LoomWare

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/

 

NOW AVAILABLE: Fedora GSearch Version 2.4.1 | DuraSpace

NOW AVAILABLE: Fedora GSearch Version 2.4.1 | DuraSpace

The latest GSearch is available and includes some very nice new features: use of Tika for metadata/text extraction; support for Solr/Lucene 3.5 and ability to embed RISearch queries in Solr/Lucene. 

Update: Islandora 11.3.1 | Islandora

I know, this is a month old, but it is the latest Islandora release :-)

Islandora has been updated to version 11.3.1. This minor release addresses a bug in the 11.3.0 release - all users of Islandora 11.3.0 should update to 11.3.1. More details can be found on the Release Notes and Downloads page.

via islandora.ca

New Islandora Release for Q1 2011

The Islandora project announces an RC1 candidate for our Q1 2011 release

The Islandora team has been working hard on the 2011 roadmap, and the new RC1 is just the start. We are actually up to release 11.1.1, which is a bug release for the 1st 2011 release. We will be following suit with a new VM in the next few days, so stay tuned.

via islandora.ca

US NSF Data Dissemination and Sharing

The NSF policy framework for sharing/disseminating research data is worth a look, of only as a best-practice approach for any research program. Some quotes from the site:

Investigators are expected to share with other researchers, at no more than incremental cost and within a reasonable time, the primary data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of work under NSF grants. Grantees are expected to encourage and facilitate such sharing.

Beginning January 18, 2011, proposals submitted to NSF must include a supplementary document of no more than two pages labeled “Data Management Plan”. This supplementary document should describe how the proposal will conform to NSF policy on the dissemination and sharing of research results.

via www.nsf.gov

New DuraCloud Beta Released

Thinking about moving your ILS to the cloud? Wondering how you are going to manage all that research data over the next few decades? You may want to keep your options open and work with an open system like DuraCloud from the good folks at DuraSpace. DuraCloud is open source and yet works with common commercial cloud systems (currently Amazon, AWS and Rackspace) and provides a number of useful features for building an enhanced repository infrastructure.

The Islandora team will be piloting DuraCloud for a number of use cases, including running the entire stack in the cloud, so stay tuned for new developments on that front.

Retooling Libraries for the Data Challenge

A good piece from Dorothea Salo on the opportunities and challenges facing libraries in providing effective research data stewardship. From the Conclusion:

None of the challenges presented herein should discourage librarians from engaging with the research data challenge. Our unique expertise in metadata, digital preservation, public service, and technology translation will serve researchers well, as will our sturdy common sense and the domain expertise of our subject librarians.

However, unless we proceed with clear understanding of researchers and their data, as well as our own systems and habits, we will simply trip over ourselves. Research data are too important, and our role in curating them at present too insecure, to allow that to happen.

As we are discovering at UPEI, Fedora has proven to be a very effective tool in meeting this opportunity. 

Fedora Repository 3.4 Released

Fedora Repository 3.4 Documentation - Fedora Repository 3.4 Documentation - DuraSpace Wiki

The latest release of Fedora is now available. Some of the new features:

• DC, RELS-EXT, RELS-INT as Managed Content: The Dublin Core and Relationships datastreams can now be stored as Managed Content, improving performance particularly when these datastreams are large. A migration tool is included to migrate existing inline XML datastreams to managed content datastreams
• REST API relationships methods: New methods in the REST API for adding and manipulating relationships in RELS-EXT and RELS-INT
• Enhanced Content Models: Including the ability to validate objects against their content models, and support for optional datastreams
• Optimistic Locking: The REST API now provides support for optimistic locking to ensure no one else has made a change to an object since you started editing it
• FeSL Authentication: FeSL Authentication can now be used independently of FeSL's experimental authorization mechanism, and is now the default authentication mechanism (although the old mechanism can be specified during installation). FeSL Authorization is still disabled by default.
• FeSL policies as Fedora Objects: XACML policies are now managed in FeSL directly through the Fedora API by manipulating Fedora objects containing a FESLPOLICY datastream
• Logging reconfiguration without restart: Using the new SLF4J and Logback logging framework, logging configuration changes now become effective without having to restart the server
• Akubra low-level storage: Akubra is now considered production-ready and is the default low-level storage module
• REST API improvements and bug fixes: further stabilizing the REST API
• Deprecation of "LITE" APIs: As of this release, the API-A-LITE and API-M-LITE APIs are deprecated, and will be removed in a future release. You are encouraged to migrate any code using these APIs to use the new REST API.

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.

If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too!

Support for Data Stewardship

A brief article drawing attention to the issue of poor (or non-existent) data stewardship and what happens without open data and peer review of research elements like computer programs.