Building archives for the digital era
A. Amudhavalli
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Open Access and Institutional Repositories complement each other. They are carefully built databases that open the gates of knowledge for academics, researchers and students.
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Photo: vino john
DIGITAL LIBRARIES: Open Access and Institutional Repositories are not synonymous, though the underlying philosophies are common.
The Madras Library Association (MALA), established in 1928, is a premier association with a large membership base of over 300. The members constantly track strategies in archiving and presenting knowledge databases and materials to the community.
Open Access (OA) and Institutional Repositories (IR) have gained prominence in this sphere since 2004. It is estimated that in the next 10 years almost all the academic institutions are likely to be running an IR. Library and Information Science professionals have often requested MALA to conduct a training programme to help build an IR.
The Computer Society of India (CSI) recently came forward to collaborate in this endeavour, drawing upon the skills of software professionals engaged in similar activities. MALA and CSI took the process forward with a three-day workshop on `Open Access and IR' to familiarise, train and equip professionals, using the Dspace platform.
There is a misconception about Open Access (OA)Vs. free access. Free access ensures accessibility to journals but not accessibility to full text articles of journals. OA enables everyone to browse, read, copy, and download research articles in all academic fields freely, using the Internet. Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is an international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the Internet and to explore the most effective and affordable strategies to promote research.
OA and IR are not synonyms, though the underlying philosophies are common. An IR is a set of services that an institution offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It emphasises organisational commitment to the stewardship of digital materials, including long-term preservation, organisation, access and distribution. IR also represents e-prints archives, as digital archives of the research output created by faculty, scholars and students and make it accessible to end-users on the Internet.
The content of an IR is institutionally defined, scholarly, cumulative and perpetual, open and interoperable. Interoperability requires persistent naming, standardized metadata formats and a metadata harvesting protocol.
Interoperability
By facilitating interoperability, the Open Archives movement has accelerated the deconstruction of the traditional scholarly publishing model and increased the potential for institutional repositories. The movement spawned the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), which was established to develop and promote interoperability solutions to help disseminate content.
Towards this end, DSpace (http://www.dspace.org), a collaborative project of the MIT Libraries and the Hewlett-Packard Company, is creating a stable, long-term digital repository to preserve the significant body of academic articles and other research materials.
Significantly, it also seeks to build a repository system that can support a federation of institutional repositories. In other words, DSpace is a digital repository system that captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and redistributes an organisation's research data. To support this goal, the DSpace project is exploring related issues including access control, rights management, versioning, retrieval, faculty receptivity, community feedback and flexible publishing capabilities.
The distinctive feature of the workshop organised by MALA and CSI in association with M.O.P Vaishnav College for Women, Chennai, was that it presented the chosen IR software, DSpace in MS Windows, in a simple manner and motivated professionals.
M.G. Sreekumar, Librarian, Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, and his team, supported by K.T. Anuradha of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, guided the workshop. The beneficiaries were the 45 principal stakeholders of IR, including librarians, information, computer and software professionals from colleges, universities, R and D laboratories, CSIR units, corporate sector, hospitals such as Apollo and Sankara Nethralaya, Tamil Nadu Dr. M.G.R. Medical University, teaching faculty in the disciplines, business firms, publishing sector and the media.
The participants got an overview of the role of subject descriptors (metadata) in describing digital objects for the IRs. The Dublin Core (DC) metadata standard, recommended by the WWW Consortium (W3C) for describing web objects and metadata standards such as `METS' and `MODS' were explained. Participants included Prof. Nirmala Prasad, principal, MOP Vaishnav College, H.R. Mohan, chairman, Division VIII, and Chennai Chapter, CSI, Prof. S. Narayanan, Dean, Academic and Chair-Library Committee, IIT-Madras, Prof. S. Parthasarathy, senior member, MALA, and R. Seshadri and R. Samyuktha, vice-presidents, MALA.
The author is president, Madras Library Association)
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