I gave a keynote at this event at the University of Bath last week. Some observations and presentations:
- There was quite a bit of discussion about ‘community’ and to what extent the conference participants represented a community of interest and to what extent they represented rather different communities of interest given (i) the diffuse nature of ‘digital libraries’, and (ii) the different interests and incentives of those who research and those who are providing services. An interesting mix of people nonetheless.
- Version 3 of Greenstone was presented, which included an interesting way of dynamically identifying and using services across Greenstone instances. Greenstone has been widely deployed.
- Variations2: the Indiana University digital library music project. Mark Notess described how they have developed a work-based view of a library of music materials. Although not directly FRBR-based, there exists a strong family resemblance between the Variations2 data model and FRBR. It was clear how the model worked elegantly with musical works, and one of the burdens of the presentation was the lack of support in existing cataloging practice for such an approach. Accordingly, the presenters claimed that the opportunities for programmatically creating required data was limited.
- Rosetta policy language. Vicky Weissman talked about work aiming to develop formal ‘English-like’ language for expressing policies which can in turn act as a front-end to policy languages such as XrMl which are not accessible to non-initiate users.
- zetoc SOAP: a Web Services Interface for a Digital Library Resource describes work which aims to integrate the zetoc table of contents service into e-science environments using a bespoke SOAP based query interface.
Much else of interest, including web services everywhere. The program is available.
(Added 2 October: Stefan Gradman has a kind note about the event here.)
