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The Metadata Coalface for Digital Repositories

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The Metadata Coalface for Digital Repositories Powered By Docstoc
					     The Metadata Coalface for Digital Repositories




                                       Adrian Burton
                    Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories
                                adrian.burton@apsr.edu.au
                                     www.apsr.edu.au


                                       Chris Blackall
                    Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories
                                chris.blackall@apsr.edu.au


                                       Scott Yeadon
                    Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories
                                scott.yeadon@apsr.edu.au




Abstract
In this paper we examine a range of metadata-related issues facing the developers
and maintainers of digital repositories in Australia. We discuss metadata
developments in the areas of digital preservation, repository interoperability, and
collection-level discovery services in the context of a range of innovative repository
projects designed to improve metadata creation, management and sharing within the
Australian higher education and research sector.
Introduction
It is not unusual to overhear negative comments about metadata, particularly at
library technology conferences such as the one this paper is written for. Admittedly,
listening to conference presentations about metadata can be about as exciting as
watching paint dry. Nevertheless, for those of us working at the digital repository
coalface, metadata is a critically important topic. Indeed, to mangle the metaphor
used for the title of this paper, we argue that metadata is to digital libraries what coal
is to electrical power generation, that is, the lights won’t shine without it.
Perhaps the coalface is not an apt metaphor to use with the threat of global warming
looming. Nevertheless, we adopt the everyday expression of the coalface to help us
focus on how metadata-rich applications, such as digital repositories, are
transforming the working lives of higher education and research communities in
Australia.
This paper focuses on three areas in which metadata-rich applications are making
an impact: digital preservation, repository interoperability, and collection-level
discovery services. More specifically, we discuss developments in the areas of digital
preservation, repository interoperability, and collection-level discovery services in the
context of a range of innovative repository projects through the Australian
Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) in 2006-7 to improve metadata
creation, management and sharing within the Australian higher education and
research sector.
These areas generally relate to extending the metadata capabilities of digital
repositories, but also overlap with trends in the so-called Web 2.0 space. Here,
metadata-rich applications and services are becoming an integral part of the Web
2.0 applications that are infiltrating our everyday lives. Ironically, it is Google,
Amazon, Yahoo, Facebook and the like that are setting benchmarks for the future of
scholarly communications.
How will repositories respond to this challenge? We envisage a world where the
barriers to sharing and exchanging digital scholarship and information are radically
lowered. The world we are undoubtedly moving toward is one of Web-based ‘mash-
ups’; that is, networked software applications that can combine data in real-time from
multiple service providers in ways that are user-friendly, yet powerful. To be effective
in this space, it is imperative that repositories become first-class service providers.
This involves collecting, curating and preserving good metadata. Hence, metadata is
not simply about technical requirements specific to digital repositories; rather, it
forms the basis of an emerging information infrastructure for scholarly
communications that has far-reaching consequences.
Before examining these developments in detail, we briefly describe the purpose and
function of digital repositories for readers unfamiliar with the topic. We then explain
what we mean by metadata, and why it is important.

Digital Repositories
Digital repositories are networked software applications primarily used for storing,
managing and disseminating digital resources (e.g. digital publications, theses, data
sets and so on) (Crow 2002). Digital repositories differ from conventional content

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management systems because they include technologies to ensure that digital
resources are preserved for long-term access and use. Although digital repositories
were initially developed for scholarly communications, they are currently being
implemented more widely; for example, by museums to facilitate online access to
cultural heritage resources, and government agencies to mediate long-term access
to documents and other data.
In practical terms, implementing a digital repository nowadays can be as simple as
downloading free open-source software and installing it onto a networked computer.
Establishing a stable repository for everyday institutional use is an altogether harder
proposition however (Barton and Waters 2004). The most popular open source
repository applications are DSpace, Fedora and E-prints (OSI 2004). There are
some commercial repository software providers, but none have gained the same
level of popularity as the open source repositories mentioned. The important point to
note here is that a digital repository is essentially a relational database that stores
and keeps track of metadata records for files stored in a mass-data storage facility.
The underlying technology is relatively straightforward whereas the institutional
context of use is typically complex.

