Issues in Scholarly Communication is a newsletter produced by Paula Kaufman, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, for the Illinois community. Entries from 2001-2005 newsletter are available.
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The Digital Library Federation has launched an OAI Portal to catalog the OAI-harvestable repositories at DLF-member institutions. DLF also provides a cross-archive search engine for the set. Excerpt from the (undated) announcement: 'The Digital Library Federation has begun a 2-year project to research, design, and prototype a second generation OAI finding system, capitalizing on the lessons learned from the first wave of OAI harvesting and using, as its raw material, collections drawn from across the DLF membership. Our research here builds on the digital objects, motivated scholarly users, and high-level OAI expertise that we have across our 38-member organization, and is informed by ongoing research into metadata creation and service building at Emory, Michigan, UIUC, and elsewhere, including our colleagues in the NSF's (OAI-based) National Science Digital Library. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) has proven itself as a protocol that allows basic metadata records to be created by many providers and then gathered up by harvesters who use those records to create library services (e.g. www.oaister.org). In the act of using it over several years in library settings, however, a range of issues have come to light that need research and development if OAI is going to mature into its full potential: collections as well as item records need further development, and we need richer mechanisms of creating dialog between harvesters and providers; the hurdles to adoption need careful study, particularly how to embed the very idea of creating public, harvestable metadata as a routine step in our digitizing workflows, and how to speed up the feedback loop from a harvester to a community of providers such as exists in the library world, who typically respond positively to such "good practice" guidance. The aim we have clearly in mind is to foster better teaching and scholarship through easier, more relevant discovery of digital resources, and a much greater ability for libraries to build more responsive local services on top of a distributed metadata platform.' Open Access News 4/8/05
Posted by at April 25, 2005 10:59 AM
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