INL 340_Theme 1 Notes_2024.pdf

Theme 1 – Digital repositories Part 1 - Introduction to digital repositories Learning outcomes After completion of this theme, students should be able to define a repository; discuss real examples of different digital repositories; comment...

Theme 1 – Digital repositories Part 1 - Introduction to digital repositories Learning outcomes After completion of this theme, students should be able to define a repository; discuss real examples of different digital repositories; comment on the history of digital repositories; discuss the content of digital repositories; discuss the advantages and disadvantages of digital repositories; and explain how one can determine if it is necessary to build a repository. Introduction There is a staggering amount of information in the world. Both digitised items and born-digital items contribute to this vast amount of information. There are various digitisation projects, for example, Google Books, and initiatives from universities. These digitisation projects make printed materials available in digital form. It is important to consider the way in which this digital information is stored, managed and accessed. A digital repository is an attempt to manage digital information. At a very basic level, a repository has a collection of digital items. These items may be born-digital or digitised. These items must be stored in system or platform of some sorts. It should be possible to find these items. This is typically enabled by having descriptions (metadata) of the items. There is typically a kind of retrieval system involved, though which users can then search for these items by searching in the metadata. It is important to know if users can access the items. For example, there might be copyright restrictions. Furthermore, it is important to preserve the items. Digital items may become obsolete and ways must be find to ensure that digital items are available for a long period of time. Lastly, scholars are increasingly applying new methods to digital material or using advanced searching to find material in repositories. Technology offers options that are not possible with printed work. Consider the advanced searching possibilities and computational techniques that can be used over large collections. It is therefore important to consider what features repositories can include. There are several related terms. Some other terms for digital repositories are digital libraries, electronic libraries, virtual libraries or open access repositories. In this module we prefer the term digital repositories as it is a broad and general term. 1 What is a digital repository? Definition Deegan and Tanner (2002) propose some principles on which a digital repository should be based. These principles have been adapted by Ball (2013) to form the following definition. A digital repository: - is a managed collection of multimedia objects in digital form - has objects that are created or collected according to collection policy - is structured to facilitate access - has services that can be given to assist with the use of objects are provided - applies processes to ensure preservation of objects - targets a specific community or user group Discussion The following discussion from Banerjee and Reese (2019) is meaningful: A repository must serve a real need. It must support user workflows and be structured and organized so that users can interact with resources as needed. It must be easy to maintain and capable of accommodating needs and resources that may not exist at the time the repository is designed. On a basic level, a digital repository is a collection of digital resources. These materials may have been converted from an analog format such as paper, or they may have been born digital. They may consist of singular objects that are used individually such as documents, images, and video files, but they might also be complex objects consisting of related files as might be found in exhibitions, photos associated with releases, and learning objects. Some types of resources such as datasets, output from specialized devices, music associated with scores, and anything with a geospatial component may require specialized software or platforms to be useful. Regardless of the type of resources they contain, the purpose of digital repositories is to allow information to be accessed and used. To accomplish this objective, a repository must preserve both objects and sufficient meta-data to provide a context that can make those objects usable. The repository must also support a reasonable mechanism for ingesting, searching, using, and managing materials. 2 Examples of digital repositories Digital Bodleian - https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ “Digital Bodleian first launched in 2015 with the aim of bringing together digitized content from the Bodleian Libraries’ extraordinary and rich collections into a single portal. The Bodleian Libraries have been digitizing content since the early 1990s and Digital Bodleian was and is designed to enable access to that content for the widest possible audience. Digital Bodleian quickly established itself as a key resource for research and teaching based on Bodleian Libraries’ collections, and usage has steadily increased over the years since launch. The site has relaunched, in late 2020, with a new and improved search and discovery interface, which aims to Facilitate improved searching, filtering and browsing of collection items Improve display of item-level metadata Enable viewing and download of highest-quality resolution images for the purposes of non- commercial research and teaching Improve curation and delivery of Bodleian Libraries content, as well as the delivery of content on behalf of partners such as Oxford’s colleges and Digital Humanities projects.” The Home page of the Digital Bodleian 3 Searching in the Digital Bodleian An item in the Digital Bodleian 4 The Nelson Mandela Digital Archive http://atom.nelsonmandela.org/ “The Nelson Mandela Foundation has in its custody an archive