DLF Tools Registry Environmental Scan

Annotated List of Known Registries
Registry Features

1. Annotated List of Known Registries

Here we describe an inventory of known registries both internal and external to the digital library community.

Oss4Lib Applications

http://oss4lib.org/article/applications

Focus: Open source library software
Scope: “Our mission is to build better and free systems for use in libraries. Toward this end, we maintain a listing of free software and systems designed for libraries (the physical, books-on-shelves kind), and we track news about project updates or related issues of interest.”
Organization: Community resource maintained by Daniel Chudnov
Number of Entries: Unknown
Status: Active
Platform: Drupal blog application hosted by iBiblio

ECHO Tools Center

http://echo.gmu.edu/toolcenter-wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Focus: Digital tools in the humanities computing
Scope: “a Wiki that we’ve put together to build a collaborative resource to connect builders and users of digital tools. Originally built to support the online history community, the Tools Center has expanded and welcomes entries on tools for digital scholarship, archiving and preservation writ large.” Categories include Tools, Programming Languages, Standards, Implementations, and People and Institutions.
Organization: Echo Project, based at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media
Number of Entries: 58 tools
Status: Tools last updated February ‘06.
Platform: MediaWiki

Global Digital Format Registry

http://hul.harvard.edu/gdfr/

Focus: Descriptions of digital objects for preservation
Scope: “The Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR) will provide sustainable distributed services to store, discover, and deliver representation information about digital formats.”
Organization: Harvard University Library
Number of Entries (as of 12/18/06): NA
Status: In development
Platform: MediaWiki hosted by OCLC

Open Archives Initiative Service Providers

http://www.openarchives.org/service/listproviders.html

Focus: OAI-PMH Service Providers
Scope: “parties that provide services based on metadata that is harvsted using the OAI metadata harvesting protocol.”
Organization: Open Archives Initiative
Number of Entries (as of 12/18/06): 27
Status: Last updated 11/30/06
Platform: HTML pages

OCKHAM Initiative Digital Library Services Registry

http://www.ockham.org/registry.php

Focus: Application-to-application services for and by the Digital Library (DL) community
Scope: “The OCKHAM Initiative seeks to promote the development of digital libraries via collaboration between librarians and digital library researchers. By promoting simple, open approaches and standards for digital library tools, services, and content, the gap between digital library development and the adoption of digital library systems by the traditional library community will be bridged.”
Organization: maintained by Jeremy Frumkin; DLF is a named sponsor
Number of Entries (as of 12/13/06): 6
Status: Begun July, 2006.
Platform: GNU, distributed

SourceForge

http://sourceforge.net/

Focus: Hosting site for Open Source projects
Scope: “SourceForge.net has the largest repository of Open Source code and applications available on the Internet, and hosts more Open Source development products than any other site or network worldwide. SourceForge.net provides a wide variety of services to projects we host, and to the Open Source community.”
Organization: SourceForge.net is owned by OSTG, Inc. (“Open Source Technology Group”), a wholly owned subsidiary of VA Software Corporation.
Number of Entries: over 100,000
Status: Active
Platform: powered by SourceForge collaborative software development tools from VA Software

Google Projects

http://code.google.com/projects.html

Focus: Open Source projects led by Google, Inc.
Scope: A registry of open source projects underway at Google. “Code.google.com is our site for external developers interested in Google-related development. It’s where we’ll publish free source code and lists of our API services.”
Organization: Google
Number of Entries: 15
Status: Active
Platform: Homegrown

Information Environment Service Registry

http://iesr.ac.uk/

Focus: “A machine readable registry of electronic resources”
Scope: “The IESR has been developed to provide a registry of information about electronic resources that are of value to teachers, researchers and learners…The aim is to create a reliable source of information that other applications, such as portals, can freely access through machine-to-machine protocols, in order to help their end users discover resources of assistance to them.”
Organization: JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee)
Number of Entries: 281 Collections, 344 Services, 168 Agents
Status: Active
Platform: “The registry is held in an XML repository using Cheshire information retrieval software.”

University of Illinois OAI-PMH Data Provider Registry

http://gita.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/

Focus: OAI-PMH Data Providers
Scope: “We have collected Identify, ListSets, ListMetadataFormats, and sample records from all of the OAI compliant repositories we could find from various sources, added the data to a database, indexed them, and made them searchable. We have also created several reports from the data. This system is driven entirely from database queries against our database, and not from live queries to the OAI repositories.”
Organization: University of Illinois, Grainger Engineering Library
Number of Entries: 1459
Status: Active
Platform: Homegrown

University of Illinois OAI-PMH Service Provider Registry

http://gita.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/services/

Focus: OAI-PMH Service Providers
Scope: An iteration of the Open Archives Initiative Service Providers registery, much more heavily used. Consists of entries pointing to entire organizations or services. “We have collected Identify, ListSets, ListMetadataFormats, and sample records from all of the OAI compliant repositories we could find from various sources, added the data to a database, indexed them, and made them searchable.”
Organization: University of Illinois, Grainger Engineering Library
Number of Entries: 97
Status: Active
Platform: Homegrown

WorldCat Registry

http://worldcat.org/registry/institutions

Focus: Global list of library institutions
Scope: “The WorldCat Registry is a Web-based directory of libraries and library consortia. This authoritative service allows any institution to do three things: 1. Create and maintain a comprehensive institutional profile in a single, secure, Web-accessible location, 2. Share this profile internally between branches or consortia members, and externally with vendors and other third parties, electronically automating the exchange of information common to these relationships, 3. Enhance the visibility of institutional services and content, moving them closer to consumer point of need through Web services such as WorldCat.org”
Organization: OCLC
Number of Entries: Unknown
Status: Active, New
Platform: Homegrown

Programmableweb Mashups

http://www.programmableweb.com/apis

Focus: Web APIs
Scope: “APIs news, how-to, contests and comprehensive database of API resources”
Organization: ProgrammableWeb
Number of Entries: 385
Status: Active
Platform: Homegrown

2. Registry Features

This is an aggregated list of features found in the environmental scan of tool registries.

Descriptive metadata

The two registries that do the best job of organizing information by fields are Google Projects and SourceForge. Both provide the following: description (summary), ownership/license information, source code and other downloads, category/tag. SourceForge can also stores a lot of technical information in fields like database environment, operating system, UI, programming language, and so forth.

Search

Basic support for keyword based search. Some registries have advanced features such as search by field. Google Projects uses a label (or tag) kind of function, and one can search by label.

Browse by facet

Browse interface could include facets such Most Popular, Newly Added, Platform, Provider, Name.

Add/edit

Some registries permit additions and/or edit of registry entries using a web-based interface.

Discussion

A number of registries support a integrated discussion board or wiki allowing the user community to freely comment or share information on items in the registry.

Ratings/reputation

Some registries allow users to rate (e.g. 1-5 scale) the quality or usefulness of a tool. This creates incentives for tool developers to share quality tools to increase their reputation. It also helps users identify best of class tools.

Update notifications

Some registries provide a feature to “subscribe” to alerts from the developer when new versions of the tool are made available.

Usage logging

Some registries such as SourceForge track the number of downloads of a particular software. An alterative approach would be for institutions to self-identify as users of a particular tool.

Web Services interface

Some registries provide an Application Programming Interface for harvesting or querying data from the registry in XML format. Examples of interfaces include OAI-PMH and SRU/SRW.

B. DLF Tools Registry Environmental Scan