Metadata
Within the digital repository community, metadata literally refers to ‘data about data’.
More typically, it refers to meaningful information about digital ‘objects’ (or files)
stored in a digital repository. Repositories gather and maintain three types of
metadata; namely: descriptive, administrative and structural metadata (Lee, Clifton,
and Langley 2006).
Descriptive metadata generally takes the form of metadata ‘records’ stored in a
repository database. These database records comprise human-readable descriptive
information about digital resources or files, such as an author's name, a subject title,
abstract, keywords, date of creation and so on. Descriptive metadata is comparable
to bibliographic records in a conventional library database; indeed, descriptive
metadata records and bibliographic records are routinely exchanged between library
management systems and repositories. The point of capturing and maintaining good
descriptive metadata is that is makes digital objects easier for end-users to discover
using repository search engines.
Administrative metadata is the technical information about the physical data file, or
‘bitstream’. This includes information about file formats (e.g. JPEG of TIFF for digital
images), level of data compression and so on. The point of capturing and storing
administrative metadata is that is essential for the long-term preservation of digital
files, particularly when they are migrated from one format to another, or one
repository to another, throughout their lifecycle.
Structural metadata captures the logical and physical relationships of files stored in
repositories. Structural metadata captures the relationships and hyperlinks between
complex digital files; for example, a set of linked HTML pages with embedded digital
images. The point of capturing structural metadata is to ensure that repository
software can store and then reconstruct the original design, as determined by the
producer. Capturing and storing structural metadata is one of the greatest technical
challenges facing repository developers and maintainers. Consequently, it is the
area requiring the greatest technical development and community input.

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Taken together, descriptive, administrative and structural metadata are at the heart
of all digital repositories; therefore, efficiently managing and preserving this type of
metadata is an essential task for digital repositories, and the professionals who
develop and maintain them.

Metadata Challenges
While acknowledging the importance of metadata to scholarly communications in the
era of digital repositories, we also appreciate that creating and maintaining ‘good’
descriptive, administrative and structural metadata is a major challenge for many
scholars and their host institutions (Henty 2007). By good metadata, we mean
metadata records that are accurate and comprehensive (from a human-readable
perspective) and that conform to the relevant technical metadata standards.
The challenges here are simultaneously institutional, economic and technical.
Firstly, the institutional and economic challenges relate to the up-front and hidden
costs of creating and maintaining good metadata, particularly if this work has to be
done by qualified library cataloguers. This point should not come as a surprise to the
library community, which understands the true costs of creating bibliographic records
for their automated library management systems. Given the amount of digital
resources being generated by the scholarly community it would make good
economic sense to reward and educate them to provide good metadata in the first
instance, but this strategy has its own unique set of challenges. The academic
community, generally speaking, do not see tangible benefits in creating good
metadata for their digital resources, nor are they motivated to seek the technology
and skills that would help them. Indeed, they are more likely to see metadata
creation as a waste of time rather than an opportunity to improve the impact and
reach of their research. These attitudes are slowly changing as traditional scholarly
communications rapidly migrates to the World Wide Web; nevertheless, there is
widespread agreement that the institutional rewards and training for digital
scholarship are currently not of a sufficient level to hasten change (Kling and Spector
2003).
Secondly, there are significant technical challenges to creating and maintaining good
metadata. These mostly relate to the widespread use of proprietary file formats and
the downstream obsolescence and incompatibilities they introduce for repository
managers. Content creators are not necessarily at fault; rather, they are locked into
using the proprietary software applications and file formats that they typically use for
their day-to-day work. The most commonly used software, such as Microsoft Office,
is not geared to help users create good descriptive metadata, nor is it easily
integrated with digital scholarly publishing platforms or repositories (Barnes 2007). In
contrast, Adobe provides extensive support for descriptive and technical metadata in
its software through its Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) and enables users to
create preservation-friendly file formats (see Adobe Systems 2005). But, to reiterate,
as long as most scholarly authors and content creators remain untrained in, and
unrewarded for, preserving their digital resources, then progress in this area will lag.
Even though the widespread use of proprietary file formats poses problems,
repositories are capable of storing proprietary file formats. The problems arise when
it comes to accessing and reusing these files at a later date. To do this successfully,
users need the original proprietary software applications and operating systems (or

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special Web browser plug-ins); however, these are often unavailable or outdated.
Similarly, repository managers face technical difficulties when converting proprietary
file formats into preservation-friendly formats. A key to overcoming these technical
barriers is for content creators to switch to using so-called open, non-proprietary, file
formats where feasible. For example, instead of using Microsoft Word file formats,
authors should adopt the Open Document Format (ODF) that has been established
as standard format for both open source and proprietary word-processing software
applications (see ISO 2006). Microsoft has publicly announced its support ODF in
future versions of Microsoft Office software so this alternative should be available to
scholarly authors (Boulton 2006).
The points discussed above by no means exhaust the issues; nevertheless, there is
some room for optimism thanks to the steady adoption of open format standards and
the growing capabilities of the open-source software development community to
replace proprietary software and file formats. Overall, our capacity to innovate and
overcome technical barriers to progress in digital preservation is constantly
improving. In the following sections, we discuss how the repository development
community is innovating in the metadata application domain.

Metadata for Preservation
A key function of digital repositories is to ensure that scholarly information and data
is preserved for long-term access and use. However, when digital repositories were
first designed, digital preservation was solely considered in terms of the needs and
responsibilities of individual users and institutions. This still holds true but has been
extended recently because digital preservation is increasingly being seen in
government policy circles as a national priority covering the higher education and
research sectors, if not the whole-of-government.
In Australia, for example, the recently published ‘Data for Science’ Working Group
report to the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council (PMSEIC
2006) has highlighted the critical importance of research data collections on a
national scale. This shift to a national perspective has emerged because research
‘collections’ are now seen as common resources that need to be shared between all
researchers, research groups and universities to maximise their utility (Blackall
2007). By providing secure platforms for disseminating research information, digital
repositories have become key technologies in our national information infrastructure
(Burton 2007).
Paralleling the national concern over access to research collections has been the
focus on sustainably curating and preserving such collections. Specialist national
organizations have been established to deal these issues, such as the Digital
Curation Centre (DCC) in the United Kingdom. We anticipate that the proposed
Australian National Data Service will play a similar function nationally for the higher
education and research sector (see ANDS Technical Working Group 2007).
At a more granular level, international leadership in digital preservation has come
through the activities of PREMIS (PREservation Metadata: Implementation
Strategies) Working Group. Although based in the USA, the PREMIS Working
Group had wide international input, including representatives from the National
Library of Australia. In May 2005, the Working Group published their final report,
which comprised a “data dictionary for core preservation metadata needed to

