Digital Commons Network^™

Utah Manuscripts Association Encoded Archival Description Best Practice Guidelines, Version 1.2, Cheryl D. Walters, J. Gordon Daines

Cheryl D. Walters

Best Practice Guidelines created for participants in the Utah Manuscripts Association EAD Project funded by a LSTA grant in 2007/2008

Supporting Name Authority Control In Xml Metadata: A Practical Approach At The University Of Tennessee, Marielle Veve

Marielle Veve

While many different endeavors to support name authority control in Extensible Markup Language (XML) metadata have been explored, none have been accepted as a best practice. For this reason, libraries continue to experiment with the schema, tool, or process that best suits their local authority control needs in XML. This paper discusses current endeavors to support name authority control in XML for digitized collections and demonstrates an innovative manual solution developed and implemented by the University of Tennessee Libraries to achieve this goal. Even though this method for authority control in XML metadata still relies on manual efforts, it effectively …

Implementing Tei Projects And Accompanying Metadata For Small Libraries: Rationale And Best Practices, Richard Wisneski, Virginia A. Dressler

Virginia A Dressler

Electronic text encoding marks up documents, most often those in the humanities and social sciences, in XML to capture various metadata and represent textual features important for research and analysis. It typically follows the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) scheme. Implementing TEI projects can be particularly challenging for small institutions with limited staff and budgets, given the detail and attention to textual nuances text encoding requires. This article argues for implementing such projects and their feasibility for small institutions, using Case Western Reserve University's text encoding project as a model. It includes the rationale for TEI versus sole reliance on page …

Beneath The Surface: Metadata, Transparency And The Ethical Use Of Information, Michael Katz

Michael Katz

While the gains from the digital revolution are tremendous in terms of increased efficiency, access to information and searchability, the change in information format has caught some off guard. No longer is data limited to what is available on a piece of paper. Yet there is a price to pay for these gains. Where once a letter’s recipient could not see anything but what the sender openly presented in the letter, today that email, word processing document and spreadsheet all contain additional information not readily visible on their face. Beneath the surface, packed into the file, exists metadata - information …

Moving Beyond Marc: Initiating And Embracing Change In A Traditional Technical Services Department, Melanie Feltner-Reichert, Marielle Veve

Marielle Veve

This article discusses integrating non-MARC metadata into a technical services department.

Big Opportunities In Access To “Small Science” Data, Harlan Onsrud, James Campbell

Harlan J Onsrud

A distributed infrastructure that would enable those who wish to do so to contribute their scientific or technical data to a universal digital commons could allow such data to be more readily preserved and accessible among disciplinary domains. Five critical issues that must be addressed in developing an efficient and effective data commons infrastructure are described. We conclude that creation of a distributed infrastructure meeting the critical criteria and deployable throughout the networked university library community is practically achievable.

Table Extraction Using Conditional Random Fields, David Pinto, Andrew Mccallum, Xing Wei, W. Bruce Croft

Andrew McCallum

The ability to find tables and extract information from them is a necessary component of data mining, question answering, and other information retrieval tasks. Documents often contain tables in order to communicate densely packed, multi-dimensional information. Tables do this by employing layout patterns to efficiently indicate fields and records in two-dimensional form. Their rich combination of formatting and content present difficulties for traditional language modeling techniques, however. This paper presents the use of conditional random fields (CRFs) for table extraction, and compares them with hidden Markov models (HMMs). Unlike HMMs, CRFs support the use of many rich and overlapping layout …

Western States Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices, Version 1.2, Cheryl D. Walters

Cheryl D. Walters

Funded by a grant awarded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in the fall of 2001, the University of Denver (Denver, Colorado) spearheaded a multi-state collaborative initiative to create a virtual collection of widely dispersed digital resources on the topic, Western trails. As part of this initiative, 23 institutions in four Western states were awarded mini-grants to create digital content and metadata for resources related to Western trails. In addition to creation of a virtual collection of digital resources, another significant component of this multi-state initiative was development of a set of Dublin-Core based best practices by …

Core Services In The Architecture Of The National Digital Library For Science Education (Nsdl), Carl Lagoze, Walter Hoehn, David Millman, William Arms, Stoney Gan, Diane Hillmann, Christopher Ingram, Dean Krafft, Richard Marisa, Jon Phipps, John Saylor, Carol Terrizzi, James Allan, Sergio Guzman-Lara, Tom Kalt

James Allan

We describe the core components of the architecture for the (NSDL) National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library. Over time the NSDL will include heterogeneous users, content, and services. To accommodate this, a design for a technical and organization infrastructure has been formulated based on the notion of a spectrum of interoperability. This paper describes the first phase of the interoperability infrastructure including the metadata repository, search and discovery services, rights management services, and user interface portal facilities.

Metaxpath, Curtis Dyreson, Michael H. Böhen, Christian S. Jensen

Curtis Dyreson

This paper presents the METAXPath data model and query language. METAXPath extends XPath with support for XML metadata. XPath is a specification language for locations in an XML document it serves as the basis for XML query languages like XSLT and the XML Query Algebra.

The METAXPath data model is a nested XPath tree. Each level of metadata induces a new level of nesting. The data model separates metadata and data into different data spaces, supports meta-metadata and enables sharing of metadata common to a group of nodes without duplication. The METAXPath query language has a level shift operator to …