ICADS Topic: Digital Resource Discovery

Theme: Accessing digital collections
This page provides links to information about initiatives and innovative projects relating to Digital Resource Discovery at the national libraries contributing to ICADS (IFLA-CDNL Alliance for Digital Strategies). For more general information on the topic follow the PADI Topic links below.
What's in scope?
- Delivery of generic digital discovery solutions
- Delivering effective integration with traditional library discovery services
- Metadata standards and automatic generation of metadata for discovery services
- Development of ‘next generation’ discovery for specialist digital formats (e.g. images, maps, sound)
- Cutting edge search interfaces, navigation technologies, etc.
For additional resourcessee PADI Topics: Digital Libraries and Metadata
ICADS libraries contributing to the topic:
British Library |
Deutsche Nationalbibliothek |
Library of Congress |
National Library of Australia |
National Library of New Zealand
- Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts
- A searchable database of some of the western illuminated manuscripts in the British Library. The Catalogue includes descriptions and images of western manuscripts with pictorial and decorative embellishments, from fully painted miniatures to decorated initials.
- Contact: Caroline Brazier
- http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/welcome.htm
- (Contributor: British Library
)
- Images Online
- Images Online gives instant access to thousands of the greatest images from the British Library's collections which include manuscripts, rare books, musical texts and maps spanning almost 3000 years. The range of images available include illustrations, drawings, paintings and photographs.
- Contact: Caroline Brazier
- http://www.imagesonline.bl.uk/
- (Contributor: British Library
)
- Treasures in Full
- High-quality digital editions showcasing how the British Library is providing online access to rare historic works such as the Magan Carta and the Gutenberg Bible.
- Contact: Caroline Brazier
- http://www.bl.uk/treasures/treasuresinfull.html
- (Contributor: British Library
)
- Online Gallery
- An online showcase of 30,000 items from the British Library's collections, including virtual books using the Turning the Pages system.
- Contact: Caroline Brazier
- http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/index.html
- (Contributor: British Library
)
- 19th Century British Newspapers
- Over two million pages of newspaper from 49 national and regional UK titles have been made available in partnership with JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and Gale
- Contact: Ed King
- http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs/
- (Contributor: British Library
)
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Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
|
- Competence Center for Interoperable Metadata (KIM)
- The aim of the project is to set up a competence center for interoperable metadata intended to help improve knowledge about and skills in interoperable metadata, metadata exchange and formats within the German-speaking countries.
The structured descriptions (metadata) of various data collections are described as "interoperable" if their content can be searched using uniform search procedures, or if they can gainfully be integrated in the data management system. Interoperability is achieved by adhering to given technical specifications in controlled institutional contexts.
A key task of the "Competence Centre for Interoperable Metadata", the DCMI affiliate in Germany (after the end of the project there will also be partners in Austria and Switzerland), is setting up a core working group plus additional specific working groups to reach a commonly agreed understanding of what constitutes good practice in the use both of the Dublin Core model and also the semantic web model by examining existing usage profiles. This understanding will then form the basis for developing certification procedures, training courses and consulting services in the field of interoperable metadata.
Project partners are the Göttingen State and University Library and the German National Library.
- Contact: Reinhard Altenhöner
- http://www.d-nb.de/eng/wir/projekte/kim.htm
- (Contributor: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
)
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- Metadata Object Description Standard (MODS) Development Project
- The goal of the MODS project is to provide the community with a metadata format that is especially suitable for describing and providing access to digital material. It is being developed by the Library of Congress with an Editorial Committee of implementers. As an XML schema it can carry selected data from existing MARC 21 records as well as serve as the format for original resource description records.
Partner: MODS Editorial Committee
- Contact: Rebecca Guenther
- http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/
- (Contributor: Library of Congress
)
- SRU-OASIS Initiative
- The Library is leading an OASIS Technical Committee that is developing search and retrieval web services with the goal of integrating various approaches under a unifying model, an Abstract Protocol Definition. SRU/CQL and OpenSearch are the two approaches featured by the current work, and we hope that additional protocols will be similarly integrated into this model.
The model provides for the development of bindings, both static (human-readable profile documents) and dynamic (machine-readable description file that a server provides for retrieval by a client that may then dynamically configure itself to access that server). The premise of the dynamic binding concept is that any server – even one that pre-dated the concept – need only provide a self-description in order to be accessible. A client will be able to access the server simply by reading and interpreting the description and, based on that description, formulating a request (including a query) and interpreting the response. Behind this concept is a standard description language, and that will also be part of the OASIS work.
Article: D-Lib Magazine January/February 2009 Partner: OASIS Search Web Services Technical Committee
- Contact: Ray Denenberg
- http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/oasis.html
- (Contributor: Library of Congress
)
- ID.LOC.GOV Vocabulary Web Service
- A vocabulary web service project, Authorities and Vocabularies, at the Library of Congress has the primary goal to enable machines to programmatically access data at the Library of Congress. As a by-product it also has a web interface that provides simple user access. The initial vocabulary offering, opened in May 2009, is a version of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). This service is a step toward exposing and interconnecting vocabulary and thesaurus data via URIs, thus for LCSH, links have been made to terms in a similar service provided in Europe for RAMEAU, a French subject heading vocabulary closely coordinated with LCSH. Over the next year it will be expanding to other vocabularies commonly found in standards that the Library of Congress supports such as the Thesaurus of Graphic Materials, geographic area, language, and relator codes, and preservation events and roles. The Library is very interested in feedback on the uses and usefulness of the service. (There is a comment form at the site.)
