Academic literature on the topic 'Machine-readable bibliographic data Standards Australia'

This survey of the achievements of the Research Libraries Group (RLG) and its Art and Architecture Group shows the effectiveness of a collaborative approach in developing best practices and standards, and implementing new methodologies and technologies, to benefit the international art library and research communities. RLG members in Europe, North America and Australia include many of the major art research libraries. RLG offers services such as the RLIN bibliographic database and the MARCADIA retrospective conversion service in conjunction with projects documenting sales catalogue records (SCIPIO), preserving serials (the Art Serials Preservation Project) and facilitating the interloan of material between members. More recently the partnership between the RLG and the Getty Information Institute has made available an enormous range of art documentation work carried out by the Getty: standards and authority control work such as the Art & Architecture Thesaurus, the Union List of Artists’ Names and the Thesaurus of Geographic Names. In the 1980s the RLG conducted a survey identifying information needs in the humanities, which has led to resources such as the Bibliography of the History of Art becoming widely accessible, with the Provenance Index to follow shortly. This partnership is now active in the museum field, attempting to bridge the gap between the domains of secondary and primary materials in the field of art research. The REACH project (Record Export for Art and Cultural Heritage) is experimenting with the export of existing machine-readable data from heterogeneous museum collection systems, and testing the feasibility of designing a common interface for access which will complement RLG’s other resources.

In bibliographic and authority data of materials in Japanese, it is necessary to represent kanji (Chinese characters) and its reading as a pair. Readings, called “yomi” in Japanese, are represented in katakana or the alphabet (romanization form). The readings in Japanese language have many variations depending on the context, so Japanese bibliographic information needs to provide both kanji and its reading as a pair to avoid misunderstandings.The JAPAN/MARC is a machine readable version of the Japanese National Bibliography and provides sets of kanji, katakana-yomi and romaji-yomi (romanization form) of bibliographic and authority data. This paper introduces how readings of bibliographic and authority data in Japanese have been expressed and handled mainly in JAPAN/MARC, compared with international standards.

The BIBFRAME model is introduced; its origins are discussed. The author explains why Russian cataloguers have become interested in this LOC’ project. The developers argue that BIBFRAME is to initiate bibliographic standards transformation into the associated data model of a higher level and will make bibliographic information more useful for within and outside of bibliographic community. The structure comprises the model (structures information on three main abstraction levels: work, expression, item), glossary, and tools. The differences between BIBFRAME and MARC are revealed. BIBFRAME development stages, step-to-step implementation program are characterized. BIBFRAME and RDA tools are compared. Expert opinions on BIBFRAME concept and the prospects of its implementation in the global library practice are reviewed. The author emphasizes that BIBFRAME makes a formal access point for the library community to enter the larger data network where links between objects are of primary importance. The author also discusses terminology problems. She also voices her hope that we will not have to catch up with the international library community and will be represented on the Semantic Web, too.

The Bibliographic Records in Libraries' Searchable Online Public Access Catalogs (Opac) Have Recently Taken on a New Role as a source of bibliographic data that can be aggregated, shared, circulated, manipulated, transformed, studied, and interpreted. Scholars' new awareness of library catalogs not just as aids to locating books and other materials but as sources of bibliographic information that researchers can manipulate and transform has inspired new scholarship on the history of the catalog and a new focus on how the catalog, in both its analog and digital forms, shapes bibliographic knowledge. Our Early Novels Dataset (END) project, for example, uses methods from book history, library science, and literary studies to think about the shape and history of the bibliographic metadata in the library catalog. Our research group's collective experiments with bibliographic metadata ask what happens when we look at the library catalog record not just as a utilitarian aid for searching or as an object of critique, but also as a work in progress with a literary character of its own. We ask what we can learn from the shape given to bibliographic information by the earlier catalogers whose records our project inherited and on whose expertise we draw. We also ask how the familiar languages of the library catalog record and the controlled bibliographic description might help make new forms of knowledge about books. And we press on the inevitable and generative tension between the particular perspective of the library catalogers who transform specific copies of physical books into bibliographic data and the informational fields dictated by machine-readable cataloging (MARC) descriptive standards.

