Upcoming CETIS MDR SIG meeting

The first meeting of 2008 for the Metadata and Digital Repositories SIG will be held on Tuesday, 12th February at Birkbeck, University of London. The meeting will focus on updates from projects in the JISC Repositories and preservation programme and will run from 10.30 (with registration from 10.00) to 16.00 . As ever, attendance is free and lunch is provided. For full information on the meeting, visit the meeting wiki page. To register, visit the event registration page.
The meeting includes presentations on the following topics.

SOURCE

The SOURCE project is looking at enabling bulk migration and deposit of learning objects in significant UK HE platforms, and is led by Birkbeck College.

FeedForward

FeedForward will develop a highly-usable desktop tool that aims to support a synthesis of user-created and curated content within a simple workflow. The project is being led by the University of Bolton.

Enhanced Tagging for Discovery

The Enhanced Tagging for Discovery project (EnTag) looks at investigating the combination and comparison of controlled and folksonomy approaches to semantic interoperability supporting resource discovery in repositories and digital collections. The project is led by UKOLN.

MIDESS Dissemination Day

On Friday 4th May, I attended the MIDESS Project Dissemination Day, held at the University of Leeds. The MIDESS Project, funded by JISC, aimed to explore the management of digitised content through the development of digital repository infrastructures.

Project Manager Stephen Charles (University of Leeds) began the event by talking about the management of images and multimedia using DigiTool, a commercial product for the management of digital assets in libraries and academic environments. Dr Charles explained that commercial and open source tools had been considered for the project. Dawn Petherick followed with a presentation on the management of images and multimedia using DSpace, talking about the DSpace repository system at the University of Birmingham and the issues that arose from the project. The morning was completed with a joint presentation from the London School of Economics’ Jane Secker and Marie Lagerwall who talked about the management of images and multimedia using FEDORA.

The afternoon consisted of three short presentations and a discussion session,with presentations on:

• the use of METS with FEDORA at the LSE (Marie Lagerwall)
• the use of OAI-PMH at the University of Birmingham (Dawn Petherick)
• IPR and rights issues in a repository context (Lesley Pitman, UCL)

Presentations from the day are available from http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/midess/documents.html (under ‘MIDESS Dissemination Day 4th May’).

Metadata SIG Meeting

On Monday 16th April, the JISC CETIS Metadata and Digital Repository SIG had a meeting in Manchester, focusing on the Dublin Core. Pete Johnson of Eduserv started the day by talking about the Dublin Core Abstract Model and providing a brief update on LOM->DC mapping. UKOLN’s Julie Allinson presented on the ePrints Dublin Core Application Profile with colleague Rosemary Russell following up with UKOLN’s UK DCMI affiliate work. Intrallect’s Sarah Currier introduced the audience to the Dublin Core Education Community, which led on to Rob Tice’s talk on Becta’s Vocabulary Management Services.

Files are/will be available at http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/16th_April_2007%2C_Manchester.

Tagging is del.icio.us

It’s all about tagging, now. The Internet, that is. It seems that web users are more interested in tagging content than just plain old searching, if this BBC Technology report is anything to go by, which claims 28% of Americans are tagging web content. According to the report, sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us are gaining popularity as people become more aware of Web 2.0-themed content, something backed up by December 2006′s report on increasing Bebo and MySpace popularity.

A del.icio.us account has been created to use a web feed for OAI-PMH-related bookmarks, which will be linked into an upcoming wiki version of an OAI-PMH briefing paper.