Description: This article discusses metadata analysis. Abstract: Over the past few years the University of North Texas Libraries' Digital Projects Unit (DPU) has developed a set of metadata analysis tools, processes, and methodologies aimed at helping to focus limited quality control resources on the areas of the collection where they might have the most benefit. The key to this work lies in its simplicity: records harvested from OAI-PMH-enabled digital repositories are transformed into a format that makes them easily parsable using traditional Unix/Linux-based command-line tools. This article describes the overall methodology, introduces two simple open-source tools developed to help with the aforementioned harvesting and breaking, and provides example commands to demonstrate some common metadata analysis requests. All software tools described in the article are available with an open-source license via the author's GitHub account.

Description: This article discusses a bellwether regarding a nation's electronic information infrastructure, the legal regulations that govern the infrastructure, the resulting citizen-trust in its government and its e-readiness in Nigeria, the DPRK, China, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands and the United States. Information technology infrastructures should be designed with cutting-edge equipment that offers citizens consistent and dependable access to necessary and pertinent information. The infrastructures should be held accountable and regulated by a well-established legal system. Additionally, the infrastructures should create a body politic that trusts its government, is aware of its nation's laws, regulations, and policies, and is motivated to contribute and participate positively in the national economy and political process. In modern societies, the most efficacious means in which a nation-state can create an information infrastructure is via electronic technology ("e-technology"). Some nation-states are currently better prepared than others to provide information to their citizens via e-technologies, and some are more willing to provide a free exchange of electronic information. An assessment of how well a nation can disseminate freely accessible, valid, and reliable information, and how willing nations are to provide complete, accurate, and open information via e-technologies is defined as "e-readiness." Scholars have posited numerous models to ...

Description: In this article, the author discusses the American Society for Indexing (ASI) conference presentations. The ASI holds annual conferences to keep members informed of new developments in indexing technology and the expanding role of indexing (ASI, 2012). Conferences also facilitate communication among members, provide educational opportunities, and raise awareness of quality indexing. The purpose of this article is to identify major topics discussed at ASI conferences from 1997 through 2012 and to explore how the topics have changed over time. ASI conference programs reflect topics of interest to indexers, and thus provide insight into concerns of the profession at large.

Description: This article offers a comparison of strategies and policies for building distributed digital preservation infrastructure. Abstract: This paper discusses the importance of a particular approach to building and sustaining digital content preservation infrastructures for cultural memory organizations (CMOs), namely 'distributed' approaches that are 'cooperatively' maintained by CMOs (rather than centralized approaches managed by agencies external to CMOs), and why this approach may fill a gap in capabilities for those CMOs actively digitizing historical and cultural content (rather than scientific data). Initial findings are presented from an early organizational effort (the MetaArchive Cooperative) that seeks to fill this gap for CMOs. The article situates these claims in the larger context of selected exemplars of Digital Preservation (DP) efforts in both the United States and the United Kingdom that are seeking to develop effective DP models in an attempt to recognize those organizational aspects (such as the governmental frameworks, cultural backgrounds, and other differences in emphasis) that are UK- and US-specific.

Description: This article discusses biography indexes. The author discusses index characteristics considered significant by book reviewers of biographies, drawing on reviews excerpted in the 'Reviewed elsewhere' column of Biography.