According to the simplest and most common definition, metadata refers to a set of data that describes other data. Research on metadata is focused almost exclusively on solving practical issues. There are few theories on metadata that emphasise the lack of a common theoretical foundation to handle metadata, and there is also a lack of corresponding research. This article looks at metadata from a broad perspective of information technology and seeks an answer to a question that may, at first glance, seem simple: what is the origin of metadata? The article aims to present a conceptual model that connects metadata to communication processes, thereby creating an opportunity to treat metadata in a more systematic manner. In memory institutions, different metadata schemes and standards are used to describe digital objects. In order to describe objects, libraries use bibliographical entries that correspond to valid entry and cataloguing rules. Objects are described by bibliographic entries and catalogued in a bibliographic format. Nowadays, cataloguing rules are mostly based on the ISBD (International Standard Bibliographic Description). The most common bibliographic formats are standards belonging to the MARC (Machine Readable Cataloguing) group. Some libraries, such as the Academic Library of Tallinn University and the University of Tartu Library use the Dublin Core metadata standard to describe the digital objects they preserve. A particular feature of the metadata systems used by libraries is that all objects in a collection are described to at least a minimum level. Archives in Estonia use the General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G)), which was developed by the International Council on Archives. Archives differ from libraries in that archives usually describe objects in detail on the levels of archive, series, and archive item, and preservation of the full context of information is prioritised. Estonian museums began introducing common structured metadata in 1992, when the Ministry of Culture commissioned a software company called AS GenNet Laboratories to develop KVIS (Information System of Cultural Values). The development of KVIS was based on the CIDOC (International Committee for Documentation) data model of the International Council of Museums, and on SWETERM, the Swedish standard of forming name attributes. This was an object-oriented data model, and the description was focused not on the object but the event. This type of description model is also supported by the CRM (Conceptual Reference Model) adopted by CIDOC in 2006. In 2005, the Ministry of Culture decided to create MuIS, a new information system for museums, although this new system was based on the same underlying data model as the previous system. The descriptions of museum objects are supported by central glossaries that ensure museum items are described as required and that searches can be made across museums. To describe natural scientific collections, other information systems are also used, such as the SARV database, used for managing data related to geocollections. Archaeological collections have their own databases as well, with specific metadata. The digital collection of the Art Museum of Estonia uses a bespoke system of metadata. Metadata are connected to each of the elements in the communication process: metadata are the attributes describing these elements. Each element of a communication act is characterised by specific, fixed attributes that provide full information about the act. All the attributes of the set of elements pertaining to a specific communication act make up the full meta description of this communication act. In fact, a communication act can be characterised by various attributes. The selection of metadata attributes used to characterise a communication process is connected to the function of the metadata relevant for the particular case.

One of the major challenges in biodiversity informatics is the generation of machine-readable data that is interoperable between different biodiversity-related data infrastructures. Producers of such data have to comply with existing standards and to be resourceful enough to enable efficient data generation, management and availability. Conversely, nanopublications offer a decentralised approach (Kuhn et al. 2016) towards achieving data interoperability in a robust and standarized way. A nanopublication is a named RDF graph, which serves to communicate a single fact and its original source (provenance) through the use of identifiers and linked data (Groth et al. 2010). It is composed of three constituent graphs (assertion, provenance, and publication info), which are linked to one another in the nanopublication header (Kuhn et al. 2016). For instance, a nanopublication has been published to assert a species interaction in which a hairy woodpecker (Picoides villosus) ate a beetle (genus Ips), along with the license and related bibliographic citation*1. In biodiversity, nanopublications can be used to exchange information between infrastructures in a standardised way (Fig. 1) and to enable curation and correction of knowledge. They can be implemented within different workflows to formalise biodiversity knowledge in self-enclosed graphs. We have developed several nanopublication models*2 for different biodiversity use cases: species occurrences, new species descriptions, biotic interactions, and links between taxonomy, sequences and institutions. Nanopublications can be generated by various means: semi-automatic extraction from the published literature with a consequent human curation and publication; generation during the publication process by the authors via dedicated formalisation tool and published together with the article; de novo generation of a nanopublication through decentralised networks such as Nanobench (Kuhn et al. 2021). semi-automatic extraction from the published literature with a consequent human curation and publication; generation during the publication process by the authors via dedicated formalisation tool and published together with the article; de novo generation of a nanopublication through decentralised networks such as Nanobench (Kuhn et al. 2021). One of the possible uses of nanopublications in biodiversity is communicating new information in a standardised way so that it can be accessed and interpreted by multiple infrastructures that have a common agreement on how information is expressed through the use of particular ontologies, vocabularies and sets of identifiers. In addition, we envision nanopublications to be useful for curation or peer-review of published knowledge by enabling any researcher to publish a nanopublication containing a comment of an assertion made in a previously published nanopublication. With this talk, we aim to showcase several nanopublication formats for biodiversity and to discuss the possible applications of nanopublications in the biodiversity domain.

