JISC has issued a calls for support of Discovery Open Metadata Principles.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Twelve national organisations have signed up to a new set of open metadata principles and now JISC is inviting all publicly funded organisations including universities, colleges, libraries, museums and archives to make the same commitment. . . .

The organisations that have already signed up are: British Library, BUFVC, Collections Trust, Digital Curation Centre, Edina, JISC, Mimas, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Owen Stephens Consultancy, RIN, RLUK, Royal Holloway University of London, SCONUL, The National Archives, UKOLN, University College London, and University of Southampton.

| Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 | Institutional Repository Bibliography | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

The Library of Congress has released "Response of the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, and the National Library of Medicine to the RDA Test Coordinating Committee."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, and the National Library of Medicine are pleased to issue a statement from the Executives of the three libraries regarding the Report and Recommendations of the U.S. RDA Test Coordinating Committee on the implementation of RDA—Resource Description & Access. This statement and the Executive Summary of the Committee's Report and Recommendations are being issued to allow interested parties sufficient time to review prior to the upcoming Annual Conference of the American Library Association in New Orleans, June 23 -28.

Read more about it at "Report and Recommendations of the U.S. RDA Test Coordinating Committee: Executive Summary."

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography |

The Library of Congress has issued "Transforming Our Bibliographic Framework: A Statement from the Library of Congress (May 13, 2011)."

Here's an excerpt:

The Associate Librarian of Congress for Library Services, Deanna Marcum, is leading an initiative at the Library to analyze the present and future environment, identify the components of the framework to support our users, and plan for the evolution from our present framework to the future—not just for the Library of Congress, but for all institutions that depend on bibliographic data shared by the Library and its partners. The Library of Congress has invested considerable resources in the development of broadly implemented encoding standards such as MARC 21, as well as cataloging standards and vocabularies such as the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd Edition (AACR2), RDA, and the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). Spontaneous comments from participants in the US RDA Test show that a broad cross-section of the community feels budgetary pressures but nevertheless considers it necessary to replace MARC 21 in order to reap the full benefit of new and emerging content standards. The Library now seeks to evaluate how its resources for the creation and exchange of metadata are currently being used and how they should be directed in an era of diminishing budgets and heightened expectations in the broader library community. . . .

The Library of Congress's process will be fully collaborative. We will consult our partners and customers in the metadata community, standards experts in and out of libraries, and designers and builders of systems that make use of library metadata. We intend to host meetings during conferences of the American Library Association, specialized library associations, and international organizations, as well as special “town hall” meetings open to the metadata community, to gather input from all interested parties. We plan to establish an electronic discussion group for constant communication during the effort of reshaping our bibliographic framework, and we expect to host a series of invitational meetings of experts and stakeholders in 2012 and 2013.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

Gail Steinhart has published "DataStaR: A Data Sharing and Publication Infrastructure to Support Research" in AgInfo Worldwide.

Here's an excerpt:

DataStaR, a Data Staging Repository (http://datastar.mannlib.cornell.edu/) in development at Cornell University's Albert R. Mann Library (Ithaca, New York USA), is intended to support collaboration and data sharing among researchers during the research process, and to promote publishing or archiving data and high-quality metadata to discipline-specific data centers and/or institutional repositories. Researchers may store and share data with selected colleagues, select a repository for data publication, create high quality metadata in the formats required by external repositories and Cornell's institutional repository, and obtain help from data librarians with any of these tasks. To facilitate cross-domain interoperability and flexibility in metadata management, we employ semantic web technologies as part of DataStaR's metadata infrastructure. This paper describes the overall design of the system, the work to date with Cornell researchers and their data sets, and possibilities for extending DataStaR for use in international agriculture research.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

Rachel Howard of the University of Louisville Libraries' Special Collections department has released the CONTENTdm Cookbook: Recipes for Metadata Entry for UofL Digital Initiatives.

Here's an excerpt:

This document is intended as a guide to data entry and descriptive cataloging for University of Louisville (UofL) digital projects using CONTENTdm software. It will be updated as modifications in the software and/or metadata schema necessitate. CONTENTdm’s metadata is based on the Dublin Core Metadata Schema. A UofL Metadata Working Group drafted initial guidelines based on The Collaborative Digitization Program (CDP)’s Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices, which was further refined by the CONTENTdm Metadata Working Group’s Best Practices for CONTENTdm and other OAI-PMH compliant repositories creating shareable metadata (http://www.oclc.org/gateway/support/best_practices.pdf).

