Metadata : XML/XSLT-Mediated File Format Migration as a Digital Preservation Strategy. This month's RLG DigiNews has an excellent overview of how XML and XSLT can be used as an approach to digital preservation.

The FAQ question makes a good point about the future of software, and how we plan to preserve electronic objects, irrespective of their formats. Tools such as OpenOffice and the new Microsoft Office 2003 are based entirely on XML. If you unzip the document, presentation, or spreadsheet with which you're working, you'll discover a nifty XML file that contains the entire contents of your work. The benefit of this is that digital preservationists can convert this XML to any long-term storage format they need, such as TIFF, JPEG2000, or any text-based file. Coupled with the metadata and XML work that catalogers are already pursuing, we could maintain accessiblity to a whole range of objects that, until now, required excessive amounts of abstracting, indexing, and summarization to utilize.

Archivists in particular should pay attention to these tools. If archivists were to work with potential donors (e.g., faculty and university administrators), to create their work in these XML-compliant tools, then the entire contents of the documents could be made accessible for searching. Natural language processing tools could do the summarization work for us, similar to what the HELIOS project did at Carnegie Mellon. This could mean less (or no) work for preparing finding aids or cumbersome EAD files. [inSilico - A Princeton University Library metadata and digital library blog]  12:53:50 PM   [Feedback ]  

RSS : The Simplicity of RSS.

Great article by Kelvyn Taylor on RSS:

"In the world of technology, it's always refreshing to come across something that's simple."

He also warns about RSS becoming too complex:

"As the technology is so simple and robust, new users are appearing all the time. Of course, the tricky bit is that as RSS becomes more popular, people will want to add extra functionality - and this way lies doom. Once it becomes too complex, the barriers to entry will rise and people will abandon it."

I agree that RSS should be just about content, but how can we advance it without getting a bit more complex?

[Library Stuff]  7:49:36 AM   [Feedback ]