Digitization&Metadata

Librarians in Canada are criticizing the nation’s federal archives for giving a consortium exclusive rights to digitize and sell content held by public universities—and for keeping the deal under wraps.

Newly launched, Zenodo www.zenodo.org offers a one-stop-store for research output. Created by OpenAIRE and CERN, and supported by the European Commission, this new-generation online repository offers its service from the OpenAIRE pan-European initiative, which expands the linking of research output to datasets and funding information, in European and national contexts.

Enabling everyone to Share and Cite Data

Zenodo welcomes multi-disciplinary research data from any individual, scientific community or research institution. Upload allowance is generous (1GB) and can be used by institutions without their own data repository. Based on the same concept as OpenAIRE, which gathers Open Access publications across a variety of funding schemes, Zenodo provides a rich interface to link objects together with funding information.

On 4 March 2013, the Spanish Government published an interoperability specification that harmonises how Spanish public administrations describe datasets or more generally public sector information (PSI). The use of common description metadata is a significant catalyst in increasing the use of open data. It affects the searchability of datasets on open data portals such as datos.gov.es.

Selection for digitization is about more than which items to scan. Selection is what shapes the online collections that are built by libraries, archives, historical societies, and other cultural heritage institutions. By selecting well, institutions can concentrate on the parts of their collections that are best suited to digitization, that make the most effective use of technology, and that meet the needs of their audiences. They can create online collections that are both useful and usable, and they can create high-quality digital assets they can manage well into the future.