The future of the academic monograph has been questioned for over two decades. At the heart of this ‘monograph crisis’ has been a publishing industry centred on the print publication of monographs and a failure and lack of incentives to develop business models that would support a transition to open digital monographs. In this post Mike Taylor argues that if […]
Category: metadata
Building Digital Content Management Capacity with Library Carpentry
In September, the Library hosted a Library Carpentry workshop to help library staff develop advanced digital skills and explore tools useful for managing digital collections and metadata. Building on the Library’s previous Software Carpentry workshop, the 2018 workshop presented an opportunity for us to explore the growing “Library Carpentry” curriculum. This effort, which adopts the […]
Addressing the unharmonised metadata of RSS feeds would support research discovery and speed up science
RSS feeds allow academics and others to keep track of the latest papers to publish in a chosen selection of research journals. They are machine-readable and aggregable, thus presenting a potentially simple solution for promoting content awareness on a large scale. However, Andreas Pacher flags a handful of problems which continue to limit the effectiveness of RSS feeds; namely a […]
It Started with a Tweet…
My very first viral tweet, in fact. It turns out that many other people have strong feeling date formats. There is one correct way to write a date and it’s YYYY-MM-DD. https://t.co/HcpEUblwCE — Kristin Briney (@KristinBriney) July 3, 2018 I … Continue reading →
Make sure your book is discoverable! Advice for the reader-oriented author
Although academic book publishing remains dominated by print, the ability to reach readers is now hugely dependent on the online discoverability of scholarly books. Authors looking to connect with as wide a readership as possible should consider how to maximise the chances of their books and chapters being returned in readers’ online searches. Terry Clague offers some simple advice to […]
Two Strategies for Working with Dates in Excel
One of the periodic discussions that comes up as a data management evangelist (beside the “data is” v. “data are” debate) is about how Excel is terrible with dates. Excel mangles dates, mangles non-date data into dates, and doesn’t play nice … Continue reading →
Metadata is the key to collaboration and a national bibliographic knowledgebase
The British Library has partnered with Jisc, Research Libraries UK (RLUK) and the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL) to create a national bibliographic knowledgebase (NBK). Neil Wilson outlines why such an initiative is necessary, explaining the implications of a hybrid print/digital marketplace, and how the rapidly evolving digital landscape has not been matched by a parallel development in […]
Lots of Transfer Collectives Keep Cultural Memory Safe: The Importance of Community Audio/Visual Archiving
This is a guest post collectively written by the XFR Collective (pronounced “transfer collective”), a grass-roots digitization and digital-preservation organization. They work with artists and media creators to rescue and preserve digital works, utilizing open, free platforms — such as the Internet Archive — for long-term preservation and access. We featured them in two previous […]
Digital Preservation at the State Library of Massachusetts
This is a guest post by Stefanie Ramsay. How do you capture, preserve and make accessible thousands of born-digital documents produced by state agencies, published to varying websites without any notification or consistency and which are often relocated or removed over time? This is the complex task that the State Library of Massachusetts faces in […]
22 Opportunities in Web Archiving! A Harvard Library Report
The following is a guest post by Andrea Goethals, Digital Preservation and Repository Manager at Harvard Library. It’s St. Patrick’s Day, so I wanted to have a catchy Irish saying for the title but, believe it or not, Irish sayings about web archiving or even the web are hard to find. I did find some […]