SWORDV3 stakeholder call

The SWORDV3 project team are looking for expressions of interest from potential stakeholders as they develop a new technical standard and community and governance mechanisms for this updated version of SWORD. From the DPC announcement:

Expressions of interest are sought to become stakeholders in the project: to make suggestions, review activities and meet as required over the coming months.

In particular, the project team is interested in making contact with people who may wish to develop SWORD V3 libraries for their preferred platforms or languages since the aim is to provide some support for such activities during the project. Please contact one of the project team (ideally by mid-October) if you are interested in participating, and indicate if you are interested in the technical or community aspects of the project (or both!).

On the technical side, the project is creating a document that brings together the change requests and new use cases that have collected since the release of SWORDV2, culled from the github site, message posts and preliminary discussions with some stakeholders earlier this year. This has also suggested a way forward that breaks with SWORD’s AtomPub roots in order to provide a more up-to-date and flexible protocol. This will be circulated to stakeholders soon.

On the community side, a similar document outlining possible models for developing the SWORD community in the future will be circulated soon. This is a much more open set of choices since the SWORD user-base has expanded considerably since its first conception, and we are open to further suggestions! The final arrangements must be aligned with community wishes in order to be an effective sustainable solution.

More at http://www.dpconline.org/news/swordv3-project-stakeholder-call.

Digital Manuscripts at the Bodleian: free event

MS. Kennicott 1

MS. Kennicott 1

On Monday 28 November we will be celebrating two major projects, the Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project and the Digital Manuscripts Toolkit, with an event at the Weston Library. Tickets are free, but please book in advance to reserve a place. The event runs from 11am to 5pm, with a break for lunch, and speakers will include:

  • Nigel Wilson on digitized Greek manuscripts at the Bodleian
  • César Merchán-Hamann on digitized Hebrew manuscripts
  • Paola Manoni from the Vatican Library on their part in the Polonsky Project
  • Judith Siefring on the Digital Manuscripts Toolkit
  • Emma Stanford on IIIF and Digital.Bodleian
  • Rafael Schwemmer on the Bodleian’s IIIF manifest editor
  • and presentations by Oxford scholars on their work with the Digital Manuscripts Toolkit.

Anyone interested in manuscripts, digitization, or learning about new tools for dealing with digitized objects is encouraged to attend.

Book free tickets

Value, metrics and action in publishing data

The funding community and other proponents of Open Science and Open Data have been trying to persuade the mainstream research community to publish their data for some time with only partial success [1].

A key problem is that, although the arguments for doing so are logical – research becomes more reproducible, data can be cited and re-used, opportunities for cross-domain cooperation are increased, and so forth – concrete underlying evidence has until recently been in quite short supply, with a resulting lack of engagement from the wider research community.

It’s been possible to argue for a while that linking an open dataset to a primary publication is correlated with increased citation rates (of up to 30%) [2]. But this still doesn’t draw attention to the dataset itself. Researchers are busy and need to optimise their behaviour towards activities that will drive their research field, departments, institutions and personal career progress and to date the proactive management, deposition and publication of their data has often simply not been a logical priority.

With Giving Researchers Credit for their Data we’re hoping to lower the barrier to action by automating and simplifying the process of submitting data papers to journals. The carrot of having a publishable, citable product at the end of the process is also part of the value proposition. And the proposition itself has been strengthened in recent weeks by the news of the data journal Earth System Science Data’s high citation rates. ESSD has been assigned an Impact Factor over 8, leapfrogging its primary research competitor titles to achieve a ranking of 2nd in Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences, and 3rd in Geosciences, Multidisciplinary.

Whilst it can rightly be argued that the Impact Factor is a blunt instrument at best with which to measure the value of individual articles, this announcement does imply that researchers use and credit data papers in their work at levels comparable to, or exceeding, many traditional research articles (at least in Geosciences). Perhaps this development will lead to ‘write my data paper’ making its way on to the standard academic To Do list.

And that is certainly worth celebrating!

-Neil Jefferies (PI for Giving Researchers Credit for Their Data)

 

Giving Researchers Credit for their Data, funded as part of the Jisc Data Spring Initiative, aims to provide a button that can be added to a DataCite compliant data repository which largely automates the process of data paper submission for an authenticated researcher. The project uses a cloud-based app and SWORD2-based APIs to link with multiple repositories and publishers, taking advantage of existing DataCite and ORCID metadata so that a paper can be automatically inserted into a publisher’s submission system without requiring any data re-entry by the author.

References:
[1] Aleixandre-Benavent, R et al. Scientometrics (2016) 107: 1. doi:10.1007/s11192-016-1868-7
[2] Piwowar HA, Vision TJ. (2013) Data reuse and the open data citation advantage. PeerJ 1:e175 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.175. This analysis specifically concentrated on micro-array data.