At one point in Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the archdeacon, Claude Frollo, looked up from a book on his table to the edifice of the gothic cathedral, visible from his canon’s cell in the cloister of Notre Dame: “Alas!” he said, “this will kill that” (146). Frollo’s lament, that the book would destroy the edifice, captures the medieval cleric’s anxiety about the way in which Gutenberg’s print technology would become the new universal means for recording and communicating humanity’s ideas and artistic expression, replacing the grand monuments of architecture, human engineering, and craftsmanship. For Hugo, architecture was “the great handwriting of humankind” (149). The cathedral as the material outcome of human technology was being replaced by the first great machine—the printing press. At this point in the third millennium, some people undoubtedly have similar anxieties to Frollo: is it now the book’s turn to be destroyed by yet another great machine? The inclusion of “post print” in our title is not intended to sound the death knell of the book. Rather, we contend that despite the enduring value of print, digital publishing is “present and active” and is changing the way in which research, particularly in the humanities, is being undertaken. Our approach has three related parts. First, we consider how digital technologies are changing the way in which content is constructed, customised, modified, disseminated, and accessed within a global, distributed network. This section argues that the transition from print to electronic or digital publishing means both losses and gains, particularly with respect to shifts in our approaches to textuality, information, and innovative publishing. Second, we discuss the Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR) project, with which we are involved. This case study of a digitising initiative opens out the transformative possibilities and challenges of digital publishing and e-scholarship for research communities. Third, we reflect on technology’s capacity to bring about major changes in the light of the theoretical and practical issues that have arisen from our discussion. I. Digitising in a “post-print age” We are living in an era that is commonly referred to as “the late age of print” (see Kho) or the “post-print age” (see Gunkel). According to Aarseth, we have reached a point whereby nearly all of our public and personal media have become more or less digital (37). As Kho notes, web newspapers are not only becoming increasingly more popular, but they are also making rather than losing money, and paper-based newspapers are finding it difficult to recruit new readers from the younger generations (37). Not only can such online-only publications update format, content, and structure more economically than print-based publications, but their wide distribution network, speed, and flexibility attract advertising revenue. Hype and hyperbole aside, publishers are not so much discarding their legacy of print, but recognising the folly of not embracing innovative technologies that can add value by presenting information in ways that satisfy users’ needs for content to-go or for edutainment. As Kho notes: “no longer able to satisfy customer demand by producing print-only products, or even by enabling online access to semi-static content, established publishers are embracing new models for publishing, web-style” (42). Advocates of online publishing contend that the major benefits of online publishing over print technology are that it is faster, more economical, and more interactive. However, as Hovav and Gray caution, “e-publishing also involves risks, hidden costs, and trade-offs” (79). The specific focus for these authors is e-journal publishing and they contend that while cost reduction is in editing, production and distribution, if the journal is not open access, then costs relating to storage and bandwith will be transferred to the user. If we put economics aside for the moment, the transition from print to electronic text (e-text), especially with electronic literary works, brings additional considerations, particularly in their ability to make available different reading strategies to print, such as “animation, rollovers, screen design, navigation strategies, and so on” (Hayles 38). Transition from print to e-text In his book, Writing Space, David Bolter follows Victor Hugo’s lead, but does not ask if print technology will be destroyed. Rather, he argues that “the idea and ideal of the book will change: print will no longer define the organization and presentation of knowledge, as it has for the past five centuries” (2). As Hayles noted above, one significant indicator of this change, which is a consequence of the shift from analogue to digital, is the addition of graphical, audio, visual, sonic, and kinetic elements to the written word. A significant consequence of this transition is the reinvention of the book in a networked environment. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by space and time. Rather, it is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors, and texts. The Web 2.0 platform has enabled more experimentation with blending of digital technology and traditional writing, particularly in the use of blogs, which have spawned blogwriting and the wikinovel. Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Googlization of Everything: How One Company is Disrupting Culture, Commerce and Community … and Why We Should Worry is a wikinovel or blog book that was produced over a series of weeks with contributions from other bloggers (see: http://www.sivacracy.net/). Penguin Books, in collaboration with a media company, “Six Stories to Start,” have developed six stories—“We Tell Stories,” which involve different forms of interactivity from users through blog entries, Twitter text messages, an interactive google map, and other features. For example, the story titled “Fairy Tales” allows users to customise the story using their own choice of names for characters and descriptions of character traits. Each story is loosely based on a classic story and links take users to synopses of these original stories and their authors and to online purchase of the texts through the Penguin Books sales website. These examples of digital stories are a small part of the digital environment, which exploits computer and online technologies’ capacity to be interactive and immersive. As Janet Murray notes, the interactive qualities of digital environments are characterised by their procedural and participatory abilities, while their immersive qualities are characterised by their spatial and encyclopedic dimensions (71–89). These immersive and interactive qualities highlight different ways of reading texts, which entail different embodied and cognitive functions from those that reading print texts requires. As Hayles argues: the advent of electronic textuality presents us with an unparalleled opportunity to reformulate fundamental ideas about texts and, in the process, to see print as well as electronic texts with fresh eyes (89–90). The transition to e-text also highlights how digitality is changing all aspects of everyday life both inside and outside the academy. Online teaching and e-research Another aspect of the commercial arm of publishing that is impacting on academe and other organisations is the digitising and indexing of print content for niche distribution. Kho offers the example of the Mark Logic Corporation, which uses its XML content platform to repurpose content, create new content, and distribute this content through multiple portals. As the promotional website video for Mark Logic explains, academics can use this service to customise their own textbooks for students by including only articles and book chapters that are relevant to their subject. These are then organised, bound, and distributed by Mark Logic for sale to students at a cost that is generally cheaper than most textbooks. A further example of how print and digital materials can form an integrated, customised source for teachers and students is eFictions (Trimmer, Jennings, & Patterson). eFictions was one of the first print and online short story anthologies that teachers of literature could customise to their own needs. Produced as both a print text collection and a website, eFictions offers popular short stories in English by well-known traditional and contemporary writers from the US, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and Europe, with summaries, notes on literary features, author biographies, and, in one instance, a YouTube movie of the story. In using the eFictions website, teachers can build a customised anthology of traditional and innovative stories to suit their teaching preferences. These examples provide useful indicators of how content is constructed, customised, modified, disseminated, and accessed within a distributed network. However, the question remains as to how to measure their impact and outcomes within teaching and learning communities. As Harley suggests in her study on the use and users of digital resources in the humanities and social sciences, several factors warrant attention, such as personal teaching style, philosophy, and specific disciplinary requirements. However, in terms of understanding the benefits of digital resources for teaching and learning, Harley notes that few providers in her sample had developed any plans to evaluate use and users in a systematic way. In addition to the problems raised in Harley’s study, another relates to how researchers can be supported to take full advantage of digital technologies for e-research. The transformation brought about by information and communication technologies extends and broadens the impact of research, by making its outputs more discoverable and usable by other researchers, and its benefits more available to industry, governments, and the wider community. Traditional repositories of knowledge and information, such as libraries, are juggling the space demands of books and computer hardware alongside increasing reader demand for anywhere, anytime, anyplace access to information. Researchers’ expectations about online access to journals, eprints, bibliographic data, and the views of others through wikis, blogs, and associated social and information networking sites such as YouTube compete with the traditional expectations of the institutions that fund libraries for paper-based archives and book repositories. While university libraries are finding it increasingly difficult to purchase all hardcover books relevant to numerous and varied disciplines, a significant proportion of their budgets goes towards digital repositories (e.g., STORS), indexes, and other resources, such as full-text electronic specialised and multidisciplinary journal databases (e.g., Project Muse and Proquest); electronic serials; e-books; and specialised information sources through fast (online) document delivery services. An area that is becoming increasingly significant for those working in the humanities is the digitising of historical and cultural texts. II. Bringing back the dead: The CLDR project The CLDR project is led by researchers and librarians at the Queensland University of Technology, in collaboration with Deakin University, University of Sydney, and members of the AustLit team at The University of Queensland. The CLDR project is a “Research Community” of the electronic bibliographic database AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource, which is working towards the goal of providing a complete bibliographic record of the nation’s literature. AustLit offers users with a single entry point to enhanced scholarly resources on Australian writers, their works, and other aspects of Australian literary culture and activities. AustLit and its Research Communities are supported by grants from the Australian Research Council and financial and in-kind