Digital libraries (DLs) are complex information systems and therefore demand formal foundations lest development efforts diverge and interoperability suffers. In this article, we propose the fundamental abstractions of Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, and Societies (5S), which allow us to define digital libraries rigorously and usefully. Streams are sequences of arbitrary items used to describe both static and dynamic (e.g., video) content. Structures can be viewed as labeled directed graphs, which impose organization. Spaces are sets with operations on those sets that obey certain constraints. Scenarios consist of sequences of events or actions that modify states of a computation in order to accomplish a functional requirement. Societies are sets of entities and activities and the relationships among them. Together these abstractions provide a formal foundation to define, relate, and unify concepts---among others, of digital objects, metadata, collections, and services---required to formalize and elucidate "digital libraries". The applicability, versatility, and unifying power of the 5S model are demonstrated through its use in three distinct applications: building and interpretation of a DL taxonomy, informal and formal analysis of case studies of digital libraries (NDLTD and OAI), and utilization as a formal basis for a DL description language.

Streams, structures, spaces, scenarios, societies (5s): A formal model for digital libraries

The Fedora architecture is an extensible framework for the storage, management, and dissemination of complex objects and the relationships among them. Fedora accommodates the aggregation of local and distributed content into digital objects and the association of services with objects. This allows an object to have several accessible representations, some of them dynamically produced. The architecture includes a generic Resource Description Framework (RDF)-based relationship model that represents relationships among objects and their components. Queries against these relationships are supported by an RDF triple store. The architecture is implemented as a web service, with all aspects of the complex object architecture and related management functions exposed through REST and SOAP interfaces. The implementation is available as open-source software, providing the foundation for a variety of end-user applications for digital libraries, archives, institutional repositories, and learning object systems.

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Fedora: an architecture for complex objects and their relationships

Problem: While there has been considerable attention dedicated to the development and implementation of institutional repositories, there has been little done to evaluate them, especially with regards to faculty participation Purpose: This article reports on a three-part evaluative study of institutional repositories We describe the contents and participation in Cornell’s DSpace and compare these results with seven university DSpace installations Through in-depth interviews with eleven faculty members in the sciences, social sciences and humanities, we explore their attitudes, motivations, and behaviors for non-participation in institutional repositories Results: Cornell’s DSpace is largely underpopulated and underused by its faculty Many of its collections are empty, and most collections contain few items Those collections that experience steady growth are collections in which the university has made an administrative investment, such are requiring deposits of theses and dissertations into DSpace Cornell faculty have little knowledge of and little motivation to use DSpace Many faculty use alternatives to institutional repositories, such as their personal Web pages and disciplinary repositories, which are perceived to have higher community salience than one’s affiliate institution Faculty gave many reasons for not using repositories: redundancy with other modes of disseminating information, the learning curve, confusion with copyright, fear of plagiarism and having one’s work scooped, associating one’s work with inconsistent quality, and whether posting a manuscript constitutes “publishing” Conclusion: While some librarians perceive a crisis in scholarly communication as a crisis in access to the literature, Cornell faculty perceive this essentially as a non-issue Each discipline has a normative culture, largely defined by their reward system and traditions If the goal of institutional repositories is to capture and preserve the scholarship of one’s faculty, institutional repositories will need to address this cultural diversity

Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Installation of DSpace

With increasingly strict data management requirements from funding agencies and institutions, expanding focus on the challenges of research replicability, and growing data sizes and heterogeneity, new data needs are emerging in the materials community. The materials data facility (MDF) operates two cloud-hosted services, data publication and data discovery, with features to promote open data sharing, self-service data publication and curation, and encourage data reuse, layered with powerful data discovery tools. The data publication service simplifies the process of copying data to a secure storage location, assigning data a citable persistent identifier, and recording custom (e.g., material, technique, or instrument specific) and automatically-extracted metadata in a registry while the data discovery service will provide advanced search capabilities (e.g., faceting, free text range querying, and full text search) against the registered data and metadata. The MDF services empower individual researchers, research projects, and institutions to (I) publish research datasets, regardless of size, from local storage, institutional data stores, or cloud storage, without involvement of third-party publishers; (II) build, share, and enforce extensible domain-specific custom metadata schemas; (III) interact with published data and metadata via representational state transfer (REST) application program interfaces (APIs) to facilitate automation, analysis, and feedback; and (IV) access a data discovery model that allows researchers to search, interrogate, and eventually build on existing published data. We describe MDF’s design, current status, and future plans.

The Materials Data Facility: Data Services to Advance Materials Science Research

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals provides an overview of open access concepts, and it presents over 1,300 selected English-language books, conference papers (including some digital video presentations), debates, editorials, e-prints, journal and magazine articles, news articles, technical reports, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding the open access movement's efforts to provide free access to and unfettered use of scholarly literature. Most sources have been published between 1999 and August 31, 2004; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1999 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet (approximately 78 percent of the bibliography's references have such links). The 129-page bibliography has been published in print and PDF formats by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). The print version is available from ARL. The book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.

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Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals

DSpace: An Open Source Dynamic Digital Repository

We describe DSpace/sup /spl trade//, an open source system that acts as a repository for digital research and educational material produced by an organization or institution. DSpace was developed during two years' collaboration between the Hewlett-Packard Company and MIT Libraries. The development team worked closely with MIT Libraries staff and early adopter faculty members to produce a 'breadth-first' system, providing all of the basic features required by a digital repository service. As well as functioning as a live service, DSpace is intended as a base for extending repository functionality, particularly to address long-term preservation concerns. We describe the functionality of the current DSpace system, and briefly describe its technical architecture. We conclude with some remarks about the future development and operation of the DSpace system.

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The DSpace institutional digital repository system: current functionality

SUMMARY This paper describes MIT Libraries' experience implementing DSpace, a home-grown open source digital institutional repository, which other institutions may want to introduce as a service to their communities. MIT's introduction of DSpace as an operating service illustrates the many political and organizational considerations that must be addressed to establish and operate institutional repositories. In addition to detailing some of the policies developed and organizational changes undertaken, this article describes the kinds of questions future implementers of DSpace will want to answer. It also outlines the impacts the service has had on the library, on MIT, and on the perception of MIT Libraries within the Institute.

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Implementing an institutional repository: The DSpace experience at MIT

For the past two years the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Labs have been collaborating on the development of an open source system called DSpace™ that functions as a repository for the digital research and educational material produced by members of a research university or organization. Running such an institutionally-based, multidisciplinary repository is increasingly seen as a natural role for the libraries and archives of research and teaching organizations. As their constituents produce increasing amounts of original material in digital formats—much of which is never published by traditional means—the repository becomes vital to protect the significant assets of the institution and its faculty. The first part of this article describes the DSpace system including its functionality and design, and its approach to various problems in digital library and archives design. The second part discusses the implementation of DSpace at MIT, plans for federating the system, and issues of sustainability. DSpace Definition, Features and Functionality

An Open Source Dynamic Digital Repository

DSpace is a joint development effort by HP and MIT to establish an ele ctronic system that will enable MIT faculty and researchers to capture, preserve, manage, and disseminate their intellectual output, and that will enable the Institute to maintain its intellectual heritage. The effort further aims to facilitate sharing of intellectual content and metadata among institutions by minimizing barriers to adoption and federation. This brief paper describes the motivation behind the project, its goals, objectives, progress, and references to detailed definition & design materials.

Margret Branschofsky

Papers

DSpace: An Open Source Dynamic Digital Repository

The DSpace institutional digital repository system: current functionality

Implementing an institutional repository: The DSpace experience at MIT

An Open Source Dynamic Digital Repository

DSpace at MIT: meeting the challenges