New and noteworthy: part 1
We Need Publishing Standards for Datasets and Data Tables: OECD white paper
On April 20 2009, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released a white paper, "We Need Publishing Standards for Datasets and Data Tables", which examines the problems with current data discoverability and citations, and the remedy in creating industry standards for bibliographic dataset metadata and linking.
Written by Toby Green, head of publishing at OECD and an expert in data publishing, the paper details the problems with user ability to locate and reference online data. Datasets are a significant part of the scholarly record and being published much more frequently, but with widely inconsistent metadata, links and citations.
The paper proposes bibliographic metadata standards that could be implemented to provide users and librarians with data that are as accessible and as easy to find and catalogue as written works such as journal articles and book chapters. By following existing scholarly metadata standards, datasets can easily utilize the existing discovery channels that are used by e-journals and e-books, including library systems, cross-reference linking, publishing platforms, and search engines.
The paper provides straightforward standards that publishers, librarians, and data providers can implement to improve the accessibility and usage of important datasets, both the data that underlies scholarly works and data that are published in their own right.
More details: http://www.oecd.org/document/25/0,3343,en_21571361_33915056_42600857_1_1_1_1,00.html
PEER project issues draft report for publishers and repository managers
PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) is a pioneering collaboration between publishers, repositories, and the research community, which aims to investigate the effects of the large-scale deposit (so-called green open access) on user access, author visibility, journal viability and the broader European research environment. Supported by the EC eContentplus programme, the PEER project will run until 2011, during which time over 50,000 European stage-2 (accepted) manuscripts from up to 300 journals will become available for archiving.
In April 2009 PEER issued a draft report on the provision of usage data and manuscript deposit procedures for publishers and repository managers. The report sets out to establish a workflow for depositing stage-2 outputs in and harvesting log files from designated repositories to facilitate the research required for PEER.
To ensure that sufficient content is made available as a research sample to validate the research process, participating publishers have agreed to collectively deposit 50 per cent of the outputs on behalf of the authors. For the other 50 per cent, publishers will invite the authors to self-archive their current manuscripts, and any previous manuscripts from participating journals. In addition to workflow, the report identifies the preferred file formats for full text and metadata to be deposited by participating publishers as well as the preferred and mandatory metadata elements.
Issues of relevance to repositories are also addressed, including the proposal to unify the ingestion services based on either format used or protocols such as OAI-PMH or SWORD, as well as procedures for the provision of usage data.
An updated version of this draft report will be made available by PEER later in 2009.
PEER draft report available at: www.peerproject.eu/reports
Progress towards a single shared format registry: UDFR proposal and road map
Following the delivery of the Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR) software in August 2008, Harvard University Library held a series of discussions and in-person meetings to get a sense of the current needs of the digital preservation community and to see if we still understood the requirements for a format registry. The top issue that emerged from these discussions was the relationship between PRONOM and the GDFR. While not everyone agreed, many we spoke to believed that the community could not support two format registries. After in-depth discussions with a number of concerned parties, it was decided that it would be in the better interests of the community if there were a single shared formats registry.
In order to make progress towards a single shared registry model, a format registry working group was formed in late 2008 with members from the British Library, the California Digital Library, Harvard University Library, the National Archives, the National Library of Australia, the National Library of New Zealand, Portico, and Tessella. This group began to build a community around the idea of a single shared registry and solicited requirements for the registry from the community.
In the spring of 2009 the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) sponsored a meeting attended by the National Archives, Harvard University and other parties who had been working with NARA on its registry efforts. An agreement was forged to bring together the two registry efforts under a new name – the Unified Digital Formats Registry (UDFR). The registry would support the requirements and use cases of the larger community compiled for GDFR and would be seeded with PRONOM's software and formats database.
The UDFR proposal and 16-month road map is now available on the GDFR website. It calls for the immediate formation of an ad-hoc governing body in anticipation of the transfer of governance to a permanent body. Pam Armstrong, manager of the Library and Archives Canada's Digital Repository Services and Standards Office, has agreed to chair the UDFR's interim governing body. In addition to the Library and Archives Canada, the interim group is composed of individuals from the National Archives, Harvard University Library, the British Library, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Georgia Tech Research Institute, and NARA.
The plan calls for the establishment of a permanent governing body in November 2009. While specific requirements for membership in the UDFR will be worked out over the coming months, the intention is to make membership in the registry and representation in registry governance open to all institutions interested in and willing to contribute to the effort.
UDFR home page: www.gdfr.info/udfr.html
UDFR proposal and 16-month road map: www.gdfr.info/udfr_docs/Unified_Digital_Formats_Registry.pdf
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