Storage and maintenance of records

Tom Worthington FACS HLM

For the course Electronic Document Management

Capturing Australia's Scholarly Output

Thought experiment

A researcher, and ARC grant recipient, at an Australian university completes an article

Following peer review the article is accepted by an international proprietary journal

A post print copy of the article is also lodged with the university's open access digital repository ...

From: "Governmental Policy Frameworks", Dr Evan Arthur, Department of Education, Science and Training, 2004, URL: http://www.humanities.org.au/NSCF/PowerPoints/NSCF%20(Arthur).ppt

At a roundtable of "Changing Research Practices in the Digital Information and Communication Environment", June 2004 at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra, a Thought experiment was conducted.

Automated Capture

... These actions lead to automatic updating of

the researcher's open access publication list

the university's open access record of staff research activity

the ARC's open access record of research activity related to its grants

a gateway site providing sophisticated, industry tailored access to research activities in Australian research institutions

the publicly accessible data warehouse which provides input into quality assessments of Australian research institutions

From: "Governmental Policy Frameworks", Dr Evan Arthur, Department of Education, Science and Training, 2004, URL: http://www.humanities.org.au/NSCF/PowerPoints/NSCF%20(Arthur).ppt

It was proposed that lodging the article would automatically update archives with the publication details.

Such a system could be demonstrated with the enhanced Xpub prototype. Articles would then be in a format suitable for repositories.

DSPACE

DSpace is an open source software platform that enables institutions to:

capture and describe digital works using a submission workflow module

distribute an institution's digital works over the web through a search and retrieval system

preserve digital works over the long term

From: "DSpace System Documentation", Tansley, Mick Bass, Margret Branschofsky, Greg McClellan, David Stuve, Version: 1.1.1-1, 17-Sep-2003, MIT and Hewlett Packard, URL: http://dspace.org/technology/system-docs/introduction.html

The "thought experiment" can simplified if an article to be lodged already includes the required metadata embedded in it. This metadata can automatically populate the repository.

The step of lodging the article can be eliminated, if the article (with metadata) is available from the publisher's repository. This would require a list of accepted publications to be harvested automatically to be kept. Such a list and harvest system is used by the Australian Government to create the index for its web sites.

DSpace has been implemented by Universities. and searches of other institutions are possible However, the limiting factor is the manual work needed to import information to the system.

RSS and Atom

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>ACM Queue</title>
<link>http://www.acmqueue.com/</link>
<description>Tomorrow's Computing Today</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<item>
<title>Samba Does Windows-to-Linux Dance</title>
<link>http://acmqueue.com/?...pid=171</link>
<description>Mounting remote Linux ...</description>
</item>

From: "RSS feed", Queue magazine, ACM, 2004, URL: http://acmqueue.com/rss.rdf

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a Web content syndication format usually used for news items. Atom (IETF RFC 4287), provides a more advanced, standardised and feature rich syndication format than RSS.

OAI Static Repository

<ListRecords metadataPrefix="oai_dc">
    <oai:record> 
      <oai:header>
        <oai:identifier>oai:arXiv:cs/0112017...
        <oai:datestamp>2001-12-14</oai:datestamp>
      </oai:header>
      <oai:metadata>
        <oai_dc:dc ...
          <dc:title>Using Structural Metadata ...
          <dc:creator>Dushay, Naomi</dc:creator>
          <dc:subject>Digital Libraries</dc:subject> 
          <dc:description>With the increasing ...
        </oai_dc:dc>
      </oai:metadata>
    </oai:record>

From: "Specification for an OAI Static Repository and an OAI Static Repository Gateway Protocol", Version 2.0 of 2002-06-14, URL: http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-static-repository.htm

OAI Static Repository is a more complete (and complex) XML format designed for digital archives. The details of a list of published documents is provided in a static file which can be harvested by a remote system.

More Information

For the course Electronic Document Management
This document is available at: http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/electronic_document_management/maintenance.shtml

Slides for these notes are also available.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.