More and more countries are making collected efforts to provide ORCID identifiers for their researchers and encouraging implementation of ORCID iDs into the national and local research information infrastructure.
Tools for the programming archivist: ead manipulation with python and lxml
Most of you probably know what the CIP [Cataloging in Publication] data block is, even if you do not realize it. A Cataloging in Publication record (aka CIP data) is a bibliographic record prepared by the Library of Congress for a book that has not yet been published. When the book is published, the publisher includes the CIP data on the copyright page (usually the verso of the title page of print books), thereby facilitating book processing for libraries and book dealers.
The digital preservation community is a connected and collaborative one. I first heard about the Europe-based PREFORMA project last summer at a Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative meeting when we were discussing the Digital File Formats for Videotape Reformatting comparison matrix. My interest was piqued because I heard about their incorporation of FFV1 and Matroska, both included in our matrix but not yet well adopted within the federal community.
We are pleased to announce that we have issued new guidance for Federal agencies on minimum metadata requirements for transferring permanent electronic records to NARA.
Since the PREFORMA project awarded prototype phase funding to the veraPDF consortium in April 2015, the focus has been on initial targets; producing a prototype validator for PDF/A-1b files while establishing software delivery practices.
EPUB is the favorite format for e-books (ignoring Amazon, which like to be incompatible so it can lock users in). EpubCheck is the open-source industry standard for validating EPUB files. If you’re an author creating your own e-book files, you should run them against EpubCheck before releasing them. It’ll make hosting sites happier, since they’ll probably run it themselves and will like your book better if it passes. A book that passes EpubCheck will also give you fewer headaches with readers complaining it doesn’t work on their reader.
In the current digital age, data are everywhere and are continually being created, collected and otherwise captured by a range of users for a variety of applications. Curating digital content is a growing concern both for business users and academic researchers. Selecting, collecting, preserving and archiving digital assets, especially research data sets, are important steps in the research life cycle and can help expand the boundaries of research by allowing data to be reused.
Today we are featuring a guest post from an important member of the Omeka community, Jess Waggoner. She has led the creation of the Grateful Dead Archive Online and several Omeka plugins. Here, she writes about her and her team’s experiences building the Grateful Dead Archive Online with Omeka, lessons learned about that project and the needs of a large institutional library’s data coordination and workflow management, and plugins that reflect that work.
I was talking with my old friend John Kunze a little while back and he described a project that he is involved with called “Yet Another Metadata Zoo” or yamz.net. In a world of more ontologies than you can shake a stick at, it aims to provide a simple, easy-to-use mechanism for defining and maintaining individual metadata terms and their definitions.
The project explains itself like this: