December 1, 2010 -- The Digital Library Federation Fall Forum (external link) was held in Palo Alto, CA, November 1 to 3, 2010. Among the presenters were several National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program partners and staff from the Library of Congress.
Leslie Johnston and Barrie Howard, from the Library of Congress, gave a presentation titled, "Recollection: Sharing and Visualization of Digital Collections (external link)."
Recollection is a developmental online tool built by Zepheira (external link) that allows users to upload and augment metadata about collections and share it with new visualizations. Johnston said, "It enables you to do new things with data as well as make the data available for other people to create their own customized views of it." The underlying data resides in a resource description framework (external link).
The Recollection presentation was well received and many audience members expressed their eagerness to begin using it. Some even had suggestions for new features. Johnston said, "One person thanked us for building this tool because now she doesn't have to build it herself."
Staff from NDIIPP partner the California Digital Library gave several presentations. "Curation Micro-Services (external link)" described a move from a monolithic repository toward a lighter, modular approach, enabling you to use your structured file system as the repository rather than having to develop a huge application to manage your collections and content.
The other CDL presentations, "JHOVE 2 Next Generation Characterization (external link) " (PDF) and "Project to Production: The Web Archiving Service (external link)" (PDF), were project updates to NDIIPP partner projects JHOVE 2 and the Web-At-Risk Project.
NDIIPP partners from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library gave a presentation related to the NDIIPP project "Tools for a Preservation-Ready Web" titled, "Transactional Web Archiving: Memento (external link)" (PDF). Memento is a web-archiving tool for making web-archived content more discoverable. Johnston observed that, though she had seen the Memento presentation at other conferences, the DLF presentation was highly effective and the audience seemed to quickly grasp Memento's purpose and usefulness. "I saw the light bulb turn on for a lot of people," said Johnston. "All of a sudden they got what Memento was and what it could do."
DLF has recently added several new members, which could lead to new potential collaborations to benefit digital librarianship.