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support the long-term preservation of digital materials” (PREMIS Working Group
2005). This document identifies the core information elements required for
preserving files and gives repository developers a common language, and common
data dictionary, for implementing preservation metadata.
The PREMIS data dictionary provides a firm conceptual foundation for moving
forwards, yet it doesn’t give (and was never required to give) a specific list of
metadata elements that are needed/desirable for use in digital repositories. Nor does
it provide clear technical specifications, or a precise XML metadata schema, that
software engineers could use to improve repositories to the point where they could
be considered ‘PREMIS compliant’. Such a metadata schema, however, is exactly
what repository developers need.
We, the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories through its partnership
with the National Library of Australia, responded to this challenge when we funded
the Preservation Requirements Statement (PRESTA) project (see APSR 2007). The
stakeholders in the PRESTA project closely examined the PREMIS data dictionary to
develop a requirements specification for preservation metadata that would inform
subsequent repository development efforts (Lee, Clifton, and Langley 2006).
Following the PRESTA project, APSR (again in partnership with the National Library
of Australia) developed a draft metadata ‘application profile’ that implemented a
subset of the PREMIS data dictionary (see next section for more details) (Lee 2006).
A metadata application profile is defined as “an assemblage of metadata elements
selected from one or more metadata schemas and combined in a compound
schema” (DCMI 2007). Its practical function is to describe the syntax and semantics
of metadata elements that are required for software applications to process data for
predictable and repeatable results. From the outset, we decided to create an
application profile for PREMIS/PRESTA using the Metadata Encoding and
Transmission Standard maintained by the Library of Congress (see METS). We
decided to use METS because it is specifically designed to encode descriptive,
administrative, and structural metadata of digital resources to be stored within digital
repositories. Moreover, it is widely adopted within the repository community and the
Library of Congress maintains a METS Implementation Registry for the maintenance
of community developed application profiles.
To demonstrate the effectiveness of the PREMIS/PRESTA metadata application
profile, a repository demonstrator application was jointly developed by the Australian
National University and the University of Queensland in late 2006. This work
included stakeholder involvement from the (ARROW) and (RUBRIC) repository
projects, also funded through the Australian Government’s Systemic Infrastructure
Initiative.
We initially used the PREMIS/PRESTA application profile to examine the feasibility
of transferring digital objects between a DSpace repository (at ANU, Canberra) to a
Fedora repository (at the University of Queensland, Brisbane), and vice versa. The
digital preservation issue examined was the feasibility of using METS to create a
common data interchange format to automatically replicate and/or mirror repository
collections. Indeed, we found that that the METS was ideal for this task. Using this
approach, data (in the form of digital image collections and metadata) were
automatically transferred between DSpace and Fedora repositories without
problems—a world-first to our knowledge.


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This experiment demonstrated that by applying the right metadata standards and
common repository interoperability frameworks, repositories, data centres and web-
based applications could automatically and reliably share information without
technical barriers getting in the way.
This successful experiment inspired us to undertake further work on the
PREMIS/PRESTA application profile through 2007, which is described in detail in the
following section.

Metadata for Repository Interoperability
Having established that METS could be used for digital preservation, it also became
clear to us that the PREMIS/PRESTA profile could be extended to greatly improve
the interoperability of digital repositories. By interoperability, we mean the capacity
of heterogeneous information systems to exchange information in highly automated
ways, without losing or corrupting data in the process.
The point of improving the interoperability of repositories is to not only enable the
scholarly community to share data, but also enable repositories to be better
integrated with a wide range software applications and systems typically used for
scholarly communications. We envisaged that it if we could lower the barriers faced
by the scholarly community when they have to move newly created digital resources
into repositories and other data storage facilities then this would encourage their
wider use. These barriers exist because scholars typically have to upload new digital
resources individually, or in small batches, to repositories. This process is time-
consuming and error prone and is widely acknowledged as a major issue needing to
be solved (McNamara and Buchhorn 2006).
Our approach to the solution was to see if we could provide better interoperability at
the repository side of the upload process. The aims here were to establish
automated services upload services between the repository and desktop
applications, such as Microsoft Office, which would make uploading new resources a
simple one-click operation. To do this, however, we realised that we needed a
common data transfer file format that could contain the uploaded files, as well as
descriptive, administrative and structural metadata. Within the repository community,
these data transfer formats are referred to as Submission Information Packages
(SIP). Based on our previous success, we decided to use METS as basis for the
SIP.
In the process of working with the METS standard and consulting the METS Primer
(METS Editorial Board 2007), we learnt that using METS for the SIP was not
straightforward. The major challenge we encountered was that developing a usable
SIP requires agreement within the repository community on how the METS standard
is interpreted as an application profile. To reiterate, an application profile typically
contains metadata elements drawn from other standards that are wrapped into the
overall data encoding syntax, which in our case was provided by METS. How these
metadata elements are selected and assembled requires careful thought and
enormous attention to detail. For example, we decided to use the Metadata Object
Description Schema (MODS) for the bibliographic sections of the SIP; however,
there are no established guidelines for doing so within METS. This should not have
come as a surprise to us because the METS Editorial Board makes it clear that


