DLF Aquifer: Bringing Collections to Light

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DLF Aquifer Bringing Collections to Light

• SULAIR
• January 10, 2006
• Katherine Kott, Aquifer Director

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Talk topics

• Organizational
• DLF
• Collaboration
• Technical
• Architecture
• Metadata
• Contextual
• Digital libraries
• Scholarly communication

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Digital Library Federation

• Consortium of research libraries
• Formed to focus on standards and best practices
  for digital libraries
• Small organization, relying on participant
  libraries for infrastructure and other resources
• Affiliated with CLIRrecently became separate
  501(c)3
• Original 1995 charter included distributed open
  digital library vision

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What is DLF Aquifer?

• The distributed open digital library of the
  Digital Library Federation (DODL)
• Collaborative effort amongst some DLF members
• Test-bed of library tools services for the
  scholar
• Quality content, initially focused on American
  culture and life

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DLF Aquifer participant libraries

• California Digital Library
• Cornell (this month)
• Emory University
• Indiana University
• Johns Hopkins University
• Library of Congress
• New York University

• Stanford University
• University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• University of Michigan
• University of Minnesota
• University of Tennessee
• University of Virginia

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Character of the initiative

• Institutions on an equal footing
• DLF is a federation, not a service provider
• DLF Aquifer participants are a subset of DLF
• Funding through DLF, in-kind contribution,
  outside support

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DLF Aquifer Problem Space

• DLF Aquifer will provide tools and services for
  pooling and piping content
• DLF Aquifer will inter-operate with
• Repositories that preserve by federating and
  deploying cross-repository services
• Content management systems that provide structure
• E-learning systems that support the teaching and
  learning process
• Personal information management systems that
  support the scholar
• DLF Aquifer will siphon content from a variety of
  digitization projects

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Why within DLF?

• Provides a framework for networked digital
  library services
• Supports DLF mission to
• develop standards and support best practices
• leverage shared actions, resources, and
  infrastructures
• encourage the creation of digital collections
  that can be brought together and made accessible
  across the globe

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Focus on the user

• Creating a context for aggregated collections
• Integrating tools and services into various
  environments
• Improving access
• Enhancing metadata
• Creating other methods of federating
• Providing the ability to annotate metadata and/or
  objects

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Where to start?

• Leveraging existing collections, tools and
  services
• Enhancing and developing tools, services and
  collections
• Implementing deep sharing

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Leveraging

• Use OAI metadata harvesting to aggregate
  collections
• Solve some metadata harvesting problems with more
  robust metadata standards
• DLF MODS implementation guidelines
• Build on action groups work to insure
  consistent results for user

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Phase I prototype

• April 2006 at DLF Forum in Austin
• University of Michigan metadata harvesting portal
  based on OAIster
• Action groups demonstration

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Enhancing

• Learning more about user needs
• Re-contextualizing collections in aggregation
• Developing DLF Aquifer middleware layer to
  enable tools and services to be implemented in
  diverse environments
• Building a metadata remediation and enhancement
  pipeline

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Developing communities of practice

• Benchmark survey of DLF libraries on digital
  collection use
• Use cases
• Collection Development policy
• Policies and principles Architecture, tools and
  services
• Metadata best practices

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Aquifer Services

• SWG prepared a report in June 2005 to the AIG on
  use case scenarios for Aquifer
• This report identified a dozen broadly applicable
  service opportunities that could be implemented
  interoperably throughout the DLF
• SWG subsequently worked to prioritize these
  services and develop a template for functional
  requirements in collaboration with TechArch WG
• First set of functional requirements were created
  for Aquifer Metadata Harvesting services

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DLF Aquifer collections

• Fit the subject scope of American history,
  society and culture
• Serve research and instructional needs of
  libraries and of scholars in the humanities and
  social sciences
• Represent collections of all media types (e.g.,
  images, text, video, audio, etc.)
• Come from a selected subset of Digital Library
  Federation member institutions local or
  aggregated collections content quality is
  assumed given prior selection and digitization by
  the participating institutions
• Be available for OAI harvesting, complying with
  both DLF OAI best practices and Aquifer metadata
  standards
• Include a persistent URL that leads to a publicly
  available digital object and
• Include assurances from the hosting institutions
  that the content will remain available for the
  foreseeable future.

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Policies and Principles Architecture

• Harvested metadata at core other services built
  outward
• Loosely coupled lightweight services
• Based on open standards
• Repository-agnostic
• Spectrum of interoperability
• More compliant more functional
• Policy enforcement throughout system

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Policies and PrinciplesTools and Services

• Tools and services based on documented user needs
• Sharing of code development using OS
  platform-independent technologies
• Attention to scalability - not just an experiment
• Encourage open source require open standards

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Metadata guidelines

• Description of digital cultural heritage and
  humanities-based resources
• Description that can be more easily shared and
  integrated into metadata aggregations
• OAI practices (documentation and Dublin Core
  mappings)

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Promise and challenge of collaboration

• Enables results that are greater than the sum of
  the parts
• Requires altruismdecreasing ones own fitness to
  increase the fitness of another
• How to prioritize within individual institutions?
• Collaboration versus competition
• Offers new roles for research libraries in an
  Amazoogle world
• Pushing the limits of the network
• Distributed hub development

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Current activity, future plans

• Seeking outside funding
• Interoperability
• Middleware layer development
• Metadata enhancement
• User studies/end user engagement
• Mapping DLF Aquifer sub-projects strategically
  within the DLF

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Fit with other DLF initiatives

• Building on standards and best practices (e.g.
  OAI-PMH)
• Collaborating on tools development (e.g. OCKHAM)
• Operating within the digital library service
  framework (in development)

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Fit with other Stanford initiatives

• Topic for small group discussion this afternoon

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Thanks!Questions or comments?

• Katherine Kott
• kkott_at_clir.org
• http//www.diglib.org/aquifer/