Catalogue of 15th century printed books now available to search

Further to work carried out at Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services, the TEXT-inc database and an associated TEXT-inc Person Index are now available to search.

The TEXT-inc database is an electronic catalogue of 15th century printed books, otherwise known as incunabula, conceived by the 15C BOOKTRADE Project. The database builds on an electronic version of A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century (project Bod-Inc) and now provides a catalogue of incunabula from collections including the British Library, Venice Libraries, and Oxford Colleges. The TEXT-inc database includes corresponding identifiers in other databases such as ISTC and MEI. The TEXT-inc Person Index describes people related to the incunabula described in the TEXT-inc database.

The public search interface has been implemented using Blacklight, an open-source discovery platform framework. Blacklight is a Ruby on Rails Engine plugin and provides a faceted search interface to a Solr index. The Solr index is updated automatically further to a scheduled query of the Text-Inc relational database that the 15C BOOKTRADE project members use to record details of incunabula.

Blacklight includes useful extensions such as an advanced search form and a date range widget that can be used in the faceted search to limit results by year:

Text Inc date tool

A showcase of how Blacklight has been implemented in other libraries is available on the Blacklight web site.

Further information:

Text-inc database http://textinc.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
Text-inc Person Index http://textinc-person.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

– Tanya Gray Jones

Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project update: Hebrew manuscripts

After four years, this landmark digitization project, a collaboration with the Vatican Library, is nearing its close. We at BDLSS, along with our colleagues in Imaging Services and Special Collections, are hard at work finishing up the digitization stage of the project. When this is done, the next step is to migrate all the Polonsky Project content—more than a thousand manuscripts and early printed books—to Digital.Bodleian, where it will all be centrally searchable and integrated with IIIF.

In the meantime, we already have 410 Hebrew manuscripts available on Digital.Bodleian, and that number is increasing every week. We are blogging about these manuscripts over at the project website, with recent posts on micrography and mathematical treatises.

MS. Canonici Or. 42, fol. 178r

MS. Canonici Or. 42, fol. 178r

Digital Manuscripts Toolkit: The Journey So Far

Monica Messaggi Kaya recently presented her ongoing work on BDLSS’s Digital Manuscripts Toolkit project at two different events: Future of Web Apps (FOWA)’s conference in London on October 5-7, and JSOxford’s Javascript Story Time event on November 18.

The Digital Manuscripts Toolkit, funded by the Mellon Foundation, aims to produce a set of IIIF-based tools for studying manuscripts online, including an in-browser manifest authoring tool, which will allow scholars to build their own sequences of images from across IIIF-participating institutions. The project is still very much a work in progress, and these events were an excellent early opportunity to present our work to a more technical audience.

Monica will be writing about these events in a future blog post. In the meantime, she has made her presentation, “Digital Manuscripts Toolkit: The journey so far…“, available online. It’s a great resource for anyone who would like to know more about the project or about the world of IIIF-based manuscript scholarship.

– Emma Stanford

Interviewees sought for DIY Digitization project

MS. Laud Misc. 243 fol. 82v

MS. Laud Misc. 243 fol. 82v, image © Daniel Wakelin

Readers and researchers in special collections reading rooms worldwide are increasingly being allowed to photograph books and manuscripts themselves, for their own research use. We at the Bodleian Library are seeing this demand increase amongst our readers, from those wishing to take high-quality images with a camera to those who want to take a quick snap with their smart phone.

However, the impact of such “DIY digitization” both on research and teaching and on service provision has not been given sustained attention. Daniel Wakelin, Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography at Oxford University, Christine Madsen, formerly Head of Digital Programmes at the Bodleian and currently a visiting academic at the Oxford e-Research Centre, and Judith Siefring, a digital project manager at the Bodleian, recently received funding from The John Fell Fund to explore the impact of DIY digitization.

One experimental aspect of the project has been to set up a Bodleian Special Collections Flickr site, where we encourage readers who have taken photographs of our special collections to share their photographs with the members of the group. Guidance and restrictions are given on the site. We want to know if and how readers want to share their images, and what their practices reveal about user-led photography.

A second aspect of the project will be to interview users of special collections about their methods and attitudes to taking their own photographs of books and manuscripts. If you are willing to be interviewed for the project, we’d be very grateful! Please contact Judith Siefring via email, in the format firstname.lastname@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Many thanks!