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developing community-wide METS application profiles requires community-wide
agreements and policies.
Complicating matters further was the fact that DSpace and Fedora repository
software development groups have implemented their own interpretations of the
METS standard for processing SIPs. Indeed, we discovered that when we wanted to
move data between DSpace and Fedora we had to create a different SIP for each
repository, as well as some extra software code so that the SIPs could be processed
consistently. Ideally, we wanted a single SIP format that could be processed by all
repositories, or other software applications, without the need of modified software
code, or on-off formatting tweaks.
The take home message for us here was that developing effective metadata
application profiles requires national and international agreements, maintenance
agencies and consistent implementation within repository software.

The Repository Interoperability Framework
With the experience of creating application profiles fresh in our mind, we began to
develop of an application profile for a common repository SIP for the Australian
higher education and research sector in early 2007. The focus was on improving the
interoperability between repositories, particularly the DSpace and Fedora
repositories used by APSR partner institutions. This was accomplished through a
series of coordinated projects under the title of the Repository Interoperability
Framework (RIFF).
The goals of the RIFF projects was to lower technical barriers involved in moving
scholarly resources into repositories by making the submission process as
streamlined and automated as possible for the academic community (Yeadon 2007).
The RIFF project involved five institutional partners: the Australia National University,
University of Queensland, University of Sydney, National Library of Australia and the
Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing. Again, stakeholder involvement
was gained from the ARROW and RUBRIC projects.
The RIFF projects began by defining a set of ‘genre workflows’ that were to be
implemented independently of the internal submission process used by DSpace and
Fedora. By genre workflows, we mean the combination of scholarly communications
genres (scholarly research papers, conference papers, theses, image albums etc.),
and automated software workflows consisting of software applications (word
processors, databases etc.) that are connected to a series of software services, in
particular, using Web Services standards and protocols. These services enable
authors to literally pipe digital content from their desktop computers through to a
repository or other data storage facility in a one-click operation from the desktop.
This approach builds on the so-called service-oriented architectures now commonly
employed in the business computing domain and, more recently, in the e-learning
Web 2.0 domain (Dagger et al. 2007; Alexander 2006; Wilson, Blinco, and Rehak
2004).
This service-oriented approach aspect of the RIFF projects was accomplished
through the interoperability layers of DSpace and Fedora that employ Web Services
standards and protocols to communicate with third-party Web-based applications
and services in the following stages. Firstly, the source digital files and metadata


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records are packaged together as a SIP using the agreed metadata application
profile. The packaging of the SIP was done programmatically at the content
provider’s end of the process, after which it was transferred from the data provider to
a repository. We developed an automated upload service for this task, which we
named the RIFF Submission Service. Once stored in the repository, the SIP is then
unpacked. By this we mean that the metadata records are stored in the repository
database and the source files in the appropriate locations in the underlying data
storage system. Once unpacked, repository users can easily locate and download
the files by using the repository search engine, or browse functions.
To test this approach we took the digital content from known online sources and
passed it through the RIFF Submission Service. For example, we took the PDF
formatted articles and metadata from Open Journal System (OJS), a popular online
e-journal editorial and production system, and automatically transferred them to
DSpace and Fedora instances in a one-click operation (Christensen and Coleman
2007). The benefits of this approach were to give e-journal owners a solution for
preserving their e-journals, as well as new options to make it more accessible to the
public, at the same time providing a long-term preservation solution. Similar tests
were successfully conducted with image collections, fieldwork data collections
(Honeyman 2007) and word-processed scholarly documents (Barnes 2007).
This application profile—now appropriately named the Australian METS Profile—
consists of a core set of metadata elements that mandate the use of PREMIS
elements for administrative metadata, MODS elements for descriptive metadata and
several metadata extensions for specific formats and content genres. A detailed
technical report of the initiative is available online (see APSR 2007), and the Profile
itself is registered with the Library of Congress, as the international maintenance
agency for METS.
Overall, the RIFF projects have demonstrated the utility of using the Australian
METS Profile to improve repository interoperability. With the help of more
development work and publicity in the near future, we hope that the Australian METS
Profile will become an internationally supported standard. Nevertheless, major work
will be required to ensure that the leading repository software applications improve
their support for registered METS profiles.

