Digital libraries in the Arts and Humanities � Current practices and future possibilities

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) Digital libraries in the Arts and Humanities Current practices and future possibilities Tobias Blanke (tobias.blanke@kcl.ac.uk) Stuart Dunn (stuart.dunn@kcl.ac.uk) Alastair Dunning (alastair.dunning@ahds.ac.uk)

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) Changing nature of Arts and Humanities Research

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) Changing nature of Arts and Humanities research • Extended re-use of research results and other resources created in research processes • Dynamic multidisciplinary teams • Outsourcing of routine tasks to computer resources • Better management of the scientific workflow • Knowledge-based support for activities

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) Changing nature of A&H research • Increasingly collaborative and distributed across various physical locations • More and more data-centric, with large amount of data available in digital formats • Multi-disciplinary and problem oriented • Distributed datasets: A central service to deal with arts and humanities data like the UK’s Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) is needed

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) New research support challenges Technologies and methodologies

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) New research support technologies • E-Science and Grid technologies • Service-oriented architecture • On-demand resource creation and consumption • Dynamic service integration • Highly complex information object technologies integrating several metadata standards and documents • Automated annotation pipelines

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) E-Science: It’s People all about building bridges… Data • Grids as a basic technology to allow allow Computation virtual computing across “admin domains” – Virtual digital libraries, virtual museums, virtual observatories • Technology that was first adopted in sciences

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) E-Science: Grids A Grid: • Coordination of distributed resources • Open, general- purpose protocols • Non-trivial quality of service

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) Grids: Foundation of e-Research computers software Grid instruments sensor nets Shared data archives colleagues Diagram derived from Ian Foster’s slide

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) Arts and humanities e-Science • Data challenge: – the ratio of digital to non-digital content creation is now very high. – data is disparate, dispersed, often fuzzy, incomplete and not interoperable. • Interoperability challenge – Highly diverse metadata standards • Convergence in terms of data formats, metadata, interfaces

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) Changing nature of the AHDS Towards a distributed digital library for the active support of A&H research

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) AHDS currently • The AHDS exists as a central service dealing with executive management and several distributed subject centres • Executive is based at King’s College London, and there are five additional regionally dispersed centres: – Archaeology in York – History in Colchester – Visual Arts in Farnham – Literature, Language and Linguistics in Oxford – Performing Arts in Glasgow

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) AHDS currently • Centres organize the deposits for their subject area • Centres send Archival Information Packages (AIP), Dissemination Information Packages (DIP) to the Executive where they are validated and stored in a digital library for digital objects in the arts and humanities • Reference Model for Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS)

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) AHDS as a distributed digital library • Local centres are the experts on the data they preserve • Instead of storing the data centrally, why not where the experts are and keep it locally? • Create a distributed library of equal peers by using e-Science technologies • Virtualize the organisation of the AHDS

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) The AHDS as a virtual organization

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) The AHDS as a virtual organization Virtual organisation (Foster/Kesselman): A set of institutions and/or individuals defined by resource sharing policies Linked via advanced networking technologies (SRB, Globus Toolkit, etc.)

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) VO: Some initial challenges • Sharing relationships can vary over time – Access rights – Resources involved – Participants • Peer-to-peer • Different usage of the same resource, no a priori definition • Implementation must be flexible and user controlled in terms of varying policies, identities etc. • Delegation of authority

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) Technology to create a distributed AHDS: Storage Resource Broker SRB • SRB will create a distributed logical file system for an easy access to data and support for management, collaboration, transfer and dissemination of humanities data • Combining data sets from different sites needs a common vocabulary to enable the exchange of these terms

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) SRB • Logical namespace via Metadata Catalogue (MCAT) • Sites rely on own local file system • Storage interface definitions

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) SRB zones • With SRB regions can be divided in to self-empowered ‘zones’ • Subject centre will become SRB zone, running their own SRB metadata catalogue

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) SRB zone: Metadata Challenge • MCAT challenge – For humanities defining metadata for one discipline only is already very difficult, as the humanities are mainly not simply fact based, but work on discourses of facts – Metadata would therefore have to include contesting views

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) Implementation schedule

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) Implementation schedule: Phase 1 • SRB data grid is set up – Council of the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC) • Main focus will be to implement the specific security requirements of AHDS data • Personnel at the AHDS is trained in grid technologies and SRB implementation issues • Nearly finished

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) Implementation schedule: Phase 2 • Review of complete ingestion workflow • Full time staff currently create web services to allow a distributed ingestion • Distributed ingestion Each centre can: – deal with specific requirements for checksums, virus checking etc. – transform the data objects in to persistent archive objects by using standards

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) Implementation schedule: Phase 2 • Files are delivered in various non-standard formats • Develop semi-automated workflow to transform the data object into a supported standard – integrating human archivists • Overall gain: Consistency

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) Conclusion and future work

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk) Conclusion and future work • Local digital libraries linked using data grids • New Standards • With the SRB, the AHDS will become a virtual organisation with subject centres as zones making their own decisions • The central executive node of the AHDS will be the mediating institution, but otherwise equal peers will interact

Digital libraries in the Arts and Humanities � Current practices and future possibilities

by inscit2006 on Jan 02, 2007

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