of the life and time, works and writings of its Founder, the late Mr. Nelson Mandela. The physical collections include the handwritten papers, official records and unique artefacts from the personal archive of Nelson Mandela in addition to records from the Office of Nelson Mandela after his retirement as President of South Africa in 1999, and the records of related significant organisations and individuals. It is the NMF’s imperative to document this vast resource, facilitate access to it, and promote its preservation and use. This site contains the archival descriptions, finding aids and many of our digitised items. More material will be added over time.” (Nelson Mandela Foundation, 2021) The Search page of the Nelson Mandela Digital Archive 5  An item from the Nelson Mandela Digital Archive Some other examples for you to explore: ICDL - International Children's Digital Library - http://en.childrenslibrary.org/ Charles H. Templeton, Sr. Music Museum: The Business of Music - http://library.msstate.edu/ragtime/ September 11 Digital Archive - http://911digitalarchive.org/ South African Rock Art Digital Archive - http://www.sarada.co.za/ From the examples you should have gathered that digital repositories can store a variety of different items, such as, texts, images, videos, etc. These items are organised into some kind of structure so that people can easily find these items. Each item is typically quite well described as well. 6 Terminology and definitions History Bearman (2007: 223-224) discusses the history of the term “digital libraries”. The term “digital libraries” emerged from the National Information Infrastructure initiative and US. national political discourse in 1991 and 1992, before achieving common currency among librarians in the wake of a special issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science (Fox & Lunin, 1993). Both the political and computer science foundations for discussions concerning the digital library lay in high-speed computer networks and the technical issues associated with linking and delivering collections of multimedia content. Although the vision of a singular “Digital Library” is what captured the popular and political imagination, and was promoted especially by Vice President Al Gore in the 1992 election campaign, through the 1990s the United States government supported “digital libraries” in the plural. Large multidisciplinary teams were funded to answer technical questions about computing requirements and almost incidentally built intensively curated collections, almost exclusively for academic use. The one exception was the Library of Congress’s largely privately funded American Memory project (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem) and National Digital Library Program (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/dli2/html/lcndlp.html), which created the largest digital library of all (over 8 million objects) for public use and enabled public access over the Web. In the pre-WWW context of 1991-1993, the period of popular discovery of the Internet and the rise and fall of gopher (which first permitted public access to remote digital resources), the focus of digital libraries on solving the technical problems faced by those building collections of multimedia content was understandable, but the orientation to discrete collections has since shifted the focus of digital library applications. More than a decade later, we are finding the core assumptions of the early 1990s-that digital library content would consist of fixed objects, that digital libraries would contain only digital works, and that individuals working alone should be the target users of digital libraries-particularly limiting as some prescient observers predicted (Levy & Marshall, 1995). The plurality of digital libraries is an ongoing technical challenge and major source of user frustration. Different schools of thought Research and development of digital repositories have come from different areas. This contributed to different definitions of the concept of “digital repository” and research reports that come from different perspectives. Chowdhury and Chowdhury (2003) mention two prominent groups who formed the main schools of thoughts on digital repositories, namely, researchers and practitioners. What are the key differences between these groups? Researchers Researchers are mostly engineers, computer scientists. 7  They emphasize ‘enabling technologies’, for example, access and retrieval of digital content, technologies that make digital repositories possible. They have a techno-centric vision of the concept. They work on infrastructure and networks to support repositories. They do research searching paradigms to be used. They work on standards. The intention is often to highlight research problems and to interest people in doing research on such problems. Practitioners Practitioners are mostly library and information scientists. They focus on the collection and organisation of information. They see digital repositories as services. The intention is often to highlight practical challenges involved in changing (i.e. transforming) traditional libraries and their services into digital libraries and electronic services. They see a digital repository not only as a point of access to information, but as managed entity that consists of co-ordinated services that are based on collections of materials. They also see a digital repository as a combination of digital objects and digital services. The example below shows the integration of digital services and digital objects. Examples of digital objects: Examples of digital services Journals Virtual reference desk Books Online registration Reserves Renewal of books Reference material Paying fines Databases Ask a librarian Exam papers Training Datasets Inter-library loans Content of digital repositories “Digital repositories may include a wide range of content for a variety of purposes and users. What goes into a repository is currently less an issue of technological or software ability, and