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New standards

Repository and content standards

Consistent with the emergence of digital object management as a concern is a focus on standards to manage this emergence. Of special note are the following:

• OAIS. This provides a model for the development of archival repositories. It has provided a framework within which OCLC and others have developed their archives.
• Preservation. There is ongoing work on preservation metadata and exploratory work on how to actually provide preservation services. This area is still in early stages and there are serious issues for those aiming to provide production services.
• Content packaging. The library community has developed METS as a way of packaging complex digital objects for exchange and manipulation. The learning community has developed SCORM. Industry approaches such as MPEG 21 part 2 and SMIL may have some overlap also.
• Content exchange. We do not yet have a routinely implemented protocol framework for exchanging actual content between repositories. The work being carried out by the OKI initiative at MIT may be relevant here.
• Metadata. The metadata landscape continues to become more complex. Metadata is data that supports operations on objects. We have developed significant expertise in descriptive metadata for information objects.We now have new forms of metadata to support other operations. Some examples are: technical metadata (data about the technical characteristics of an object, what equipment was used to create it, etc.), structural metadata (metadata about the relations between components of an object), rights metadata. We also see metadata about other objects: collections, services, organizations, people. And finally, different domains and models are coming together in the shared space of the Web, so we need to work with schemas from related domains—ONIX (book industry), EAD (archives), IEEE/LOM (learning management) and so on.

Applications

Application areas of note include:

• Cross searching. Z39.50 is a search and retrieve protocol that is widely adopted in the library and related communities for query. It is a complex protocol that is unlikely to grow in use. A parallel initiative is working on Z39.50 next generation: carrying Z39.50 over into a Web services environment. This work is resulting in two approaches SRW (search and retrieve on the Web) and SRU (search and retrieve URL). These are not widely adopted, but there is some expectation that they will be taken up in newer applications, and may find some traction outside the library community. They have been developed as “Web services.”

• Harvesting. There has been great interest in harvesting metadata, sparked by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). An example here would be an OAI-PMH-based harvester that takes data from several sources and makes it available at a machine or a user interface. The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is a technique for sharing metadata between services. One service—a data provider in OAI terms—makes metadata available in an agreed way; another service comes and “harvests” it. The latter service—a service provider in OAI terms—may harvest from multiple “data providers” and in turn may provide access to the metadata it collects in this way.

• Resolution. A resolution service will typically take an identifier and return data about the resource identified. In the last couple of years a particular type of resolution service, based on the OpenURL, has become very important in library portal applications. An OpenURL provides a way of encoding citation data and exchanging it between services. Reference linking applications have emerged that are configured so as to resolve an OpenURL in a way that is configurable to the particular context of the user. So, in a typical scenario, given a journal article, a user might be directed to the local collection, to a particular aggregator and so on. This is a way of linking metadata for a resource with the “appropriate” copy of that resource, as determined by the library.
• Niche library transaction applications. NCIP and ISO ILL are two library-specific protocols. The latter is well established; the former is very recent. Neither is widely deployed, but each has a role in its niche area.

Library Landscape: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15