[Dr-rg] OGF26 summary + future sessions

[Andreas Aschenbrenner]

Dear members of the OGF Digital Repositories Research Group,

thanks to all who participated at the discussions at OGF26 last week. 
Please find a quick write-up of my impressions from the session. It is 
hard to squeeze all the issues into just a few sentences, but please do 
not hesitate to add / correct the lines below. We intend to publish this 
text, so please make sure to contribute.

We hope to see you and all those who could not participate this time at 
future events. Also, we are still collecting metadata scenarios and are 
looking forward to your contributions. These scenarios are the basis for 
the OGF repository work.

best wishes,
a



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The latest meeting of the Digital Repositories Research Group (DR-RG) 
took place at OGF26. The conference saw a much lower participation than 
earlier OGF's, yet there were 14 participants from various backgrounds 
contributing to a lively discussion. In fact, we had to stop 
mid-sentence, but will continue the discussion at upcoming events. As 
future venues for the DR-RG were suggested
* Digital Curation Conference, London, 1st week of December
* IEEE e-Science, Oxford, 2nd week of December


The OGF26 session featured two presentations from Jane Mandelbaum 
(Library of Congress) and Richard Marciano (UNC). A common theme were 
the interoperability requirements for metadata (e.g. on item and 
collection level) to enable interaction between different communities, 
organisational contexts, and systems. Herewith just a few points that 
were picked up during the discussion. Slides can be found
http://forge.gridforum.org/sf/docman/do/listDocuments/projects.dr-rg/docman.root.meeting_materials

Jane Mandlebaum from the Library of Congress gave an impression of the 
developments in one of the most experienced fields in information 
science. For decades discussion among cultural heritage institutions 
were dominated by the idea of the "perfect set" of metadata that is 
globally applied, by information managers and users alike. This notion 
of global unification by and large failed. Jane described how future 
information environments are likely to allow for variations in metadata 
standards and encourage participation rather than enforce it. In these 
environments, infrastructure provides the tools to mediate between 
different data, to simplify metadata creation and to raise its quality. 
(Seemingly simple things can turn out utterly complex: e.g. how to 
convert existing long titles of history videos into short titles as 
required by YouTube.)

This point resonated with other participants who also agreed that 
automatic metadata creation/conversion, and encouraging early metadata 
creation were amongst the key opportunities in their communities.

Richard Marciano from the iRODS team DICE focused on policies for 
collection management. In a talk seeded with the multiplicity of 
experiences from iRODS installations, Richard identified standardised 
mechanisms for describing collection policies (e.g. replication 
criteria, legal constraints) as a key challenge for the repository 
community. Without collection policy standards, important contextual 
information may be lost when migrating or exchanging collections between 
federated repositories.

All participants - cross-community activities in national grids (e.g. 
D-Grid), at national service centers (e.g. NGS), as well as in 
enterprise environments - agreed that requirements of users or user 
communities differ greatly and need to be addressed individually (i.e. 
dealing with a requirement once it's there, not creating the perfect 
set, or the perfect service upfront). It is the information environment 
between dedicated repositories that enables the necessary flexibility 
over time through mediation, interoperation, added-value services, etc.



OGF Digital Repositories Research Group
http://www.ogf.org/gf/group_info/view.php?group=dr-rg