LoomWare

iPad App for Islandora Repo Now Available

Our new iPad application, Telling Island Stories, is now available in the App Store (and yes it does support the retina display). TIS is a front-end to a number of Islandora-based digital collections, with a focus on story and geo-level presentation of digital assets. As a lightweight iPad app it will give you a good example of what can be done with a powerful Islandora-Fedora driven backend. Some highlights of this version:

- provision of "collection" views via Media (images, audio, books, maps), Stories (associated subsets of assets) and Communities (assets sharing a geographic range);
- a map-based view of all assets, including media-specific pins, pin aggregation for larger numbers of items in close proximity (including the ability to turn this feature on and off), search/display via the map;
- flexible display including ability to toggle metadata display on and off by item, filter items by type;
- delivery of high quality retina-display quality books in a page 

Items available at launch include photographs from the University of PEI and community groups, herbarium specimins, digital books from the Lucy Maud Montgomery Institute, oral histories from the Dutch Thompson collection and maps from UPEI and partner organizations. As content is added to the Islandora system it automatically shows up in the app - no need to download a new app just for new content. A future version will allow the user to submit content to a central repository.

We are especially proud of the collaborative approach to making content from all parts of Prince Edward Island available to the world. If you are visiting PEI this summer you definitely want to download the free TIS app to your iPad!

TIS is a joint development venture between UPEI and DiscoveryGarden, an Islandora services company, along with generous funding from Innovation PEI. If you are interested in adapting the TIS app to your own Fedora/Islandora framework drop me a note.

 

New Islandora Site in Italy

I want to start highlighting new Islandora sites as we come across them, so please let me know when you find or create a new site using the Islandora framework.

The BESS (Biblioteca Elettronica Di Scienze) Digital Archive is a new Islandora site in Italy:

Archivio digitale di BessBiblioteca digitale sulle trasformazioni sociali ed economiche del Piemonte e Torino | Digital library on the social and economic transformations of the Piedmont and Turin

The BESS team has also done a great job of documenting their effort on a Dev Page, including a comprehensive PDF guide to their processes. Excellent work and a good indication of what can be done using open source software!

A Global University-Cached Archive?

I just read the Jan/Feb issue of MITs Technology Review which features a piece called Fire in the Library. It made me mostly sad. It's about a group called the Archive Team and their efforts to scrape and archive what I would all "failed internet nation states" like poetry.com and geocities. The depressing part was the fact that this group is doing the job of libraries with a minute fraction of the resources. The bright sparks are that they are doing it, as well as Brewster Kahle's involvement and the loose affiliation of the project with the Internet Archive. The mostly sad part went away quickly (as it always does for me) and was replaced with the "how could we participate" part. Libraries are doing some of these things, but in a very piecemeal and exclusive fashion. Academic libraries are focusing on the scholarly record, preserving the record of promotion and tenure and so students in the future can largely not read it either. It occurred to me that the space needed for what the Archive Team is salvaging is a tiny fraction of the space the global university community stewards for our own communities, and we should step up and offer resources. Who knows, maybe the next e.e. cummings is sill hovering in the now mostly lost poetry.com archive? I'm not sure the Archive Team would want our help, and the uncertainties around the copyright of what they are scrapping would cause risk embolisms for must institutions, but I can dream ;-)

AIMS White Paper Available

The AIMS project has released their white paper, which has some great reading on the issues and challenges facing institutions as they embrace the avalanch of born digital content. From the e-mail release:

AIMS (Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship) was a two year grant generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It ran from October 2009-September 2011. An international collaboration of partners from the University of Hull (UK), Stanford University, Yale University, and the University of Virginia as lead, AIMS had several main goals, among them:

1. Develop a methodology for the support and stewardship of born-digital materials 

2. Foster and enhance the digital archivist community

3. Process over a dozen collections that had born digital content.

4. Create and disseminate a white paper that outlines our findings and work

To that end, I am pleased to announce the successful conclusion of both the grant and the white paper. The white paper is an expression of our methodology for supporting and stewarding born digital materials. The participants used their experience in processing collections with born digital content as the groundwork for our shared (rather than singular) approach.  As such, it highlights decision points and practice. It is meant to introduce and expose readers to the issues of born digital stewardship, not necessarily solve every possible contingency since this is an evolving challenge for us all. We have articulated practices that are informed by archival principles that we hope will have a broad reach to our readers.

