Au sommaire, notamment, du dernier n° de D-Lib Magazine (vol. 15, n° 7-8, juillet-août 09):

Articles:

• Measuring Mass Text Digitization Quality and Usefulness: Lessons Learned from Assessing the OCR Accuracy of the British Library's 19th Century Online Newspaper Archive

"This article will discuss how to measure the accuracy of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) output in a way that is relevant to the needs of the end users of digital resources. A case study measuring the OCR accuracy of the British Library's 19th Century Newspapers Database provides a clear example of the benefits to be gained from measuring not just character accuracy but also word and significant word accuracy. As OCR primarily facilitates searching, indexing and other means of structuring the user experience of online newspaper archives, measuring the word and significant word accuracy of the OCR output is very revealing of a resource's likely performance for these functions. Having such data is therefore extremely helpful for planning and quality assurance assessment. After briefly discussing the role of OCR in the text capture process and how OCR works, we give a detailed description of the methodology, statistical data gathering techniques and analysis used in this study. Our conclusions point the way forward with suggested actions to assist other mass digitization projects in applying these techniques."

• Semantic Integration of Collection Description: Combining CIDOC/CRM and Dublin Core Collections Application Profile

"This article is motivated by the demand for unified access to the wealth of distributed digital cultural collections, allowing users to make queries and discover information about them through integrated processes. Our effort originates from the semantic interoperability perspective and considers CIDOC/CRM as the mediating schema, which integrates in an optimal way the semantics of the collection-level metadata schemas and application profiles. The research reveals the complexity of mapping metadata schemas to ontologies and resolves particular difficulties by presenting the crosswalk between Dublin Core Collections Application Profile and CIDOC/CRM."

Comptes rendus de conférence:

• JCDL 2009 Workshop Report: Lightweight User-Friendly Evaluation Knowledge for Digital Librarians

• Report on the First International Workshop on Innovation in Digital Preservation (InDP 2009)

• Doing So Much More: The Fourth Annual International Conference on Open Repositories (OR09)

• ELPUB 2009 - Rethinking Electronic Publishing: Innovation in Communication Paradigms and Technologies

Catalogablog signale:

"A specification is being developed for distribution of books via a catalog, the OpenPub standard.

OpenPub is an initiative of Lexcycle, Adobe, the Internet Archive, and O'Reilly Media to create an Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) enabling the widespread discovery, description, and access of book and other published material on the open web. OPDS utilizes existing or emergent open standards and conventions such as ATOM with a priority on simplicity and extensibility.

Libraries might have an interest in this. Why are none among the developers?"

METS Tool

"[...] OpenMIC includes a complete METS metadata implementation with structure map, descriptive metadata, source metadata, technical metadata and rights metadata documents. OpenMIC incorporates MODS, Dublin Core, MIX (NISO technical metadata for images) AES (technical metadata for sound recordings) and PREMIS. [...]"

(source: Catalogablog, 09/07/09)

Streamlining Book Metadata Workflow

"The white paper was commissioned by NISO and OCLC as a follow-up to the Symposium for Publishers and Librarians held by OCLC on March 18-19, 2009 to discuss book metadata. This paper analyzes the current state of metadata creation, exchange, and use throughout the book supply chain. With the number of book formats multiplying and the amount of digital content growing rapidly, the metadata required to support the discovery, sale, and use of content by a global audience is increasing exponentially. At the same time economic pressures on all stakeholders in the supply chain from publishers, wholesalers, booksellers, metadata vendors, and librarians present greater challenges to providing quality and comprehensive metadata at every point in the cycle. Through interviews with over 30 industry representatives, Luther has created a book metadata exchange map illustrating the process and has identified opportunities for eliminating redundancies and making the entire process more efficient."

(source: NISO & OCLC, 30/06/09)

Au menu du n°7 du Code4Lib Journal:

• How Hard Can It Be? : Developing in Open Source

In 2000 a small public library system in New Zealand developed and released Koha, the world’s first open source library management system. This is the story of how that came to pass and why, and of the lessons learnt in their first foray into developing in open source.