contributions from a consortium of Australian universities, and by other external funding sources such as the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Like other more extensive digitisation projects, such as Project Gutenberg and the Rosetta Project, the CLDR project aims to provide a centralised access point for digital surrogates of early published works of Australian children’s literature, with access pathways to existing resources. The first stage of the CLDR project is to provide access to digitised, full-text, out-of-copyright Australian children’s literature from European settlement to 1945, with selected digitised critical works relevant to the field. Texts comprise a range of genres, including poetry, drama, and narrative for young readers and picture books, songs, and rhymes for infants. Currently, a selection of 75 e-texts and digital scans of original texts from Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive have been linked to the Children’s Literature Research Community. By the end of 2009, the CLDR will have digitised approximately 1000 literary texts and a significant number of critical works. Stage II and subsequent development will involve digitisation of selected texts from 1945 onwards. A precursor to the CLDR project has been undertaken by Deakin University in collaboration with the State Library of Victoria, whereby a digital bibliographic index comprising Victorian School Readers has been completed with plans for full-text digital surrogates of a selection of these texts. These texts provide valuable insights into citizenship, identity, and values formation from the 1930s onwards. At the time of writing, the CLDR is at an early stage of development. An extensive survey of out-of-copyright texts has been completed and the digitisation of these resources is about to commence. The project plans to make rich content searchable, allowing scholars from children’s literature studies and education to benefit from the many advantages of online scholarship. What digital publishing and associated digital archives, electronic texts, hypermedia, and so forth foreground is the fact that writers, readers, publishers, programmers, designers, critics, booksellers, teachers, and copyright laws operate within a context that is highly mediated by technology. In his article on large-scale digitisation projects carried out by Cornell and University of Michigan with the Making of America collection of 19th-century American serials and monographs, Hirtle notes that when special collections’ materials are available via the Web, with appropriate metadata and software, then they can “increase use of the material, contribute to new forms of research, and attract new users to the material” (44). Furthermore, Hirtle contends that despite the poor ergonomics associated with most electronic displays and e-book readers, “people will, when given the opportunity, consult an electronic text over the print original” (46). If this preference is universally accurate, especially for researchers and students, then it follows that not only will the preference for electronic surrogates of original material increase, but preference for other kinds of electronic texts will also increase. It is with this preference for electronic resources in mind that we approached the field of children’s literature in Australia and asked questions about how future generations of researchers would prefer to work. If electronic texts become the reference of choice for primary as well as secondary sources, then it seems sensible to assume that researchers would prefer to sit at the end of the keyboard than to travel considerable distances at considerable cost to access paper-based print texts in distant libraries and archives. We considered the best means for providing access to digitised primary and secondary, full text material, and digital pathways to existing online resources, particularly an extensive indexing and bibliographic database. Prior to the commencement of the CLDR project, AustLit had already indexed an extensive number of children’s literature. Challenges and dilemmas The CLDR project, even in its early stages of development, has encountered a number of challenges and dilemmas that centre on access, copyright, economic capital, and practical aspects of digitisation, and sustainability. These issues have relevance for digital publishing and e-research. A decision is yet to be made as to whether the digital texts in CLDR will be available on open or closed/tolled access. The preference is for open access. As Hayles argues, copyright is more than a legal basis for intellectual property, as it also entails ideas about authorship, creativity, and the work as an “immaterial mental construct” that goes “beyond the paper, binding, or ink” (144). Seeking copyright permission is therefore only part of the issue. Determining how the item will be accessed is a further matter, particularly as future technologies may impact upon how a digital item is used. In the case of e-journals, the issue of copyright payment structures are evolving towards a collective licensing system, pay-per-view, and other combinations of print and electronic subscription (see Hovav and Gray). For research purposes, digitisation of items for CLDR is not simply a scan and deliver process. Rather it is one that needs to ensure that the best quality is provided and that the item is both accessible and usable by researchers, and sustainable for future researchers. Sustainability is an important consideration and provides a challenge for institutions that host projects such as CLDR. Therefore, items need to be scanned to a high quality and this requires an expensive scanner and personnel costs. Files need to be in a variety of formats for preservation purposes and so that they may be manipulated to be useable in different technologies (for example, Archival Tiff, Tiff, Jpeg, PDF, HTML). Hovav and Gray warn that when technology becomes