Metadata for Collection-Level Discovery
Our final example of developments in the metadata domain is the development of
repository discovery services based on collection-level metadata.
This development has arisen largely because the Google search engine has
transformed the public’s expectations about what can be discovered on the Internet
(Estabrook and Rainie 2007). Google, and a host of other innovative Web 2.0
applications, have demonstrated that search results can be enriched with a wide
range of contextual information and hyperlinks. Inspired by these developments,
libraries are pioneering new search services that seek to emulate the context-rich
search results of Google. The WorldCat (see OCLC) and Libraries Australia (see
NLA) search engines exemplify this approach.
Significantly, the library community has acknowledged the need to fundamentally
rethink library cataloguing in light of the changing public expectations about what


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search engines can provide (Rosa, Dempsey, and Wilson 2004). The recent report
from of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic
Control (2008) highlights the scope of changes required. They recommend a shift
from the current model of item level bibliographic control towards a relational model
based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (1998). However,
before this recommendation can be realised, bibliographic records (and descriptive
metadata generally) will need to be enriched with authoritative information about a
wide range of information entities so that contextual relationships can be represented
in search results. Hence, there is a growing realisation within the library community
that registries of authoritative information will be required for many of the high-level
entities in the FRBR information model; such as for people, places, organizations,
collections and so on (Gorman 2003; Patton 2005).
Where do repository collections fit into this new information landscape? Currently,
repository end-users are provided with search results based on descriptive metadata
at the item level. This situation has arisen because most repositories support the
Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMI 2008), which comprises item level
metadata elements only. By items we mean discrete digital files; for example,
individual documents, images or data sets. This typically gives useful search results,
but just as long the user has a fair degree of certainty about what they are seeking.
This approach is less useful when the user needs more information to refine their
search, or when seeking contextual information that might broaden its scope.
The repository community is aware of the limitations of the current Metadata Element
Set; indeed, it has had some success in aggregating item level metadata for
searching through the implementation of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for
Metadata Harvesting (OAI PMH 2004). Although widely used, OAI PMH powered
search engines have also exposed the poor data quality of much of the metadata
being harvested (due to missing, incomplete and/or duplicated information) and the
lack of basic collection level information that could be used to help enrich search
results.
This situation is about to change. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative recently
introduced the Dublin Core Collection Application Profile (DCCAP 2008), which
covers collection-level metadata. The Profile document provides a broad definition of
a collection when it states, “…the term ‘collection’ can be applied to any aggregation
of physical or digital items.” We anticipate a number of benefits that will flow from
the support of the Collection Application Profile within the repository community. For
example, in the higher education and research sector where most scholarly work is
done in groups, or by broad discipline area, collections metadata will greatly improve
our capacity to discover resources that are aggregated and sorted according to
group criteria. Not only will the addition of collection-level metadata help refine user
searches and improve browse and navigation structures throughout repositories, but
it will also provide richer contextual linkages to information beyond the boundary of
the repository community, such as Google and Wikipedia.
Furthermore, the adoption of collection-level metadata would allow repository
managers to initiate automated administrative and curatorial processes; for example,
to control access to collections or migrate/replicate them to other repositories.
Indeed, we see great many opportunities in the Web 2.0 space to expose collection-
level information to third-party Web applications to create new services for our end-
users (Burton 2007).