Major content metadata vocabularies to be mapped

"Work is under way to create an extensive and authoritative mapping of vocabularies from major content metadata standards, creating a downloadable tool to support interoperability across communities. The work is an expansion of the existing RDA/ONIX Framework into a comprehensive vocabulary of resource relators and categories, which will be a superset of those used in major standards from the publisher/producer, education and bibliographic/heritage communities (CIDOC CRM; DCMI; DDEX; DOI; FRBR; MARC21; LOM; ONIX; RDA – see reference section below for details). The resulting tool will be known as the Vocabulary Mapping Framework (VMF). The new vocabulary is not intended as a replacement for any existing standards, but as an aid to interoperability, whether automatic or human-mediated. The expanded Framework will include mappings of terms from code lists or allowed value sets in the existing standards to the RDA/ONIX vocabulary, enabling the computation of “best fit” mappings between any pairing of standards. The results of the VMF project will be formally presented at an event at the British Library on the morning of November 9th this year, and made available on the Web. The project, which is largely financed by a grant from the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), is being carried out by Godfrey Rust and Steffen Lindek of Rightscom and Gordon Dunsire, Depute Director of the Centre for Digital Library Research at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland, with input from other domain experts. A virtual Advisory Group drawn from interested parties is being convened. The International DOI Foundation, which fully endorses this work, will provide the web hosting facility as part of its commitment to promoting the wider use of interoperable metadata, and will use the mapping vocabulary wherever possible to support the association of metadata with DOI names. [...]"

(source: JISC, DOI, etc., 15/06/09 / via Catalogablog)

SKOS is a W3C Proposed Recommendation

(source: Planet RDF, 16/06/09)

The Metadata is the Interface: Better Description for Better Discovery of Archives and Special Collections, Synthesized from User Studies

"Structured metadata can be useful internally for collection management and public services, but is not always what users need most to discover primary sources, especially minimally-described collections and “hidden collections.” We understand archival standards for description and cataloging, but our users by and large don’t. Studies show that users often do not want to search for collections by provenance, for example, as important as this principle is for archival collections.5 One of several core competencies that special collections metadata librarians must have is “a keen understanding of users’ needs and preferences.” This is especially important now that discovery happens in multiple environments. Librarians and archivists need to manage archival collections by provenance, but also must describe what is in the collections for their users."

(source: OCLC / via ResourceShelf, 12/06/09)

Blurring the distinction between metadata and content files : datasets

"Case study: An archival body has collated text documents, photographs, plans, and more to assist with the preservation of national heritage buildings and monuments. They would now like to have these digitized and stored in a library and generally made publicly accessible.
This gives rise to some interesting conceptual nuances in figuring out the best way to structure the data in a library (repository) record."

(source: Metalogger, 12/06/09)

Italie - Les présentations du dernier séminaire CIBER (Comité interuniversitaire bases de données et édition en ligne) qui a eu lieu début juin sont disponibles ici:

A voir, notamment:

• Stato dell'arte dell'OA nel panorama nazionale e internazionale (Open access: état de la question en Italie et dans le monde)

• Il "viaggio" di una risorsa elettronica tra procedure, processi decisionali ed ERM (Le "voyage" d'une ressource électronique à travers les procédures, les processus de décision et l'ERM)

• Caratteristiche degli ERMS e bisogni delle biblioteche: verso una valutazione consapevole (Caractéristiques des ERMS et besoins des bibliothèques: vers une évaluation en connaissance de cause)

• Lettori di Ebook ad inchiostro elettronico e Quotidiani Digitali in Biblioteca. E' possibile? (Lecteurs d'e-book à encre électronique et journaux numériques en bibliothèque. Est-ce possible?)

• Verso la biblioteca 2.1 (Vers la bibliothèque 2.1)

• Oltre il libro - the e-book, the webook (Au-delà du livre - e-book, webook)

• From the social to the real time web (Du web social au web en temps réel)

• Garanzie a lungo termine per i materiali digitali: metadati di conservazione e identificatori persistenti (Conservation à long terme du matériel numérisé: métadonnées et identifiants persistants)

• Raccolta, Gestione ed Analisi delle Statistiche di Accesso ai Full Text (Récolte, gestion et analyse des statistiques d'accès aux textes intégraux)