Digital Library Standards and Practices
The DLF will identify, document, organizationally endorse, and
promote adoption of those standards and best practices that
support the effective acquisition, interchange, persistence, and
assessment of digital library collections and services. These
pages open out onto work in this area.
Contents
1. Standards and best practices endorsed by
the DLF
2. Previous Work
- Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard
(METS).
- During the past few years, the DLF has supported work on
mechanisms for describing technical, structural, and
administrative characteristics of digital objects. Initial
recommendations about technical, structural, and administrative
metadata emerged from the Making of
America II initiative. In 2001, these were refined and
extended by a DLF working group into a more inclusive "Metadata
Encoding and Transmission Scheme" (METS). Work of the initiative
is fully documented on a website that is being maintained by the
Library of Congress at http://www.loc.gov/mets/. The
site includes the METS schema (in XML), an overview and tutorial,
and examples of METS applications. The planning
document that framed the initial METS meeting and a report on that meeting are also
available.
- The Open Archives Initiative.
- The DLF is pleased to support the Open Archives Initiative
(OAI) - an
international initiative that is developing a technical framework
for facilitating the efficient dissemination of content via the
network. DLF support takes two forms. More information about OAI is available here.
- Standards for electronic resource management
- DLF-Sponsored NISO White Paper:
The
Exchange of Serials Subscription Information by Ed
Jones.
Do we need a standard for the exchange of serials
subscription information? This new White Paper reviews the
current state-of the-art, identifies opportunities and barriers,
and presents several recommendations. You are invited to comment
on this report.
- Libraries (particularly academic libraries) are investing
major portions of their acquisitions dollars in electronic
information resources. As these electronic collections grow they
are becoming increasingly difficult to manage and few existing
library management systems provide tools to address contract
management, umbrella subscriptions, and license terms. Some
libraries are investing in local development of control
databases, while others are waiting for vendor-supplied
solutions. At this relatively early stage NISO and the DLF want to begin the
process of developing a standard set of data definitions and
common XML schema, encompassing names, definitions, and semantic
relationships for elements related to identification, access and
licensing of these resources. An initial
workshop was held on May 10, 2002 in Chicago, and the White
Paper (above) published on September 30th 2002.
- Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS). Framework of Guidance for
Building Good Digital Collections
- In spring/summer 2001, the DLF contributed to a forum
convened by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
to develop a framework
for considering and promoting standards and good practices as may
be adopted by the library community to guide the development of
good (that is persistent and interoperable) digital collections.
After review, the DLF has endorsed the framework in a statement
that is available from http://www.diglib.org/standards/imlsframe.htm.
- Benchmarking digital reproductions of printed monographs
and serials
- Libraries and others are digitizing increasing quantities of
printed material for online access without agreement on any
desirable level of imaging quality. The DLF has identified and
endorsed a specification that its members deem acceptable as the
minimum necessary for digitally reformatted monographs and
serials intended as faithful reproductions of the underlying
source materials. The benchmark focuses largely on format
specifications. It is also currently reviewing a specification of
the functions a digital master must minimally support, as a means
of providing guidance about what metadata must be associated with
it. Widespread adoption of the benchmark will help users and
libraries alike. Users will have more confidence in the fidelity
of digital reproductions that are available to them. And
libraries will produce and maintain reproductions with confidence
that expensive re-digitization will not become necessary. Digital
reproductions meeting at least the benchmarks' minimum
specifications will remain viable even as reproduction techniques
improved. Also, because such objects will have well-known,
consistent properties, they will support a wide variety of uses
(including uses not possible with printed texts). Additionally,
widespread adoption of the benchmark is an essential first step
for libraries that wish to investigate whether they can manage
and preserve print materials more effectively by relying more
heavily on digital reproductions for access.
The benchmark as endorsed by the DLF is available from http://www.diglib.org/standards/bmarkfin.htm.
Draft recommendations
about a digital master's required functions are also available.
These recommendations are currently being reviewed by the DLF. A
case for the benchmark's adoption is available in an article
in RLG's DigiNews. A report on the meeting that initially defined
the benchmark is also available from http://www.diglib.org/standards/presreformatsum.htm.
- DLF Electronic Resource Management Initiative
- This DLF-sponsored project is developing common
specifications and tools for managing the license agreements,
related administrative information, and internal processes
associated with collections of licensed electronic
resources.
