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New York University
Report to the Digital Library Federation
October, 2004
A. Collections
Afghanistan Digital Library
The ultimate purpose of the project is to make available, both on
readable electronic media and on the internet, the entire publishing
output of Afghanistan, searchable by title, author, subject, and date.
The project will begin with the earliest books and proceed
chronologically. At some point, a decision may be made to expand the
scope to include rare newspapers, journals, and government documents
but at the outset the project will be limited to books.
http://afghanistandl.nyu.edu.
Database of Recorded American Music
The Database of Recorded American Music (DRAM) is a joint project of New
World Records and New York University, aimed at developing a searchable,
comprehensive collection of recordings of American music. The scope
of the database has been expanded from the holdings of New World Records
to include music from the CRI and Albany Records catalogs, as well
as a variety of other music publishers. Authentication and authorization
services for DRAM are now handled by the Internet2 Shibboleth protocol, and
the project is now providing Indiana University and Dartmouth College
with access to DRAM.
http://dram.nyu.edu/
Hemispheric Institute
The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, based at
the Tisch School of the Arts, and NYU's Digital Library program are
developing a digital video library focusing on the overlapping areas of
aesthetic and political performance in the Americas. The library, when
completed, will provide students, scholars and artists with access
to rare documentation of social performance. It is also providing
NYU Libraries with a unique opportunity to explore the issues
surrounding the preservation of digital video materials.
Richard Maass Collection
New York Historical Society, The Fales Library at NYU and NYU's Digital
Library Team are currently collaborating on a project to create a
digital library of primary source material from the American Revolutionary
War documenting events in the New York City region. Material to be
added to the library include all of the items in the Richard Maass Collection at Fales, one
of the more significant collections of material documenting activities during
America's Revolutionary War in New York State, the William Alexander manuscripts
from the New York Historical Society, and the Robert Erskine/Simeon De Witt
collection of survey maps from New York Historical Society.
B. Services
The Arch
Both NYU students and faculty continually request the ability
to identify electronic resources broadly applicable within
their discipline. In order to support this, NYU Libraries have
created The Arch, a HTTP/Z39.50 gateway which exploits enhanced
descriptive metadata within the BobCat OPAC system to allow
NYU's users to hunt for electronic resources by topic and format.
http://library.nyu.edu/collections/find_ejournals_subject.html
C. Systems
Shibbolized Darwin Streaming Server
NYU's Digital Library Team has implemented the Shibboleth
system for authentication and access control in the Database
of Recorded American Music (see above). This involved
developing a bridging mechanism to allow the credentials
established in a Shibboleth-based login taking place through
an Apache module to be carried over into the user's
interaction with the Darwin Streaming Server we are employing
for delivering streaming audio files. Both the Apache code
and our modifications to the Darwin Streaming Server are available
upon request.
http://dram.nyu.edu/
A. Projects
New Project Announcements
Digital Archive of Public Television (NDIIPP)
In collaboration with the Educational Broadcasting Corporation (EBC),
WGBH Educational Foundation, and the Public Broadcasting Service, New York University (NYU)
is participating in a project sponsored under the National Digital Information Infrastructure
Preservation Program to establish the first procedures, structures and national standards
necessary to preserve public television programs produced in digital formats. EBC and WGBH
are the two largest producers of public television content in the United States. Through PBS,
their productions are made available to audiences from coast-to-coast. Together,
these three entities produce and distribute the majority of public television
in the United States. The four partners will focus on such influential series as "Nature,"
"American Masters," "NOVA" and "Frontline," which are increasingly being produced only
in digital formats, including the new high-definition standard (HDTV). The project will
also examine issues associated with the preservation of important corollary
content, such as Web sites that accompany broadcasts.
Archiving the Political Web (NDIIPP)
Working with the California Digital Library, the University of North Texas,
San Diego Supercomputer Center, Stanford University
Computer Science Department and Sun Microsystems Inc., NYU's Digital Library Team is
seeking to develop Web archiving tools that will be used by libraries to capture,
curate and preserve collections of Web-based government and political information.
The collections will focus on local political activities and movements, such as
the California gubernatorial recall election of 2003.
