Ithaca, NY Reinforcing its place in the scientific community, the arXiv repository at Cornell University Library reached a new milestone in October 2008. Half a million e-print postings–research articles published online– now reside in arXiv, which is free and available to the public.

arXiv is the primary daily information source for hundreds of thousands of researchers in many areas of physics and related fields. Its users include the world’s most prominent researchers in science, including 53 Physics Nobel Laureates, 31 Fields Medalists and 55 MacArthur Fellows, as well as people in countries with limited access to scientific materials. The famously reclusive Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman posted the proof for the 100-year-old Poincaré Conjecture solely in arXiv.

Journalists also use the repository extensively to prepare articles for the general public about newly released scientific results. It has long stood at the forefront of the open-access movement and served as the model for many other initiatives, including the National Institute of Health‚s PubMedCentral repository, and the many institutional DSpace repositories. arXiv is currently ranked the No. 1 repository in the world by the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities.

“arXiv began its operations before the World Wide Web, search engines, online commerce and all the rest, but nonetheless anticipated many components of current Web 2.0‚ methodology,” said Cornell professor Paul Ginsparg, arXiv‚s creator. “It continues to play a leading role at the forefront of new models for scientific communication.”

arXiv encompasses publications in physics, mathematics, statistics, computer science and quantitative biology. Researchers upload their own articles to arXiv, and they are usually made available to the public the next day. A team of 113 volunteer moderators from around the world screen submissions and recommend whether they should be included in the repository.

More than 200,000 articles are downloaded from arXiv each week by about 400,000 users, and its 118,000 registered submitters live in nearly 200 countries, including Suriname, Sudan and Iraq. Fifteen countries host mirrors of the main site, which is located on Cornell‚s campus in Ithaca, N.Y.

“It represents an incredible model for scholarly communication that transcends borders, publishers and time,” said Anne R. Kenney, Cornell’s Carl A. Kroch University Librarian. “We bring operational stability and a demonstrated track record of stewardship to this invaluable open-access resource.”

Ginsparg developed arXiv in 1991, when he was working for Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. When Ginsparg came to Cornell as a faculty member in 2001, the repository came with him and is now a collaboration between Cornell University Library and Cornell‚s Information Science Program. The Library maintains the repository; information science handles research and development.

The repository is continually evolving, adding links to other repositories and RSS feeds. New facilities are being developed to ease the submission process for authors and support the addition of articles from conference management systems. The new query-and-retrieval interface allows others to build additional services onto arXiv, such as an iPhone interface.

“We’re excited to not only sustain and grow arXiv, but also to make it an integral part of the global scholarly communications infrastructure,” said arXiv manager Simeon Warner, who has been working on the project for nearly a decade.

See arXiv.org for more details.

Carissa Smith, Assistant Director of Business Operations and Web Presence, Fedora Commons, shares an overview of the recent DORSDL and Fedora EU User Group meetings held in Aarhus, Denmark in her blog.

The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) is sponsoring a mid winter symposium, ”Implementing an Institutional Repository: Benefits and Challenges.” Has your institution begun to develop, or is it considering developing, an institutional repository? If so, will there be a role for the library? Whether you answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to this question, please join us to consider the challenges, pitfalls and promises of establishing and supporting an institutional repository.

An outstanding panel of presenters will discuss thelegal and access issues as well as various IR platforms and models that will provide attendees with the means to make informed decisions regarding the introduction of an institutional repository.

Speakers:

Greg Tananbaum,
Consulting Services at the Intersection of Technology, Content & Academia
Opening and Closing presentations

Georgia Harper
Scholarly Communications Advisor
University of Texas at Austin Libraries

Leah Vanderjagt
Digital Repository Services Librarian
University of Alberta Libraries

Marilyn Billings
Scholarly Communication & Special Initiatives Librarian
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Jessica Branco Colati
Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries
Project Director, Alliance Digital Repository

Bob Gerrity
Director of Library Systems
Boston College Libraries

Robert Tansley
Engineer
Google, Inc.