This document should be considered as a framework to guide good practice in terms of archival tasks and objectives necessary for success. 

The AIMS white paper can be found here:

http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/

 

Access 2010 Conference - Don't Miss It!

A quick promo for the upcoming Access 2010 Conference, which is looking to be a typical stimulating Access conference, with lots of time to spend with your Library colleagues.

Conference Site

How Much Does Your Data Cost

Keeping Research Data Safe : JISC

A new report from JISC looks at the costs of preserving research data:

This study has investigated the medium to long term costs to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) of the preservation of research data and developed guidance to HEFCE and institutions on these issues. It has provided an essential methodological foundation on research data costs for the forthcoming HEFCE-sponsored feasibility study for a UK Research Data Service. It will also assist HEIs and funding bodies wishing to establish strategies and TRAC costings for longterm data management and archiving.

Access Day 1 - Afternoon Sessions #1

Dan Chudnov, Donald Moses, Paul Pound and Stevan Harnad do the early afternoon at Access 2009

I unfortunately missed a lot of Dan's talk getting another speaker setup. I came in when Dan was talking about the LOCs new linked data initiative with LC Subject Headings, which are accessible in a smart and flexible framework. The library community should be eating this up - LC Subject Headings available as linked data, and free. LC is also making their newspaper data available as linked data, which is very exciting for us at UPEI with the work we are doing on newspapers. Very exciting stuff - thanks for going to Library of Congress Dan!

Donald and Paul gave an overview of the IslandLives project at UPEI, including a summary of the the new Islandora software and the basic architecture. IslandLives is UPEIs project to digitize the Island's local histories and provide a reach discovery and collaborative layer around these resources. Some of the innovative features of the project include the use of Islandora (a Drupal-Fedora collaborative repository system), automated workflows, Drupal-based TEI editor and more.

Access Day 1 - 2nd Session Set

Mark Jordan and Brian Owen from Simon Fraser University

Mark provided an update on the COPPUL (Council of Pacfiic and Prairie University Libraries) effort to create a LOCKSS server, which went from Pilot to production 2 weeks ago.

Brian Owen gave an update on the various SFU open source projects, especially the reSearcher and the PKP suites. CUFTS has a lot of development effort behind it and as the community grows. The SFU team will be working in the next 6-12 months on to clean-up the existing CUFTS product, provide better admin interface, etc. OJS is also a mature project, with well over 3,000 journal titles published with it. The PKP team will be providing a stable 2.2.3 release (the stable release) and the 2.3 line, which will be the developer version. They are also re-writing all the code for OJS to consolidate and modularize it - the PKP Web Application Library. The Open Monograph Press will be the first new feature to use it and will be doing a major interface upgrade. These guys are doing amazing work - support them with code, money and praise!

Data Deluge Swamps Science Historians

30 TB Per Day in Data

Nice piece about the emerging (sorry, here now) issues related to stewarding large amounts of digital data. It made me realize that in the year that will be 2009 UPEI's own Virtual Research Environment and Digital Library projects will have generated in the order of 30 TB of data that will need to be stewarded in the long term. And this will likely increase 10-fold in the following year.

Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability

Sustaining Digital Projects

Another quality report from Ithaka:

Tens of millions of dollars, pounds, and euros are invested each year by government agencies and private foundations to develop and support digital resources in the not-for-profit sector. As budgets tighten, will these digital resources be able to survive and thrive? This question is at the heart of the Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability project, a multi-year, international exploration of the strategies being used to support digital initiatives over the long term. Twelve detailed case studies present the steps project leaders have taken to achieve this, with special attention paid to their strategies for cost management and revenue generation. These studies include financial data, and explore the decision-making process that project leaders undertake when experimenting with different strategies to find the best fit for their organization.