The NSF and JISC had a joint invitational workshop on repositories in Phoenix, Arizona on April 17-19, 2007. The report, "
The Future of Scholarly Communication: Building the Infrastructure for Cyberscholarship " is now available from the workshop web site at
http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~repwkshop/Labels: JISC, metadata, NSF, scholarly communication
Today I read the
AHDS Digital Moving Images and Sound Archiving Study.
I've been looking into metadata for the preservation of digital video/multimedia. It's an area of intense interest for me but I haven't had a work-related need to review it since I wrote, "OAIS, METS, MPEG-21 and archival values" for the Spring 2002 issue of The Moving Image. That means I haven't taken a good look at it since early 2001, given peer-review time lag.
I've had a request for consultation about archiving digital video, so I'm taking the opportunity to re-familiarize myself with the latest and greatest. The AHDS Digital Moving Images and Sound Archiving Study was released in August 2006 and it's the most current description of the state-of-the-art that I've found so far. Please do send me pointers to more recently available materials if you're in the know. I figure NDIPP probably has some recent information too and I'll be sure to look there next.
The AHDS surveyed 92 individuals and organizations working in digital audiovisual preservation. Most respondents indicated that their focus was on practical work flow management issues like data capture, access/dissemination, metadata, and rights management. They conclude that preservation work is at an early stage of development. Much remains to be done.
The big take-aways I get from the article:
- there's no sustainable funding model in place
- organizations and institutions can't do digital preservation alone. There needs to be wider collaboration in order to achieve economies of scale
- there's no consensus on best practices and standards especially regarding file formats and codecs (the report recommends JPEG 2000 and MFX as the best lossless format and wrapper for digital masters – but they do think there needs to be more research comparing METS and MPEG-21)
- more tools need to be built for automated metadata extraction
- technical obsolescence is still the greatest threat to long-term preservation of A/V materials.
It's pretty much the same conclusions that I took away from DigCCurr2007. No surprises.
It's a bit discouraging to see that the same big issues that existed in 2001 still exist today. It is encouraging, however, that big funding agencies like JISC and the NSF are on the case, and that smart folks like Reagan Moore are building the tools to assist with wide scale distributed collaboration on digital preservation. I suspect that digital video/multimedia preservation is going to be all about the Grid. That's the key research area to watch, I think.
Labels: digital preservation, digital video, metadata, what i did today
metadata.net doesn't list RDA as a resource discovery/description
metadata initiative. To be fair, the site hasn't been updated for a year. Also, they have
METS, MODS, and
CIMI listed, as well as a link to
IFLA's list of
metadata initiatives, so they're not completely ignorant of
librariana.
It's just sort of interesting to ponder the oversight as one considers the relevance of RDA outside of the library world.
metadata.net,
fwiw, is run by the
MAENAD project, which was(is?) a
metadata research project run by the venerable
Jane Hunter, a leading researcher in
metadata issues for complex digital objects.
Is it an act of hubris to reach out to other communities with the expectation that they will leap to adopt our "standard"?
Labels: metadata, RDA
If you (a) understand cataloging and
metadata and (b) have mad web skills then the ALA Cataloging Committee on Description and Access (a.k.a. CC:DA) needs you.
At ALA Annual CC:DA voted to establish an official web master position. John
Attig, our current web master, has become our representative to the
JSC. If you are interested contact me (laura.j.smart on
gmail) or Cheri
Folkner (
cherifolkner at
boisestate dot
edu) , chair of CC:DA.
The web master may not have to attend every ALA conference in order to do the job. This is an important gig because we are porting the current CC:DA web site to ALA managed servers and because we have a Task Force examining all aspects of CC:DA communication. We want the committee to make full use of emerging technologies to better reach our constituents.
Labels: cataloging, CC:DA, metadata
I finally got a moment to review the Peter Murry-Rust presentation. Unfortunately I couldn't do it using my Macbook and Firefox. It would crash my browser each time, probably got something to do with the ActiveX, I haven't had time yet to troubleshoot.
So many apologies to any of my Mac-using audience. I'll post an update/work-around as I get to it. I'm off to Santa Barbara county today with my beautiful wife and daughter so it will need to wait. LTB=life trumps blogging.
Labels: data curation, etd, life1.0, metadata, Peter Murray-Rust
I knew I was going to love my new gig when I returned from the Underground Railroad tour to find out that my library, in partnership with campus Digital Media Services had invited Peter Murray-Rust to give a talk on campus on data driven science and digital repositories.
The Power of the Scientific eThesis is now
publicly available for your screen
casting pleasure.
Labels: data curation, etd, metadata, Peter Murray-Rust
Returning to RFID
I haven't followed RFID developments in the library world since handing the torch for
my previous blog over to Margaret Hazel.
That's going to change. I don't think I can afford to let RFID standards and issues slide just because I don't have an an immediate gig-related need to follow RFID. The impending world of
ubiquitous computing and "
the Internet of things" (a.k.a.
spime) makes it necessary. Besides, on the Internet you can never erase your digital snail trails. People keep finding my name linked to library-related RFID info and contacting me to give talks, consult, etc. I hate to disappoint.
I have to make a confession - I find RFID standards terribly dry and boring and utterly cringe at the notion of returning to following it actively. But I think RFID is going to have a growing impact on librarianship as the years go by. It will not go away. It will be both good and bad. We can create cool Library2.0 services with it but it will also continue to push the boundaries of privacy, identity, and security. We will ignore it at our peril.
So I'm planning on catching up by re-subscribing to the feeds I used to follow. I'm sure a lot has happened since I abdicated my watchdog post so I won't make any promises to contribute to libraryrfid.org. It's possible that I'll post stuff there from time to time as I do continue to have authoring privileges. But I can't even get my ever growing pile of draft posts for this blog under control.
Labels: RFID, standards, ubiquitous computing
