D-Lib Magazine

March/April 2011
Volume 17, Number 3/4

Editorial

The Current Issue

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

doi:10.1045/march2011-editorial

We have a varied collection of articles in this issue that we hope you will find of interest and use. Each of them is directly related to one or more practical issues that face digital library practitioners today.

We start with a report from David Seaman on a study of the information needs of humanities scholars that could be addressed by institutional repositories (IRs). It is a relatively small study, in terms of interviewees and their responses, but I believe you will find David�s analysis and discussion compelling and an excellent starting point for considering the use of IRs in this and other disciplines.

Next up Rose Holley of the National Library of Australia (NLA) gives an update on the impressive Trove project, the discovery service focused on Australia and Australians that was launched in 2009 by NLA. The focus of the project has moved from enabling users to find resources, considered a success at this point, to enabling users to get those resources. As in our first article, the emphasis here is on servicing a given user community.

Our third article, by Dulock and Long from University of Colorado at Boulder, provides a detailed description of a pilot project to digitize the complete audio recordings of the long-running Conference on World Affairs (CWA), annually held at the University starting in 1948. The description of the conference is itself of interest, but the value to D-Lib readers faced with any similar task will be the step-by-step detailing of the process from planning and funding through metadata provision and final delivery to end users.

The fourth article, by a set of authors from Utah State University led by Anne R. Diekema, looks at the use of primary sources in K-12 through the lens of a three-day workshop for teachers and school librarians. Material that was formerly available only to scholars is now available to anyone with an Internet connection. The authors used a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) program to bring together local teachers, librarians, and locally-created digital resources. Here we have digital library technology at its most basic providing valuable services at the local community level.

Our final article, by three authors from Cornell led by Adam Chandler, looks at measuring the quality of OpenURL metadata. The development of the OpenURL framework and context sensitive linking a decade ago was an important event in the evolution of digital libraries, but the framework by itself cannot guarantee the quality of the links and those with inaccurate or incomplete metadata will fail. Those who have followed the evolution of this technology and those who use it today will find this article of special interest and will note in the conclusion that follow-on work is likely.

About the Editor

Laurence Lannom is Director of Information Management Technology 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.