OpenETD Announced

The Rutgers University Libraries have announced the release of OpenETD, a tool for electronic theses and dissertations.

The Rutgers University Libraries are pleased to announce the availability of OpenETD, a web-based software application for managing the submission, approval, and distribution of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). OpenETD is the open source release of the Rutgers University Libraries. RUetd application and will be maintained on the RUetd annual release schedule. Releases will include fixes for known problems and recommendations for enhancements received from internal projects and the user community at large.

OpenETD can be used as either a standalone ETD submission system, or it can be implemented as a component of an institutional repository by using its METS/XML export functionality. Using the METS/XML export functionality, native to OpenETD, implementers can export acquired ETDs to their local institutional repositories for preservation and presentation purposes.

Open Harvester Systems

The Public Knowledge Project has a new version of the Open Harvester Systems, a free metadata indexing tool.

This is a major rewrite of numerous parts of the Harvester code, including metadata storage and indexing. It increases indexing flexibility to support plugin-based indexing, including Lucene/SOLR support. It also adds OAI Data Provider support, including the potential to convert between metadata formats (currently from various formats into Dublin Core).

Seen on DigitalKoans.

Older News Items

Gary D. Price over at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker brought some news items to my attention.

Canadiana Authorities searches over 660,000 name, title and name/title authority records derived from the AMICUS database.

Helping online communities to semantically enrich folksonomies by Freddy Limpens, Fabien Gandon, and Michel Buffa.

This paper presents our approach to collaborative and semiautomated semantic structuring of folksonomies. Tags freely provided by users of online communities are not semantically linked, and this hinders signi cantly the potentials for browsing and exploring these data. We propose a sociotechnical system combining automatic handlings of tags, using state of the art algorithm, and user friendly interfaces designed after a careful analysis of the usage of our target communities. Much like folksonomies, our socio-technical system lets each user maintain his own view while still bene ting from others contributions. As a complement to similar approaches, our approach supports conicting point of views all along the life-cycle of semantically enriched folksonomies.

The March/April 2010 Issue of CLIR Issues (no. 74) includes By Any Other Name by CLIR President, Chuck Henry. Gary says it has "Some interesting thoughts on the role and importance of cataloging and classification in the digital age."

Exposing OAI Content

Image via CrunchBase

News from OCLC about their OAI project.

A pilot of the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway is currently underway, which allows you to upload the metadata of your digital content to WorldCat from any OAI-compliant digital repository. (Previously, the Gateway was only integrated with CONTENTdm repositories.)

Once your metadata is in WorldCat, your collections are more visible and discoverable by end users who search WorldCat.org, WorldCat Local and WorldCat Local "quick start", as well as Google, Yahoo! and other popular Web sites.

Participants in the Gateway pilot are provided online training, access to documentation and e-mail support to help get started. If you are interested in participating in the pilot, please e-mail us at digitalcollections@oclc.org and include:

1. contact information,
2. OAI-repository base URL,
3. OCLC symbol, if available.

Coming in July, OCLC will make the Gateway available to all institutions and it will support the upload of metadata from all OAI-compliant repositories.

World Wide review of "ISBD: International Standard Bibliographic Description -- 2010 consolidated edition"

IFLA seeks comments on the ISBD: International Standard Bibliographic Description.

After more than two years since the publication of the ISBD preliminary consolidated edition, 2007, we now present for your review the following draft. This draft takes into account suggestions received from the previous worldwide review of the preliminary consolidated edition, suggestions that were not resolved at that time, as well as many other issues.

In order to facilitate review, the draft is presented in a marked-up file and also in a clean file, accompanied by a list of revisions, available at http://www.ifla.org/en/news/worldwide-review-of-isbd. Comments should be based on the clean draft and refer to the line numbers and stipulation numbers in that draft.