HARVESTING AND GATEWAYS WORKING GROUP

Facilitator - Jason Grossman

Definitions

Both harvesting mechanisms and gateways are discovery tools. Harvesting captures data including metadata that is not necessarily in any major collection using web spiders/crawlers or robots. It can include a mechanism for creators of resources to submit metadata to a clearing-house. Gateways may include hand-crafted catalogues of other people's material, with or without annotations by the gateway owner.

Problems and Opportunities

  • URLs are much too unstable, and especially difficult when dealing with dynamic content and restructured sites. Need to promote alternative means of identifying online digital resources.
  • Lack of provision of metadata - need to provide encouragement and incentives to at least use Dublin core
  • Hand-crafted catalogues can't keep up with the explosion of content
  • Need semantic reasoning in free-text (and voice) search engines, and in metadata input
  • IP and authentication issues
  • Quality and branding via gateways

Priorities for an e-Humanities Research Network

Become a clearing-house (via web and/or phone).

Participate in programmes to facilitate the EASY production of metadata - e.g.:

  • by joining international consortia
  • by acting as a clearing-house for tools to translate between different metadata formats

Promote open access - good models for this are already out there: e.g. Austlii, MIT, abstracts.

Provide guidelines and assist in design of gateways and portals.

Examples

  • worldlii World Legal Information Institute: free, independent and non-profit global legal research facility developed collaboratively by Legal Information Institutes based in various countries, including the Australasian Legal Information Institute based at UTS and UNSW
  • Open Language Archives Community Gateway: harvests metadata from 27 participating archives worldwide, including several Australian language archives such as PARADISEC and ASEDA
  • Australian E-humanities Gateway: a selection of Australian online humanities resources and projects
  • humbul UK-based gateway to online humanities resources
  • Google free-text search engine