Katherine Kott, DLF Aquifer: Tapping New Sources for Scholarship, CLIR Issues, May/June 2005. Excerpt: 'What will allow libraries to meet users' growing demand for digital content from the libraries' own collections and beyond? What will enable libraries to provide tools and services to help scholars tap digital content in ways that support teaching, learning, and research? DLF Aquifer will do both. Enabling vast pools of distributed digital content to be used as a single resource, DLF Aquifer will also provide the means for libraries to channel the content in helpful ways....[T]he Digital Library Federation initiated, sponsored, and participated in a variety of activities and thereby laid the foundation for a distributed, open digital library (DODL). Among these efforts are the Open Archives Initiative for metadata harvesting, the DLF Scholars' Panel for advice on scholars' needs, and the OCKHAM initiative for the development of technical and architectural models....By the time that the 2004 DLF Spring Forum was convened, the temporary acronym DODL had been replaced by the new name, "Aquifer."...DLF Aquifer will enable a variety of digital library components to interoperate smoothly by [1] providing access, in context, to objects in repositories that preserve; [2] knowing about the data in a variety of content-management and e-learning systems; [3] interacting with repositories and personal content-management systems that store modified digital objects; and [4] making sense of the output from mass-digitization projects such as Google’s recently announced partnership with libraries. A testbed suite of tools and services, the DLF Aquifer will be contained within a flexible framework that can be integrated easily into a variety of library environments....DLF Aquifer is entering the first of three implementation phases. In phase one, DLF Aquifer will expose existing digital collections through currently available tools and services. Phase two will focus on enhancing services by adding such functions as metadata enhancement, result-set visualization, and systems-interoperability support. In phase three, DLF Aquifer will enable "deep sharing," or the ability to capture digital objects from other systems such as repositories, modify the objects, and redeposit them in e-learning spaces or personal collections, for example.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/11/2005 10:12:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