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The Online Research Collections Australia Registry
In this section we describe another APSR project named the Online Research
Collections Australia (ORCA) Registry that demonstrates the possibilities for
improved collection level discovery described above.
The aims of ORCA-Registry project were to provide a national registry for collection-
level metadata ‘harvested’ from repositories and other data sources. The ORCA-
Registry design anticipated the need for a federated network of repositories and data
storage facilities in Australia as set out in the National Collaborative Research
Information Strategy (NCRIS 2008). The Registry will not only provide a ‘human-
readable’ interface to the harvested information, but will also form the basis for a
wide range of machine-to-machine ‘services’ that intersect with Web 2.0
developments. Thus, we refer to the ORCA-Registry as a collections and services
registry. The Registry will be operational in 2008 as part of the Australian National
Data Service (ANDS) as part of the NCRIS investment.
We faced numerous design challenges when specifying the ORCA-Registry. Firstly,
it had to maintain detailed information about institutional owners/managers of
collections, and the various rights, authorisation and access conditions covering
them. Secondly, it had to provide Web Services interfaces that would enable
communications with third-party applications, such as repositories. Finally, it needed
to be user-friendly for registry administrators and the providers of collection-level
metadata records.
To meet these design challenges we originally envisaged using the Dublin Core
Collection Application Profile (DCCAP); however, we found that it did not include
sufficient scope to include the type of descriptions for high-level business entities
that we required and so we searched for a better solution. We plan to retain DCCAP
as a metadata exchange protocol instead. In the end we adopted the ISO2146
(Registry Services for Libraries and Related Organisations) standard (see NLA
2008). We decided to adopt the ISO2146 standard because of its
comprehensiveness and fitness as a generic registry model (Pearce and Gatenby
2005).
After closely analysing the ISO2146 standards document we developed a functional
data model of the ORCA-Registry, which was then mapped to a relational database
structure for testing. This was followed by the development of an XML schema to
assist the automated submission of third-party metadata into the Registry. These
technologies were successfully demonstrated as a functional Web-based ORCA-
Registry application in September 2007. The collection-level metadata for the
Registry was provided by the ORCA-Network, an institutional network of Australian
higher education and research data providers that are also the target users of the
ORCA-Registry (see APSR 2007).
Another key design goal of the ORCA-Registry was to support inclusion in, and
expansion of, a global network of interoperable collections and services registries
(Burton 2007). To this end, representatives of collecting institutions met in
Washington in December 2007 to discuss the opportunities for such a network. It
was agreed that discussion and planning toward implementation would take place
through 2008. We think that the ORCA-Registry project will provide an inspiration for



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the development of global collection-level discovery services. In other words, we
hope that it will be to research collections what Google is to generic web searching.
Naturally, as the first functional registry developed using the ISO2146 standard, we
encountered some issues during implementation. These are being raised with the
relevant ISO standards committee and are being addressed. The ORCA Registry
software was released to the public in late 2007, and this will undoubtedly aid other
registry developers and further refine the ISO standard (see APSR 2008).

Conclusion
In this paper we have discussed developments in digital preservation, repository
interoperability, and collection-level discovery, and examined a range of innovative
repository projects guided by the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories
that are designed to improve metadata creation, management and sharing within the
Australian higher education and research sector.
The developments described in this paper suggest that the prevailing assumptions
that digital repositories as discrete, monolithic, entities must change. Indeed, the
public success of Google’s web-based applications almost assures this change. This
success indicates that repositories must become more agile, service-oriented and
interoperable if they are to be relevant to end-users in the higher education and
research sector. The world we are undoubtedly moving toward is one of Web-based
‘mash-ups’, that is, networked applications that can combine data in real-time from
multiple service providers. Clearly, digital repositories must become active providers
and consumers of these services. A good place to start this effort would be to
investigate, if not implement, some of the metadata concepts and applications
outlined in this paper.




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VALA2008 Conference                                                               12
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VALA2008 Conference                                                                  13
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VALA2008 Conference                                                               14
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VALA2008 Conference                                                               15

				
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