Professional Development

Lynn, Mary Beth, Wanda, Patty, Jean-Paul, Kaeley, Barry, Chris B. Lauren C., Lauren P, Kevin, Tim and Erik attended the session which was a presentation on how Georgia Tech (Tyler Walters) and Clemson(Emily Gore) approach digitization and digital priorities.

Emily covered what Clemson is doing and presented on her work building a digital initiatives program including MetaArchive, Open LOCKSS, the development of a written preservation plan and a goal to participate in the development community. She briefly covered their beginning use of Archivist Toolkit. She talked about their use of grants and regional grant/collaborations to digitize resources, work with partners to preserve digital resources, and run a ‘regional scan center.’ She mentioned their work to plan a fedora repository and discussed a project called <a href=”http://www.intelligentriver.org/”>Intelligent River</a>, a site that focuses on archiving real-time hydrologic data and data sets in south carolina.

Tyler Walters talked about the Galileo knowledge repository (http:/GKR.library.gatech.edu) which will focus on providing IR hosting via Dspace, workshops, IR services and a collaborative metadata repository. He also talked about Virtual Research Environments which are based on drupal/fedora sites called islandora (http://vre.upei.ca/dev/islandora) that has been developed by the University of Prince Edward Island. Georgia Tech is going to try out a similar approach. He also discussed e-publishing services offered by the library (Epage @ Tech, The Tower).

Tyler also talked about search & discovery approaches including Vufind, metalib (Xerces Xserver), and Tsquared (Univeristy Sakai system) - a project to integrate metalib into Sakai. As he discussed their architecture he mentioned a sun infinite archive solution, sun storagetek 2540 disk array (16 TB), SL 500 Tape library (529 TB), Managed by Sun’s SAM server and ZFS software.

Next ASERL Lunch-n-Learn on November 12th with Mary Molinaro (U-Kentucky) and Toby Graham (U-Georgia)!

In September and October there will be three Sun Webinars that look at cloud computing and its role in institutional repositories. If you enjoyed reading about the Berkman Webinar then these are for you!

• New DuraSpace ‘Stack’ Releases: Fedora Commons, DSpace, and Mulgara
  Wednesday, September 30th, 2009, 1:00pm - 2:00pm
• SPARC OA Week Kick-off Presentation and Presentation of DuraSpace OA Week Winners
  Wednesday, October 14th, 2009, 12:00pm - 1:00pm
• Repositories in the Cloud: How to Participate in the DuraCloud Pilot Program
  Wednesday, October 28th, 2009, 1:00pm - 2:00pm

All sessions will be held in the Bridge Screening Room.

On September 25, I took part in an hour-long webinar that detailed the new ONIX for Serials standard (ONIX is an abbreviation for ONline Information eXchange). It is a joint project developed by EDItEUR from the UK and the NISO from the United States, and is the latest in a series of standards to create a uniform method of information exchange. Earlier standards, such as ONIX for Books, have been well received by participants across the industry.

ONIX for Serials is a new metadata standard that was designed for communications regarding serials subscriptions between all or some of the following: libraries, publishers, subscription agents, hosting servers, consortia, aggregators, content providers (Serials Solutions, for example), and link resolvers. Based on the ONIX for Books standard, it relates information dealing with subscription data and all of its sources and formats and presents it in an XML message that would be readable across these control systems.

Three primary formats have been developed for the ONIX for Serials standard.

1. SPS (Serials Products and Subscriptions). These are standard messages to help distribute information to evaluate packages, titles a library is currently receiving in its catalog, and product lists from publishers and agents.
2. SOH (Serials Online Holdings). This standard pushes information about available issues directly into library systems without using link resolvers, populates A-Z lists, and generates online holdings for consortia arrangements.
3. SRN (Serials Release Notification). This format can become a method to know when issues are published for e-journals in the catalog and link resolvers; to remove doubt about delays in print issue delivery; and to announce the publication of an article before their respective journals are completely published.

In addition, there is an ONIX Serials Coverage Statement that displays complete enumeration and chronology data for all serial formats, regardless of format or type. Because of its nature, this is a complex data set.

As each format of ONIX for Serials has become available, they have been incorporated into the regular processes of various companies. Early adopters of the SOH format have been TDNet, Serials Solutions, EBSCO, Innovative and OCLC. The SPS and SRN formats are currently in the pilot stage, and compatibility with companies like SirsiDynix and Ex Libris are still on the proverbial drawing board. Further, compatibility with open source catalogs has not yet been addressed, but the nature of open source could change this in the near future.

ONIX for Serials could have tremendous implications across the library community. The key to expanding its growth, mentioned by the webinar’s presenters, was to encourage more companies to sign on as partners.

Please visit www.editeur.org for more information.