The following new material has been posted on the DLF website
1. Website for The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's e-journals archiving
program.
2. Report on a meeting to initiate work on a service that registers
digitized books and serials.
3. Draft scheme for recording technical, structural, and administrative
information (metadata) about digital objects
4. Report on meetings convened to initiate work on a shared web-based
cataloguing tool for visual resources.
5. Report on a meeting convened to identify standard criteria for assessing
the quality of digital images and digital imaging systems
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1. Website for The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's e-journals archiving
program.
The DLF is maintaining a website for a program funded by The Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation and involving seven grant-funded research libraries in
processes designed to plan the development of e-journal repositories. The
seven libraries participating in the process are the New York Public Library
and the university libraries of Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Pennsylvania,
Stanford, and Yale. The site contains original project proposals (where
available), working papers, and occasional progress reports on the planning
projects (http://www.clir.org/diglib/preserve/ejp.htm)
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2. Report on a meeting to initiate work on a service that registers
digitized books and serials.
The DLF takes a growing interest in helping to define and facilitate the
development of key "infrastrutural services" that are required by digital
libraries but beyond the capacity of any one of them to develop. In April
2001 it convened a small group of specialists to examine the potential uses
to which a registry of digitized books and serials might be put and, if
deemed appropriate, to initiate a planning process to guide the development
of such a service. The group concluded that "a service that records
information about digitized books and journals may be a key part... of an
evolving network of organizations and services that support the efficient
and responsible stewardship of our cultural heritage, all formats, old and
new, and the economical and effective development of high-quality scholarly
collections." They characterized a registry service, outlined potential uses
and benefits, and defined several practical next steps necessary to its
development. A report on the meeting is currently available at
http://www.clir.org/diglib/collections/reg/regsum.htm
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3. Draft scheme for recording technical, structural, and administrative
information (metadata) about digital objects
The DLF has initiated a process to identify standard structural,
administrative and technical metadata as needed to successfully,
consistently, and interoperably manage digital objects. The process builds
on and extend the work of the Making of America II project that developed a
well-documented set of metadata elements for a limited range of digital
objects. The draft scheme is available from
http://www.clir.org/diglib/standards/mets.xsd. A report on the meeting is
available from http://www.clir.org/diglib/standards/metssum.pdf.
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4. Report on meetings convened to initiate work on a shared web-based
cataloguing tool for visual resources.
As part of its work facilitating the development of essential
infrastructural services, the DLF launched an initiative to specify the
benefits and requirements of a shared cataloguing tool for visual resources.
Reports on meetings convened in the course of the investigation are
available from http://www.clir.org/diglib/collections.htm.
The DLF's work on the shared cataloguing tool has been subsumed by ArtSTOR,
an initiative launched recently by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. ArtSTOR
is “an independent not-for-profit organization that will develop, ‘store’,
and distribute electronically digital images and related scholarly materials
for the study of art, architecture, and other fields in the humanities”.
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5. Report on a meeting convened to identify standard criteria for assessing
the quality of digital images and digital imaging systems
Building in part on work on imaging practices conducted with the Research
Libraries Group (RLG), the DLF is investigating methods for evaluating the
quality of digital images. Such methods will help assess claims that are
made about images (e.g. by their producers or vendors). The report is
available from http://www.clir.org/diglib/standards.htm