 Advance registration will open on October 1, 2008 at the ALA conference website. 

Cambridge, MA Mark R. Diggery is a software engineer who is on the DSpace 2.0 development team. He provides observations and details about combined DSpace/Fedora collaborative efforts and opportunities in a recent blog post that reports  on “new synergies between DSpace and Fedora.” Diggery’s blog  is entitled “Sapere Aude!” which means “Dare to Know.”

Ithaca, NY  A cash prize of $2000, sponsored by Microsoft Research, has been awarded to Ross McFarlane, University of Liverpool, for his “OREsome” entry. The challenge prototypes were to focus on OAI-ORE functionality at the end-user level (e.g. in a browser) and the potential for the prototype to promote ORE within and beyond the repository community.

ORE wishes to thank David Flanders and other organizers of RepoCamp 2008 (held on 25 July 2008 at the Library of Congress, see D-Lib report) for coordinating the challenge; to Savas Parastatidis, David Flanders, Rob Sanderson and Tim DiLauro for judging the challenge; and to Microsoft Research for sponsorship.

Amazon’s web services customers have been alerted to early details about a new content delivery service that is currently in development and expected to be widely available before the end of the year

This new service will provide a high performance method of distributing content to end users, and will give customers low latency and high data transfer rates when they access objects. The initial release will help developers and businesses who need to deliver popular, publicly readable content over HTTP connections. The goal is to create a content delivery service that:

•Lets developers and businesses get started easily - there are no minimum fees and no commitments. You will only pay for what you actually use.
•Is simple and easy to use - a single, simple API call is all that is needed to get started delivering your content.
•Works seamlessly with Amazon S3 - this gives you durable storage for the original, definitive versions of your files while making the content delivery service easier to use.
•Has a global presence - we use a global network of edge locations on three continents to deliver your content from the most appropriate location.

You’ll start by storing the original version of your objects in Amazon S3, making sure they are publicly readable. Then, you’ll make a simple API call to register your bucket with the new content delivery service. This API call will return a new domain name for you to include in your web pages or application. When clients request an object using this domain name, they will be automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high performance delivery of your content. It’s that simple.

The service is being tested with a small group of private beta customers. If you’d like to be notified when we launch, please let Amazon know by clicking here.

Ithaca, NY Fedora Commons has grown since the non-profit organization, home of popular Fedora open source software, launched in August of 2007. To keep pace with users and developers who are participating in innovative initiatives leading to groundbreaking technical releases, as well as with those who are creating community-sponsored meeting and events, Fedora Commons is pleased to announce the release of a new homepage and a new collaborative Wiki. This new design combines direct navigation to web site hot spots at http://fedora-commons.org that are connected from the concepts of “dream,” “learn,” “build,” and “network,” and an open community-driven wiki content environment that had over 1,700 visitors in the first two weeks of it’s existence. The new Fedora Commons web presence is designed to get new users involved in the community quickly, and to support existing users and developers with fast access to key information. Your comments and feedback are most welcome.  Add feature requests and track bugs here.

London, UK  The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) will lead a Members Meeting November 6-8, 2008 at King’s College London hosted by King’s College and the Center for Computing in the Humanities. The meeting is open to all and free of charge for the TEI consortium subscribers, institutional members, and invited guests. Program and registration information is available from the web site: http://www.cch.kcl.ac.uk/cocoon/tei2008/index.html.

About TEI

Since 1994 the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a global non-profit membership organization composed of academic institutions, research projects, and scholars, has provided a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. The TEI Guidelines specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. The most popular section of the Guidelines is entitled “Gentle Introduction to XML.”

By Sandy Payette

It’s been an exciting summer with the release of Fedora 3.0, Mulgara 2.0, and the kickoff of the new collaboration of Fedora Commons and the DSpace Foundation.

In July, Michele Kimpton, Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation, and I stood on the steps of the Library of Congress to shake hands as a symbol of our commitment to collaboration. This is a very exciting development for our organizations and our communities for several reasons. First, our communities will benefit from our efforts to bring the DSpace and Fedora repository systems closer together and make them more interoperable. We have heard from many users that the ideal solution for them would be to have the “best of both” and we are committed to determining the best strategies to meet this requirement. Second, our non-profit organizations will benefit from the strategic alliance we have formed. Both the DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons are situated in an exciting and dynamic context that is influenced by both technical and social forces. With many new players in the terrain that might loosely be described as “repositories” we believe that together DSpace and Fedora can continue to provide a unique value proposition over the long haul. We both have strong communities, successful open source products, deep understanding of the challenges of digital preservation and scholarly communication, and close relationships with universities, libraries, scholars, and scientists. Working together, we will continue to serve our mission by leveraging new technologies and by developing new strategies for integrating repositories in Web-based knowledge spaces and emerging cyberinfrastructure. We look forward to lots of community participation as refine our ideas and translate them into software development plans. Check out the press release about our collaboration and stay tuned for more information over the next few months.

Fedora 3.0 Milestone

Both the core Fedora development team and committers and contributors from the wider community have done a great job in delivering Fedora 3.0. I consider this an important milestone for several reasons: (1) it streamlines the core Fedora repository service, (2) it introduces the first in a series of new features that will make the Fedora repository integrate better with new and emerging Web technologies and standards, and (3) it provides a simple starting point for creating and storing “content models” that describe different genre of digital objects.

I’ll mention a few things about better integration with the Web. With feedback from our community, we are focused on providing new lightweight interfaces for the Fedora repository that make it much easier to integrate with Web applications. Also, we would like to expose the repository in a manner that promotes interoperability using common Web protocols and formats. In Fedora 3.0, we took our first steps by introducing a new REST interface for managing the repository and supporting ingest/export using the Atom syndication format. In the next six months we will kick off a number of new innovative projects to improve the repository fit within the Web, both from the perspective of front-end access to the repository, and from the perspective of integrating Web storage providers at the back-end of the repository.

Here’s my simple explanation of the new “Content Model Architecture (CMA) unveiled in Fedora 3.0…. Given that you can register a description of what a particular type of digital object should look like (for example a “book” digital object), it’s a lot easier to take the next step, which is to assert which digital objects in the repository conform to the model. With Fedora’s new CMA features, the relationships between digital objects and their content models can be easily recorded via RDF. At a minimum, this enables you to “round up all the suspects” during times when you would like to find all the “book” objects for maintenance or migration. Better yet, you can use content models as the basis for which transformative services can be dynamic associated with digital objects.

Mulgara Semantic Triplestore

Finally, I would like to draw your attention to the new release of the Mulgara semantic triplestore, whose development is supported by Fedora Commons. This week Mulgara 2.0.5 was released. The new Mulgara 2.0 line is a major milestone that continues to advance the state of this very powerful RDF triplestore in open source. With the release of Mulgara 2.0 we now have SPARQL query support, plus an array of new features that greatly improve reliability and scalability. Check out the details at the Mulgara web site.

Edinburgh, Scotland Those interested in the likely future development of repositories will be interested in video and PowerPoint presentations of the event which are now available at http://www.repositoryfringe.org.

Repository Fringe 2008, funded by JISC and hosted by the University of Edinburgh, was held from August 31 - September 1. Researchers were on hand to exchange ideas on the best way’s for repository data to be collected, stored and made accessible.

The keynote presentation was given by Dorothea Salo, Digital Repository Librarian, University of Wisconsin, and Caveat Lector author, focused on the failure of the ‘build it and they will come’ approach to institutional repository provision (’Le IR, c’est mort. Vive le IR!’). Other presentations took up the theme of radically rethinking ideas and assumptions about what repositories are.