obsolete, then content becomes unreadable unless backward integration is maintained. The CLDR items will be annotatable given AustLit’s NeAt funded project: Aus-e-Lit. The Aus-e-Lit project will extend and enhance the existing AustLit web portal with data integration and search services, empirical reporting services, collaborative annotation services, and compound object authoring, editing, and publishing services. For users to be able to get the most out of a digital item, it needs to be searchable, either through double keying or OCR (optimal character recognition). The value of CLDR’s contribution The value of the CLDR project lies in its goal to provide a comprehensive, searchable body of texts (fictional and critical) to researchers across the humanities and social sciences. Other projects seem to be intent on putting up as many items as possible to be considered as a first resort for online texts. CLDR is more specific and is not interested in simply generating a presence on the Web. Rather, it is research driven both in its design and implementation, and in its focussed outcomes of assisting academics and students primarily in their e-research endeavours. To this end, we have concentrated on the following: an extensive survey of appropriate texts; best models for file location, distribution, and use; and high standards of digitising protocols. These issues that relate to data storage, digitisation, collections, management, and end-users of data are aligned with the “Development of an Australian Research Data Strategy” outlined in An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework (2006). CLDR is not designed to simply replicate resources, as it has a distinct focus, audience, and research potential. In addition, it looks at resources that may be forgotten or are no longer available in reproduction by current publishing companies. Thus, the aim of CLDR is to preserve both the time and a period of Australian history and literary culture. It will also provide users with an accessible repository of rare and early texts written for children. III. Future directions It is now commonplace to recognize that the Web’s role as information provider has changed over the past decade. New forms of “collective intelligence” or “distributed cognition” (Oblinger and Lombardi) are emerging within and outside formal research communities. Technology’s capacity to initiate major cultural, social, educational, economic, political and commercial shifts has conditioned us to expect the “next big thing.” We have learnt to adapt swiftly to the many challenges that online technologies have presented, and we have reaped the benefits. As the examples in this discussion have highlighted, the changes in online publishing and digitisation have provided many material, network, pedagogical, and research possibilities: we teach online units providing students with access to e-journals, e-books, and customized archives of digitised materials; we communicate via various online technologies; we attend virtual conferences; and we participate in e-research through a global, digital network. In other words, technology is deeply engrained in our everyday lives. In returning to Frollo’s concern that the book would destroy architecture, Umberto Eco offers a placatory note: “in the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else” (n. pag.). Eco’s point has relevance to our discussion of digital publishing. The transition from print to digital necessitates a profound change that impacts on the ways we read, write, and research. As we have illustrated with our case study of the CLDR project, the move to creating digitised texts of print literature needs to be considered within a dynamic network of multiple causalities, emergent technological processes, and complex negotiations through which digital texts are created, stored, disseminated, and used. Technological changes in just the past five years have, in many ways, created an expectation in the minds of people that the future is no longer some distant time from the present. Rather, as our title suggests, the future is both present and active. References Aarseth, Espen. “How we became Postdigital: From Cyberstudies to Game Studies.” Critical Cyber-culture Studies. Ed. David Silver and Adrienne Massanari. New York: New York UP, 2006. 37–46. An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework: Final Report of the e-Research Coordinating Committee. Commonwealth of Australia, 2006. Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991. Eco, Umberto. “The Future of the Book.” 1994. 3 June 2008 ‹http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html>. Gunkel, David. J. “What's the Matter with Books?” Configurations 11.3 (2003): 277–303. Harley, Diane. “Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” Research and Occasional Papers Series. Berkeley: University of California. Centre for Studies in Higher Education. 12 June 2008 ‹http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html>. Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Hirtle, Peter B. “The Impact of Digitization on Special Collections in Libraries.” Libraries & Culture 37.1 (2002): 42–52. Hovav, Anat and Paul Gray. “Managing Academic E-journals.” Communications of the ACM 47.4 (2004): 79–82. Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris). Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth editions, 1993. Kho, Nancy D. “The Medium Gets the Message: Post-Print Publishing Models.” EContent 30.6 (2007): 42–48. Oblinger, Diana and Marilyn Lombardi. “Common Knowledge: Openness in Higher Education.” Opening up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education Through Open Technology, Open Content and Open Knowledge. Ed. Toru Liyoshi and M. S. Vijay Kumar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. 389–400. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Trimmer, Joseph F., Wade Jennings, and Annette Patterson. eFictions. New York: Harcourt, 2001.