As we began to work with CONTENTdm, we felt it necessary to adjust CDP’s recommendations to accommodate the capabilities, limitations, and additional field properties presented by the software. We also modified some of the field labels to make more sense to the end-user, and put the fields in an order that highlighted the descriptive metadata at the top of the record and relegated the more administrative and technical information at the bottom.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

The National Research Foundation has released Managing Digital Collections: A Collaborative Initiative on the South African Framework.

Here's an excerpt:

The objective of this Framework is to provide high-level principles for planning and managing the full digital collection life cycle. It aims to

• provide an overview of some of the major components and activities involved in creating good digital collections
• provide a sense of the landscape of digital collections management
• identify existing resources that support the development of sound local practices
• encourage community participation in the ongoing development of best practices for digital collection building
• contribute to the benefits of sound data management practices, as well as the goals of data sharing and long term access
• introduce data management and curation issues
• assist cultural heritage organisations to create and manage complex digital collections
• assist funding organisations who wish to encourage and support the development of good digital collections
• advocate the use of internationally-created appropriate open community standards to ensure quality and to increase global interoperability for better exchange and re-use of data and digital content.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |

DataCite has released the DataCite Metadata Scheme for the Publication and Citation of Research Data, Version 2.0.

Here's an excerpt:

The DataCite Metadata Scheme is a list of core metadata properties chosen for the accurate and consistent identification of data for citation and retrieval purposes, along with recommended use instructions. At a minimum, the mandatory metadata scheme properties must be provided at the time of identifier registration. Data centres and other submitters may also choose to use the optional properties to identify their data more clearly. This metadata scheme can fulfill several key functions in support of the larger goals of DataCite. Primarily these are:

• recommending a standard citation format for datasets, based on a small number of properties required for identifier registration;
• providing the basis for interoperability with other data management schemas;
• promoting dataset discovery with optional properties allowing for flexible description of the resource, including its relationship to other resources;
• and, laying the groundwork for future services (e.g., discovery) through the use of controlled terms from both a DataCite vocabulary and external vocabularies as applicable. The DataCite vocabularies will be administered by the DataCite Metadata Supervisor who will establish and publicize procedures for submitting changes.

| Digital Scholarship |

OCLC has released MARCView and MARConvert as open source software.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

OCLC and Systems Planning are pleased to announce the donation of MARCView and MARConvert to OCLC, and OCLC’s release of MARCView and MARConvert as open source software under the Apache 2.0 license.

MARCView and MARConvert software, developed by Systems Planning of Bethesda, Maryland, USA, are widely-used applications designed to assist librarians and developers working with MARC records. MARCView provides a user-friendly interface to navigate and display individual MARC, MARCXML and UNIMARC records. MARConvert™ supports the conversion of bibliographic or authority records into or out of MARC21, UNIMARC or MARCXML and can also convert MARC records from one character set to another.

Ewa Deelman et al. have self-archived "Metadata and Provenance Management" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

Scientists today collect, analyze, and generate TeraBytes and PetaBytes of data. These data are often shared and further processed and analyzed among collaborators. In order to facilitate sharing and data interpretations, data need to carry with it metadata about how the data was collected or generated, and provenance information about how the data was processed. This chapter describes metadata and provenance in the context of the data lifecycle. It also gives an overview of the approaches to metadata and provenance management, followed by examples of how applications use metadata and provenance in their scientific processes.

OCLC Research has released Over, Under, Around, and Through: Getting Around Barriers to EAD Implementation.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This report frames obstacles that archivists have experienced adopting Encoded Archival Description (EAD). It also suggests pathways to help archivists get out of the ruts, around the roadblocks and on the road to success.

Written by Michele Combs from Syracuse University, Mark A. Matienzo from Yale University, Lisa Spiro from Rice University and Merrilee Proffitt from OCLC Research, the objective of the report is to communicate EAD's value as a key element of successful archival information systems and help archivists overcome potential barriers to its implementation. This work is an output of the Barriers to Using EAD project undertaken by OCLC Research and the RLG Partnership.