D-Lib Magazine
September/October 2012
Volume 18, Number 9/10
Table of Contents
Editorial
An Embarrassment of Riches
Laurence Lannom
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
llannom@cnri.reston.va.us
doi:10.1045/september2012-editorial
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In writing these brief editorials I usually try to preview the issue and invite any readers that happen to begin here to keep going. Sometimes I can tie the articles together in a theme, either because we have accidentally hit on one or because it was planned as a themed issue. The current issue has no theme, planned or accidental, but it is an outstanding collection of articles.
The first two articles, OpenAIREplus: the European Scholarly Communication Data Infrastructure by Manghi, et al. and The Data Conservancy Instance: Infrastructure and Organizational Services for Research Data Curation by Mayernik, et al., describe two of the more important infrastructure building projects going on today. OpenAIREplus covers scholarly communication in general, including publications and data, while Data Conservancy focuses on research data curation. These are large collaborative projects and the spread of authorship of these articles reflects that. Anyone wanting to keep up with digital library developments has to keep up with these sorts of large projects. They are pointing the way to library futures.
The next two articles address specific issues in digital information management: A Perspective on Resource Synchronization by Van de Sompel, et al., and Identifying Threats to Successful Digital Preservation: the SPOT Model for Risk Assessment by Vermaaten, et al. Simple synchronization does not cover many of today's use cases and the article does an excellent job of describing the approach taken in the ResourceSync project for the needs of projects such as arXiv.org and Europeana. In the risk assessment article the authors analyze existing threat models for digital preservation and provide a very useful framework, the SPOT Model of the title, for carrying out risk assessment in different repository contexts.
I think you will find the fifth and final article, Fulltext Geocoding Versus Spatial Metadata for Large Text Archives: Towards a Geographically Enriched Wikipedia by Leetaru, interesting, thought provoking, and fun to read, especially if you haven't yet gotten deeply into spatial information, both 'born geographic' and, the main topic here, the spatial indexing of existing bodies of text.
Finally, we have a timely opinion piece by Stevan Harnad. In United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak he argues that the UK government is about to put into place an Open Access (OA) requirement that is not really in the best interests of the OA movement. Whichever side of the issue you are on I think you will find it of interest.
About the Editor
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Laurence Lannom is Director of Information Management Technology and Vice President at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), where he works with organizations in both the public and private sectors to develop experimental and pilot applications of advanced networking and information management technologies.
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