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