impensabile la prospettiva che il semantic web si affermi definitivamente sull’altro web.  Qualche punto anche quest’anno lo segnano invece le applicazioni di semantic web nelle pagine web as they are, ovvero i microformati (sempre nel post di un anno fa riportavo la querelle tra i sostenitori di questi e i fan di Rdf).

Strumenti del c.d. lower case semantic web, i microformati vantano ormai diverse applicazioni: hCal, Xfr, hReview e diverse altre ancora, ed essendo concepiti per essere compresi (e adoperati) prima dagli esseri umani e poi dalle macchine, probabilmente non spaventano gli utenti sprovvisti di conoscenze di Xml. Rappresentano insomma la versione pragmatica e realistica dell’universo semantico. Interessante per esempio l’uso che LinkedIn fa di hResume, un microformato per rappresentare nelle pagine web informazioni circa il proprio percorso professionale.

In biblioteca mircoformati come COinS fanno un grande lavoro per rendere riconoscibili ad agenti software informazioni bibliografiche all’interno di una pagina web. E che dire di applicazioni come unAPI, che fanno un parsing delle pagine e richiamano API HTTP per produrre record in formati come Rdf, oai_dc, Mods, BibTex etc.

In conclusione: tenendo conto anche dei progressi in relazione all’integrazione della semantica nelle pagine web grazie agli sforzi del W3C sia sul versante di semantizzazione di Xhtml che su quello delle nuove specifiche come quella relativa a Sparql (the query language for semantic web – potete vederne un esempio sul sito di social tagging Revyu) direi quasi: il semantic web è morto – lunga vita al semantic web Insomma, magari si realizzerà con hCard piuttosto che con Owl, ma la speranza di migliorare le applicazioni internet e renderle non dico intelligenti (sarà stato questo mito dell’intelligenza che ci ha portato fuori strada?) ma almeno più reattive e interoperabili potrebbe non andare delusa…

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La Open Archives Initiative (OAI) se creo con la misión de desarrollar y promover estándares de interoperabilidad para facilitar la difusión eficiente de contenidos en Internet. Surgió como un esfuerzo para mejorar el acceso a archivos de publicaciones electrónicas (eprints), en definitiva, para incrementar la disponibilidad de las publicaciones científicas. Los trabajos iniciales se centraron en el desarrollo de marcos de interoperabilidad para la federación de archivos de eprints, pronto apareció evidente que dichos marcos (permitir el intercambio de múltiples formatos bibliográficos entre distintas máquinas utilizando un protocolo común) tenían aplicaciones más allá de esta comunidad. Por ello se adoptó un objetivo mucho más amplio: abrir el acceso a un rango de materiales digitales
Por lo tanto, la OAI no es solamente un proyecto centrado en publicaciones científicas, sino en la comunicación de metadatos sobre cualquier material almacenado en soporte electrónico. No hay nada en el protocolo que impida a los implementadores transmitir el contenido propiamente dicho de esos materiales. No obstante esto no es el objeto principal de OAI-PMH.
Los metadatos a transmitir vía OAI-PMH deberán codificarse en Dublin Core sin calificar con objeto de minimizar los problemas derivados de las conversiones entre múltiples formatos. Aunque se está investigando la creación de servicios tales como una interfaz de búsqueda a través de formatos heterogéneos de metadatos, una solución menos complicada y por lo tanto más fácil de implementar es requerir a los implementadores convertir sus datos a un formato común.

Per ampliar la informació sobre OAI, accediu al següent article de Imma Subirats i José M. Barrueco: OAI-PMH: Protocolo para la transmisión de contenidos en Internet

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