- Guide to Good Practice: Cataloging Standards for
Describing Cultural Objects and Images
- The DLF joined the Getty Grant
Program in sponsoring the Visual Resources Association (VRA) to review and evaluate
existing data content standards and current practice in order to
compile a manual, Cataloguing Cultural Objects, that can be used to describe, document, and
catalog cultural objects and their visual surrogates.
The original proposal describing the work is available here.
- The
Liblicense model licensing agreement
- Resulting from a initiative funded by CLIR and DLF and led by
Ann Okerson at Yale University, the license attempts to reach
consensus on the basic terms of contracts to license digital
information between university libraries and academic publishers.
It benefits from the contributions of numerous college and
university librarians, lawyers and other university officials
responsible for licensing, as well as significant input from
representatives of the academic publishing community. The
Liblicense initiative also supplies valuable information
resources for those involved in licensing information content
from academic publishers including Liblicense software. Operating
with Windows and NT, this freely available software
systematically queries librarians (or producers) concerning the
details of the information to be licensed and, based on that
input, produces a draft license agreement. The draft license
agreement can then be sent to information publishers (or
customers) to serve as the basis for further negotiations for
license agreements with acceptable terms.
- TEI text encoding in
libraries, Version 1
New -- a thorough revision, expansion, and migration to XML of these popular Guidelines is underway (2004), under the direction of Perry Willett (University of Michigan). - Version 1 of these guidelines grew out of a workshop
convened to explore the use of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
and XML in libraries. They make recommendations pertaining to the
application of the TEI Guidelines and particularly "best
practices" for the encoding of electronic texts developed for
different purposes. The guidelines have been endorsed and are in
use by leading text centers in the US and Europe.
- Methods to evaluate the quality of images and imaging
systems
- Building in part on work on imaging
practices conducted Research Libraries Group (RLG), the DLF
hosted a meeting to evaluate methods for evaluating the quality
of images and image systems in order to determine whether common
evaluation criteria might be developed to guide assessment in any
domain. Both summary (PDF)
and detailed (HTML) reports
of the meeting are available.
- Z39.50
- Z39.50 is an
international standard search and retrieval protocol that has
been widely adopted by libraries as a means of integrating access
to information maintained in distributed databases. Because the
standard has become so important within the library community,
the DLF in October 2000 appointed a representative to liaise with
the ZIG, to attend its meetings, and to report on matters arising
there. Reports are available for ZIG meetings held in December 2000.
- Guides to quality
in visual resource imaging
- Five guides issued in July 2000 by the DLF and the Research
Libraries Group (RLG) are
designed to serve the growing community of museums, archives, and
research libraries that are turning to digital conversion to
provide greater access to their visual resources as well as to
help preserve the original materials. The guides range from
project planning to scanner selection, considerations for imaging
systems, digital master quality, and masters' storage, and share
the experience and knowledge of leaders in the field. In addition
to providing advice based on the uses to which the images will be
put and the technology now available, they also flag areas where
further research and testing are needed.
- Archival authority
control
- Report of a meeting
involving an international group of archivists to develop a
standard encoding format for the recording and exchange of
archival authority information.
- The Making of America,
part II. Structural metadata
- Structural Metadata. The project, led by UC Berkeley and
including Cornell, NYPL, Penn State, and Stanford focused on
special collections and the linkages between encoded finding aid
descriptions of the collections and digitized versions of
collection objects. In support of the planning phase of the
project, DLF commissioned a white
paper describing a method for capturing structural metadata
for digitized materials in the context of a general service model
for different genres of digitized archival materials. The project
itself moved into an implementation phase with funding from NEH.
It has produced a variety of tools to support the
capture of administrative and structural metadata during the
creation of digitized archival materials, the transmission of
administrative and structural metadata regarding such materials,
and the display of digitized materials to archive users.
- Making of
America, part IV: The American voice, 1850-1870
- Although not a DLF project per se, MOA IV, conducted
at the University of Michigan builds on previous DLF-sponsored
efforts in this area. It establishes benchmarks and guidelines
for the provision of online access to preservation-quality
digital books. The effort uses the Making of America initiative
as a foundation for validating, elaborating, and documenting
methods employed by University of Michigan in the initial
project. Those methods, combining sound, standards-based
approaches with highly functional online retrieval mechanisms,
have been demonstrated to be cost-effective and to meet a wide
range of user needs.
return to top >> |
