Page 90 - Building Digital Libraries

General-Purpose Technologies Useful for Digital Repositories

• Prior to the work that the XML Working Group would
eventually accomplish in 1996, the Online Archive of Califor-
nia (OAC) was already doing research on how SGML could
be used to create archival finding aids. Between 1993 and
1995, a full one year before the XML Working Group would
be established, the OAC published a prototype finding-aid
syntax known then as the Berkeley Finding Aid Project.
Using this prototype, the OAC developed one of the very
first union databases composed primarily of encoded finding
aids—showing early on some of the benefits that could be
gained through the utilization of structured metadata. This
prototype would eventually be developed into what we know
today as EAD (Encoded Archival Description), which is the
lingua franca of the library archival community.
• Developed in 1987 by the Association for Computers in the
Hu manities, TEI was initially developed to provide a stan-
dard-based format for moving formatted text into an XML
markup language. Humanities scholars needed an agreed-
upon markup language to enable the development and
reusability of digitized text-based documents for long-term
research purposes. In 1999, the University of Virginia and
the University of Bern proposed the creation of a commit-
tee to oversee the continued development and expansion of
the markup language. Libraries working with TEI realized
that if expanded, the format could provide more than just a
markup language; it could provide an essential component
for the digital preservation of text-based content.

Today, libraries make use of XML nearly every day. Today, we can find
XML in their ILS systems, in image management tools—in many facets of
the library.
In figure 5.2 we see an example of how a current ILS vendor, in this
case Innovative Interfaces, is utilizing XML to make bibliographic metadata
available directly via the WWW. In this case, the process demonstrates
the ILS vendor’s localized XML format for the record. This information is
available via a durable URL. The vendor also provides data in MARCXML
for users working with the system’s limited read-based programming inter-
faces. In figure 5.3, we see how the Ohio State University is utilizing the
OAI (Open Archive Initiative) harvesting framework via its Samvera-based
application to make a collection’s metadata available for public data harvest-
ing. And in figure 5.4, we see an example of an ILS vendor, in this case Ex
Libris’s Alma system, that has provided API integration to enable the abil-
ity to read and write data into their system utilizing MARCXML wrapped
around a localized data format. In all of these examples, the availability of
the XML interfaces offers digital library developers additional opportunities
for integrating information from these disparate systems together. Moreover,
technologies like OAI provide a way for other organizations to harvest and
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