more a policy decision made by each institution or administrator. Typically content in an academic repository can include: research outputs such as journal articles or research data, e-theses, e-learning objects teaching materials, and administrative data. Some repositories only take in particular items (such as theses or journal papers), whilst others seek to gather any credible scholarly work produced by the institution; limited only by each author's 8 retained rights from publishers. However, some more complex objects (websites, advanced learning objects, 3D topographical representations and other data sets) do present a technological challenge.” (JISC, 2012)” “One of the advantages of a repository is that each piece of content can be described in some detail via the input of associated 'metadata'. This acts much like a catalogue record in a library management system and allows searching across items within the repository. If the repository has implemented an appropriate metadata exposure method (such as Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting and/or RSS) the metadata can then be harvested by external services and exposed to the wider world. Repositories use open standards to ensure that the content they contain can be searched and retrieved for later use. The use of these agreed international standards allows mechanisms to be set up which import, export, identify, store and retrieve the digital content within the repository.” (JISC, 2012) Benefits of digital repositories The following benefits have been adapted from Wikipedia and Chowdhury and Chowdhury (2003, pp. 9-12) No physical restrictions “The user of a digital [repository] need not to go to the [repository] physically; people from all over the world can gain access to the same information, as long as an Internet connection is available.” (Wikipedia, 2014) This means users of a repository can be distributed over the world. Continuous availability People can gain access to the repository at any time (24/7), there are no office hours. Multiple access “The same resources can be used simultaneously by a number of institutions and patrons. This may not be the case for copyrighted material: a library may have a license for "lending out" only one copy at a time; this is achieved with a system of digital rights management where a resource can become inaccessible after expiration of the lending period or after the lender chooses to make it inaccessible (equivalent to returning the resource).” (Wikipedia, 2014) Improved information retrieval Digital repositories can provide very advanced searching and retrieval features, for example, allowing the user to search in various fields, searching the entire collection or a subset, filtering and browsing. Preservation and conservation Though digital material presents many preservation challenges (discussed in theme 7), digital repositories can also offer preservation and conservation benefits. Physical material that has been digitised can be protected from degradation if used repeatedly. Digital material that is backed up properly can survive natural disasters and prevent catastrophes such as the burning down of a library. Less space 9  “Whereas traditional libraries are limited by storage space, digital libraries have the potential to store much more information, simply because digital information requires very little physical space to contain them and media storage technologies are more affordable than ever before.” (Wikipedia, 2014) Added value “Certain characteristics of objects, primarily the quality of images, may be improved. Digitization can enhance legibility and remove visible flaws such as stains and discoloration.” (Wikipedia, 2014) Disadvantages of digital repositories Digital repositories also have some disadvantages (Wikipedia, 2014): Equity of access (the digital divide) o People who do not have access to technology or do not have Internet access, may not have access to digital repositories. This could increase the digital divide. Interoperability between systems and software o Numerous applications and systems are developed. Standard protocols should be developed and followed to ensure that data can be shared between systems. User authentication for access to collections o A digital repository could contain items that have copyright restrictions or are protected by intellectual property rights. Access to such items should be restricted. Information organization o It is often challenging to organise digital items in a way that is clear to users. The extent of the collection is not visible to users, as it is in a physical space. The nature of the collection should be communicated to the user, and it is often more challenging than anticipated. Interface design o It is challenging to design an interface that is easy to use. The interface should offer searching and browsing options. It should be easy to navigate amongst items. Digital preservation o Digital materials are at risk of becoming obsolete. Strategies should be put in place to make digital items accessible in the long term. Training and development o It could be necessary to train users to use a repository, as well as to train people to manage and maintain the repository. References Banerjee, K. & Reese, T.J. (2019). Building Digital Libraries: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians. (Second Edition). Neal-Schuman. Bearman, D. (2007). Digital libraries. Annual Review of Information Science & Technology, 41: 223- 272. 10 Chowdhury, G.G. & Chowdhury, S. (2003). Introduction to digital libraries. Facet Publishing. Deegan, M. & Tanner, S. (2002). Digital futures: strategies for the information age. Library Association Publishing. Digital Bodleian. 2022. Digital Bodleian. https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ JISC. (2012). Digital Repositories InfoKit. http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/digital-repositories/ Nelson Mandela Foundation – Archive. (2021) Nelson Mandela Foundation – Archive – Welcome http://atom.nelsonmandela.org/ 11