 

Launch of Digital.Bodleian

Digital.Bodleian landing page

We’re very pleased to announce that our new unified digital collections platform, Digital.Bodleian, is now live. For the first time, it is possible to search and browse the Bodleian’s online special collections via a single interface. The site was launched on Wednesday at an event in the new Weston Library, with a lecture by Bruno Racine, president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (whose Gallica is a well-established giant of digital library collections), and a speech by BDLSS’s own Lucie Burgess.

Digital.Bodleian has occupied the energies of a number of BDLSS people for some time now, and we are very excited to see it go live. The site’s landing page was designed by ONE, and the iNQUIRE search and browse interface was built by Armadillo (whose code will shortly be going open-source). We will have another post later on about the technical specs, but there are a couple of things we would like to highlight:

  1. Digital.Bodleian is IIIF-compliant, so you can view the manifest for any item, use the item’s UUID to open it in a IIIF viewer such as Mirador or Digirati’s Universal Viewer, and keep pace with future IIIF developments. Links to the IIIF manifest and the Universal Viewer are included in each item’s metadata panel within Digital.Bodleian.
  2. The content of the Bodleian Libraries’ diverse online collections, such as Luna, image.ox.ac.uk, and the Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project, is in the process of migration to Digital.Bodleian. Much of it is already there, and we hope to migrate the rest of it by the end of this year.
  3. Digital.Bodleian is interactive: you can tag and annotate items and build your own collections to download and export. The download package includes both the image (as a lower-resolution JPEG) and the metadata, but you can also download a JPEG of a portion of an image by right-clicking.

For more information, please see the Bodleian’s press release about the launch, an article by  BBC Oxford, and this Storify of DB tips. Also check out the next few weeks’ Twitter coverage by @bodleianlibs and @BDLSS.

– Emma Stanford

The Bodleian First Folio on tour

Happy birthday to Shakespeare, 451 today!

FF-portrait-blogWhile our friends at the Folger Shakespeare Library are planning their nationwide First Folio tour, the Bodleian First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays (Arch. G c.7) has been the subject of a series of international presentations and discussions. Thanks to the generosity of the public, the Bodleian First Folio was conserved, digitized, and published online, open to anyone in the world with an internet connection.

The geography of the digital resource’s readers is widening, as word of it spreads. Public lecture venues have included Perth and Sydney (during a Short Stay Visiting Fellowship at the University of Western Australia’s Institute of Advanced Studies), and Oxford. The long history of this copy of the First Folio was the subject of research seminars at the University of Edinburgh, and at the Shakespeare Association of America conference in Vancouver, where it was considered alongside other digital resources including the excellent Meisei Shakespeare Folios Electronic Library.

The intersection of the digital and material in the First Folio has been the subject of experimentation in a collaboration between Pip Willcox and the Oxford e-Research Centre‘s Professor David De Roure. The results are discussed in a forthcoming article, and in two conference papers: at the University of Southampton’s Physical Archives in the Digital Age conference, Chawton House; and at the National Library of Ireland Galway‘s upcoming Digital Material conference.

David De Roure will be presenting on the long history of social machines of the First Folio at a Scholarly Communications Workshop Focusing on the Humanities in Boston next month.De-Roure-Willcox-materiality

You can see the Bodleian First Folio in the Weston Library‘s Marks of Genius exhibition, which is free and open to the public daily.

—Pip Willcox

ORA-Data: managing research data

oraWe’re pleased to announce that depositing in ORA-Data will now allow researchers and the University to comply with the EPSRC’s (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) policy about research data management, which comes into effect from 1 May 2015.

The Bodleian Libraries recently launched a new service for the University, the Oxford Research Archive for Data (ORA-Data). A digital repository and catalogue for research data, ORA-Data offers a service to archive and enable the discovery, citation and sharing of data produced by researchers at Oxford.

ORA-Data is aimed especially at researchers who wish:

  • to deposit data that underpins publications
  • to deposit data that their funding body requires be preserved and made accessible
  • to add a record to the University’s catalogue of data

Any type of digital research data, from across all academic disciplines, may be deposited in ORA-Data, and we accept any file format. A permanent catalogue record is created for all data deposited in ORA-Data and a persistent unique identifier generated (a DOI, or Digital Object Identifier), which allows the dataset to be cited. Data and records will be discoverable through Google and other search engines, maximising the visibility and impact of the research. Researchers can also choose to set an embargo period for their files if they wish.

ORA-Data is running as a free pilot until July 2015. We’re keen for users to try it out, and would welcome any feedback to help us improve the service. ORA-Data can be accessed via the main ORA website: just select ‘Contribute’ followed by the ‘Data’ link. Our ‘How to deposit’ guide is available via our LibGuide and the ORA-Data team can be contacted at: ora@bodleian.ox.ac.uk – we would love to hear from anyone interested to find out more.

—Amanda Flynn, Digital Scholarship Support Officer