Digital Commons Network^™

Watching Our Backs: Community Verification Of Digital Preservation Systems, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

Librarians and faculty agree that information preservation is one of the essential roles of libraries. Yet, as the information we manage increasingly becomes digital, we have to rely on new methods of preserving this information that have not been fully tested. While developing and auditing for best practices is important, we must also verify that preservation systems actually perform as we hope they will, preferably long before we have to fall back on them.

In this talk, I will show ways in which this verification can be done now, by the community, with reasonable cost and demonstrable efficacy. Specifically, I …

Promoting Discovery And Use Of Repository Content: An Architectural Perspective, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

Slides and notes for a talk I gave at a NARA/UMD conference. (The notes include a full script, though it differs slightly from the talk as delivered.)

In this talk, I stress the importance of effective discovery as an essential component of (and aid to) preservation. I advocate the importance of opening up information, system, and social architectures to do so, with examples that include subject maps, the DLF ILS-DI work, VCat, and PennTags.

Some of the material in the talk was adapted from the "High Quality Discovery in a Web 2.0 World" talk I gave for Palinet.

High Quality Discovery In A Web 2.0 World: Architectures For Next Generation Catalogs, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

Issues of information and systems architecture underly many of the current debates over the future of cataloging. This talk discusses some ways in which the architecture of the catalog is being redesigned to combine the rich information architecture of library metadata with the robust systems architecture of many Web-based discovery systems. I will show "subject map" discovery systems that better exploit the relationships in complex ontologies like LCSH, and discuss a Digital Library Federation initiative to promote standards supporting interoperability between discovery systems and ILS data and services. I will also touch on the role of networked architectures in improving …

Mapping The Library Future: Subject Navigation For Today's And Tomorrow's Library Catalogs, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

My ALA Mindwinter 2008 presentation slides on subject maps. For more details on how subject maps are created, see the New Maps of the Library white paper from 2006.