A fundamental limitation of existing taxonomic databases is that they don't explicitly link to the primary literature (Page 2016). The taxonomic literature is the foundation of our understanding of biodiversity and tracks how that understanding has changed over time. It is the authoritative source of taxonomic names, descriptions, nomenclatural changes and taxonomic revisions and, as such, is an essential reference for taxonomists describing new species, undertaking taxonomic revisions and conducting threatened species assessments. The taxonomic literature is the source of truth for the publicly accessible taxonomic databases that provide the backbone for the names index in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and other large scale data aggregators. However, the citations in these databases vary enormously in their format and completeness, and the vast majority are unlinked text strings. Our inability to link directly from taxonomic databases to the source literature is not just a serious impediment to taxonomic and conservation research, it is archaic and annoying. Taxonomists need these links. Specifically, they need links in the form of persistent identifiers to both publications (journal articles, books, etc) and (particularly for botanists) to the specific pages in publications where taxonomic treatments begin. Efforts to extract treatments and present them in isolation, while invaluable when the work itself is behind a paywall, remove the treatment from valuable contextual information. It is of greater value to provide links to specific pages within the entire work, enabling scrolling to previous and subsequent pages. Mapping unlinked citations to modern publications is straightforward; they are generally published online, they usually have complete, machine-readable metadata, and, most importantly, they have DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers). Despite this, citations of modern publications in taxonomic databases still frequently appear as dead strings. Linking to historic publications was difficult in the past, but this is no longer the case. Digitisation efforts, particularly by the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), mean that much of the legacy taxonomic literature is now freely available online. Discoverability of the content on BHL has been dramatically improved by the retrospective addition of article level metadata. Over 325,000 articles have now been “defined” within the BHL (73% by the BioStor project). These articles now have article landing pages and (as of March 2022) pre-generated PDFs (Richard 2022), bringing them in line with modern publishing standards. Since 2020, the BHL’s Persistent Identifier Working Group (Team #RetroPIDs) has been assigning DOIs to these articles, bringing them into the linked network of scholarly research and making them as discoverable and citable as contemporary literature (Kearney 2021). These retrospectively assigned DOIs are now appearing in the reference lists of new publications, as well as in Wikipedia articles, social media posts and Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) profiles. We know this because, now they have DOIs, we can track their impact and reach (Kearney et al. 2021). The BHL is most appreciated for the access it provides to historic literature, but the BHL community is increasingly uploading recent publications. For example, BHL Australia spent much of 2021 uploading contemporary orchid journals in response to an urgent request from researchers studying the impact of Australia's devastating 2020 bushfires on native orchid species. These journals contain vital information about past distribution and abundance. If taxonomic efforts, such as Taxonomy Australia's mission to discover and document all remaining Australian species in a generation, are to have any chance of success, we need to make it as easy as possible for taxonomists to access the taxonomic literature (Thiele et al. 2022). This presentation will detail Team #RetroPIDs’ newest project: to replace the unlinked citations in taxonomic databases with links that will provide immediate access to the taxonomic literature.

Metadata provides important information relevant both to finding and understanding corpus data. Meaningful linguistic data requires both reasonable annotations and documentation of these annotations. This documentation is part of the metadata of a dataset. While corpus documentation has often been provided in the form of accompanying publications, machinereadable metadata, both containing the bibliographic information and documenting the corpus data, has many advantages. Metadata standards allow for the development of common tools and interfaces. In this paper I want to add a new perspective from an archive’s point of view and look at the metadata provided for four learner corpora and discuss the suitability of established standards for machine-readable metadata. I am are aware that there is ongoing work towards metadata standards for learner corpora. However, I would like to keep the discussion going and add another point of view: increasing findability and reusability of learner corpora in an archiving context.