D-Lib Magazine

March/April 2016
Volume 22, Number 3/4

Editorial

Grappling with Data

Laurence Lannom
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
llannom@cnri.reston.va.us

DOI: 10.1045/march2016-editorial

Libraries have always dealt with data in one form or another and have never really been simply the keepers of books and papers but also the managers of data about those books and papers. Among the many changes and challenges libraries have been grappling with over the last few decades has been the vast increase in the amount of that data, caused in no small part by the new digital forms of the books, papers, and all of the other media that now represents the intellectual activity that libraries both need to preserve and to make available.

We lead with Thomas Padilla on "Humanities Data in the Library: Integrity, Form, Access." This is a thoughtful article, falling somewhere between an opinion piece and a survey, advocating a set of principles to guide humanities collection development that will meet the requirements of digital scholarship and pedagogy. These concerns, also prominent in scientific data management, are presented, as indicated by the subtitle of the article, along the issues of integrity (can the users of the data know exactly how the data came to be), form (can the data be understood), and access (can the data be found and used).

The second article, by Tobin Cataldo, describes the approach used by the Alabama Digital Preservation Network to increase the fault tolerance of their Private LOCKSS Network against changes in network membership or infrastructure failure. Next up are Verbert, et al., on a conceptual model for data aggregation for learning, education, and training, although it appears widely applicable beyond that domain. RAMLET is a new IEEE standard, providing a scalable middleman approach for structuring and exchanging resource aggregations across existing standards such as METS, MPEG-21, and others.

Our fourth article, by Yuan Li, reports on "Harvesting and Repurposing Metadata from Web of Science to an Institutional Repository Using Web Services." This describes the successful automation of one piece of the workflow needed for institutional repository ingest. We close with Kärberg and Saarevet on the work at the National Archives of Estonia to add user knowledge, through crowdsourcing, to archival knowledge.

About the Editor

Laurence Lannom is Director of Information Services and Vice President at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), where he works with organizations in both the public and private sectors to develop experimental and pilot applications of advanced networking and information management technologies.