In August 2008, tagging was implemented on articles that were full text searchable within the National Library of Australia's historic Australian Newspapers service. During the first year, 500 users created over 100,000 tags, 38,000 of which were distinct. The tagging was very successful and the National Library will be extending the tagging functionality to all of its other collections before the end of 2009. In this article, the tagging activity, behaviors and outcomes are analyzed and compared with other research on image tagging.

By the use of bibliometric techniques, authorship characteristics of D-Lib Magazine (D-Lib) are studied. Data was collected by examining issues from the Magazine's launch date, July 1995 to the issue dated May/June 2008. Author productivity, the most productive authors, authors' gender, type of affiliated institutions, authors' geographic distribution, multiple authorship, and the average number of references per article are reported. The impact of D-Lib Magazine was investigated by utilizing Web of Sciences (WoS) databases and its analyzing tools. The most cited D-Lib Magazine authors, D-Lib articles, and the lists of authors, journals, and academic fields that often cite the Magazine are presented.

The Digital Object Architecture defines three primary components: an identifier system, metadata registries, and digital object repositories. The identifier system is the widely used Handle System and the CNRI metadata registries are now in use in several projects. This paper introduces the Digital Object Repository Server (DORS), the most recent instantiation of CNRI's repository work. DORS includes an open, flexible, secure and scalable protocol and software suite that provides a common interface for interacting directly with all types of Digital Objects. It has been implemented and tested as server software and provides a trustworthy network interface for invoking operations on objects.

Information privacy is an important consideration when transitioning university collections from paper to electronic access. Yet the protection of — and limits to — student privacy regulations have rarely been addressed in the literature for online electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and its relevance to student work should be a consideration when widely distributing scholarship like e-portfolios, ETDs, and senior capstone projects. In this article, we share several campus approaches to FERPA and electronic student work.

The Resource Description and Access (RDA) standard, due to be released this coming summer, has included since May 2007 a parallel effort to build Semantic Web enabled vocabularies. This article describes that effort and the decisions made to express the vocabularies for use within the library community and in addition as a bridge to the future of library data outside the current MARC-based systems. The authors also touch on the registration activities that have made the vocabularies usable independently of the RDA textual guidance. Designed for both human and machine users, the registered vocabularies describe the relationships between FRBR, the RDA classes and properties and the extensive value vocabularies developed for use within RDA.

This article describes the results of a survey investigating the use of technological protection measure (TPM) tools to control patron access to or use of digital cultural materials made accessible by U.S. archives, libraries and museums. Libraries reported using a broader range of systems than archives or museums including repository software, streaming media servers, digital library software and courseware. In terms of controlling access to collections, most respondents reported using IP range restrictions and network-ID based authorization systems. Some reported restricting access to approved terminals or individual user registration systems. In terms of controlling use of collection items, respondents reported reliance on resolution limits, clips and thumbnails, and visible watermarking. A lower percentage reported use of click-through license agreements. Few institutions reported using new technologies to control access or use such as pop-ups, disabling right click copy and save functionalities, invisible watermarks, viewers or cross-institutional authentication systems.

The wide availability of educational resources is a common objective for universities, libraries, archives and other knowledge-intensive institutions. Although generic metadata specifications (such as Dublin Core) seem to fulfill the need for documenting web-distributed objects, educational resources demand a more specialized treatment and characterization. In this article we focus on the use of learning-object specific metadata in digital repositories, as they are primarily incarnated in the LOM (learning object metadata) standard. We review relevant standards and practices, especially noting the importance of application profiling paradigms. A widespread institutional repository platform is offered by DSpace. We discuss our implementation of LOM metadata in this system as well as our interoperability extensions. To this end, we propose a potential LOM to DC mapping that we have put into use in DSpace. Finally, we introduce our implementation of an LOM ontology, as a basis for delivering Semantic Web services over educational resources.

The research area of nuclear astrophysics is characterized by a need for information published in tens of journals in several fields and an extremely dilute distribution of researchers. For these reasons it is difficultfor researchers, especially students, to be adequately informed of the relevant published research. In an attempt to address this problem, we have developed a virtual journal (VJ), a process for collecting and distributing a weekly compendium of articles of interest to researchers in nuclear astrophysics. Subscribers are notified of each VJ issue using an email-list server or an RSS feed. The VJ data base is searchable by topics assigned by the editors, or by keywords. There are two related VJs: the Virtual Journal of Nuclear Astrophysics (JINA VJ), and the SEGUE Virtual Journal (SEGUE VJ). The VJs and support information are available here.