Archivists' Toolkit
This project, a collaboration between the UCSD Libraries, New York University Libraries,
and the Five Colleges, Inc., is developing an open source application that
will provide archives with a turn-key system to support major archival functions
and activities. The objective is a system that will support all aspects and functions
of archival administration and description (including components for digital and
analog media asset tracking and management), and which will be easily deployable
in a range of archival repositories from small historical societies to large
multi-repository consortia such as the Online Archive of California.
http://euterpe.bobst.nyu.edu/toolkit/index.html
B. Programs
METS
NYU continues to take a leading role in the Metadata Encoding and
Transmission Standard (METS). METS has been submitted to the National
Information Standards Organization for registration. The METS editorial
board has begun to actively reach out to other standards efforts, such
as the IMS Global Consortium developing standards for courseware systems,
in order to promote and insure METS' interoperability with other relevant
document standards for research and education.
http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/
DSpace
The increasing amount of content contained within NYU's digital library
server has mandated the quick implementation of a repository system
to assist in the process of managing our content. We have selected
the DSpace software as the basis for our digital library repository.
We will be working with the DSpace Federation to try to augment
the DSpace code to add support for the enhanced descriptive, administrative
and structural metadata that libraries need to manage complex content.
Colloborating to build on Prior Work
Our experiences at the NYU Digital Library Team over the past
several years have taught us that we do not have the staff resources
sufficient to develop the various systems we need to create, manage,
disseminate and preserve content on our own. Not only our future
growth, but our survival will depend on effective collaboration with
partners, both in the DLF and outside, to combine and build upon our
various efforts to create digital library systems to support the
services we wish to provide our users. However, mechanisms for
in-depth technical collaboration on digital library systems, while
available, do not appear to have been widely used by our community,
and many institutions appear to be reluctant to share much of
their internal work. While there are some positive signs in
this regard, such as the use of SourceForge as the new home
for development the DSpace institutional repository system,
there are still many unresolved questions regarding how multiple
institutions can effectively work together on a common, large-scale
project to develop tools that work for all of us.
Colloborating with New Communities
As libraries increase their holdings of electronic media
and their use of network systems to make those holdings
available, we are increasingly finding that standards and
best practices established by other communities impinge
on our abilty to serve our patrons, and our own standards and
practices are, in turn, impinging on other organizations'
ability to do their work. Standards set for network authentication
and access control determine how we are able to securely deliver
content; systems for digital rights management directly affect
our ability to preserve material for future use; our standards
with respect to creating digital content and organizing have
a direct impact on our users' ability to take
advantage of the materials we offer, as well as on the ability of
other systems, such as eLearning and courseware software, to
easily integrate with our own. We in the library community
need to become more active participants in standards bodies
which we previously have ignored, and must do a better job
of identifying stakeholders outside our community and proactively
work to include them in discussions regarding standards and
practices which affect us all.
Need for Standards
While we have made great progress in the past several
years in developing standards for handling of digital materials,
there is still a great deal of work that needs to be done in
this arena. Technical metadata standards for audio/visual materials
are being developed, but are highly settled, and standards for
technical metadata for formats such as vector graphics,
3D images, and executables are non-existent. We also badly
need standards for preservation metadata, particularly for
maintaining an audit trail documenting a digital object's
life-cycle. While there are standards available for digital
rights & permissions information, these were for the most part not developed
by the library community (with the notable exception of the
DLF-sponsored Electronic Resource Management Initiative)
and there is a need to experiment with these standards from
other communities and see if they can be adopted for library
use.
- McDonough, Jerome. "Preservation-worthy Digital Video: or, How to Drive your
Library into Chapter 11." Proceedings of the Electronic
Media Group of the American Institute for Conservation of
Historic and Artistic Works Annual Meeting, Hilton Portland
and Executive Tower Portland, Oregon, June 9-14, 2004
http://aic.stanford.edu/sg/emg/pdfs/McDonough-EMG2004.pdf
- Reilly, Bernard, Gretchen Tuchel, James Simon, Carolyn Palaima, Kent Norsworthy and Leslie Myrick.
Political Communications Web Archiving: Addressing Typology and Timing for Selection, Preservation and Access.
http://bibnum.bnf.fr/ecdl/2003/proceedings.php?f=reilly
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