- Contact: Clay Redding
- http://id.loc.gov
- (Contributor: Library of Congress
)
- XML Datastore Project
- The Library of Congress's Network Development & MARC Standards Office has been performing pilot testing of the efficacy of a native XML datastore for enabling search across all of the types of metadata for LC collections, including MARC, non-MARC, EAD, and MODS. MODS and METS are the XML standards central to this project.
- Contact: Morgan Cundiff; Nate Trail; Clay Redding
- (Contributor: Library of Congress
)
- Library of Congress Web Archives (LCWA)
- The Library of Congress is forming topical collections of archived web sites, selected by curators and subject specialists, and evaluating various aspects: workflow strategies, efficient metadata creation for end-user access, metadata packaging, and search systems. Each site in a collection is given simple descriptive cataloging using MODS (Metadata Object Description Standard), which is currently used by a Lucene-based access system to provide searching across the collections or in individual or selected collections. The MODS data is partially derived from the archived site and partially supplied by program. Catalogers review the descriptions and supply information for basic search points. Ongoing work will include experimentation with METS wrappers for the MODS descriptions, image thumbnails, tag clouds, and PREMIS preservation metadata. The deriving, describing, searching, and packaging aspects of the project are all part of continuing research into effective archiving of web material. It is also part of a continuing effort by the Library to preserve web materials for future generations of researchers, and also to use metadata to enable consistent searching across sites that may be in various languages and scripts. The project has given a special emphasis to United States elections and the sites of persons in the United States Congress. Technical information is available from the project web site.
- Contact: Tracy Meehleib
- http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/lcwa/html/lcwa-home.html
- (Contributor: Library of Congress
)
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National Library of Australia
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- Single Business Discovery Project
- This project aims to integrate the National Library of Australia’s national resource discovery services with a view to improving the discovery process for users and to reduce the number of separately maintained and branded discovery services offered by the Library. The new service will be based on a virtual 'national metadata store' which will be dissected into a number of 'Collection views' that recognise the unique requirements of different types of information resource, and provide result sets tailored to the needs of users. SBDS Prototype "Trove" released for public comment May 2009.
- Contact: Warwick Cathro
- http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/2008/documents/single_business_di
scovery_project.pdf
- (Contributor: National Library of Australia
)
- Australian METS profile
- The Australian METS Profile describes the rules and requirements for using METS as an exchange format to support the collection and preservation of and access to content in Australian digital repositories. The profile was developed as part of the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) Project, a collaboration of the National Library of Australia, the Australian National University, the University of Sydney and the University of Queensland.
- Contact: Bronwyn Lee
- http://www.nla.gov.au/australianmetsprofile/
- (Contributor: National Library of Australia
)
- People Australia
- This online resource discovery service is being developed by the National Library of Australia to allow users to access information about significant Australian people and organisations as well as related biographical and contextual information. The service will be built on the Australian Name Authority File and will be enriched through partnerships with other organisations that make available information about Australian people and organisations in their specific domains.
- Contact: Basil Dewhurst
- http://www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/peopleaustralia/
- (Contributor: National Library of Australia
)
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National Library of New Zealand
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- Aotearoa People's Network Kaharoa (APNK)
- The Aotearoa People’s Network Kaharoa provides free access to broadband internet services in public libraries so that all New Zealanders can benefit from accessing, experiencing and creating digital content.
APNK opens up the digital world by giving access to computers, the internet and training. Scanners, audio recorders and Kete (digital repositories) allow communities to gather, digitise and store their histories and memories and to share them with others.
APNK was initially funded by the Community Partnership Fund of the New Zealand government’s Digital Strategy and by other government funding through the National Library of New Zealand.
- Contact: peoples.network@natlib.govt.nz
- http://www.aotearoapeoplesnetwork.org/home
- (Contributor: National Library of New Zealand
)
- DigitalNZ
- DigitalNZ is a collaborative initiative led by the National Library of New Zealand, working with a wide range of contributing institutions and organisations.
DigitalNZ aims to make New Zealand digital content easy to find, share and use. This includes content from government departments, publicly funded organisations, the private sector, and community groups.
DigitalNZ tests and develops approaches that increase the amount of New Zealand content flowing through the Digital Content Life Cycle. We need to create and digitise more New Zealand content so we can stay digitally connected to our own stories, creations, knowledge and culture.
- Contact: info@digitalnz.org
- http://www.digitalnz.org.nz/
- (Contributor: National Library of New Zealand
)
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Related Topics: ICADS Topic: Digital Archiving | ICADS Topic: Digital Ingest & Storage
| ICADS Topic: Digital Preservation
| ICADS Topic: Digital Rights Management
| ICADS Topic: Digitisation
| ICADS Topic: Web Archiving
Broader Topic:
ICADS (IFLA-CDNL Alliance for Digital Strategies)
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA, Canberra, ACT 2600, AUSTRALIA
Telephone + 61 2 6262 1111; Facsimile +61 2 6257 1703; Telephone Typewriter
Number: 1800 026 372
|