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Letter to Deputy CTO Noveck: “Open Government Publications”
[UPDATE 9/23/11: It’s come to our attention that scribd, the site that hosts the document below, does not make it easy for users to download. In some instances it appears as if the user has to subscribe to scribd before they can download. So I’ve attached a copy of the document below for your free downloading pleasure. JRJ]
In early April, Michael Keller, Stanford University Librarian and my boss, had a phone conversation with [[Beth_Simone_Noveck|Beth Simone Noveck]], US deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government leading President Obama’s Open Government Initiative. Noveck requested a short report outlining how the digital FDLP would work.
Below is that report outlining a distributed ecosystem, or publications.gov, that “would incorporate collaborative cataloging/metadata creation, as well as shared or Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technical infrastructure in which data and technological redundancy and collective and proactive action reign.” As many of you already know, some of the pieces for a digital FDLP ecosystem are already in place. However, as our recent post, “The State of FDsys and the Future of the FDLP”, showed, some of those critical pieces are on shaky ground to say the least.
The report was forwarded to Bob Tapella and Mike Wash at GPO as well as Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer (CIO), and US Archivist David Ferriero.
FDLP issues are now front and center to the movers and shakers in the Obama administration. But we’ll need more libraries and librarians willing to step up and pitch in to make the digital FDLP ecosystem a reality.
Digital FDLP Ecosystem
Demystifying Digital Deposit: What It Is and What It Could Do for the Future of the FDLP
At the Fall Depository Library Council Meeting in Arlington, VA, Rebecca Blakeley gave a presentation that she and I wrote on “Demystifying Digital Deposit: What It Is and What It Could Do for the Future of the FDLP.” Although a PDF version of the presentation is available on the FDLP web site, it only has the slides, not the text of the presentation.
The complete, original PowerPoint file, including the “speaker notes” with the complete text of the presentation, is available on slideshare, and also uploaded here on FGI for those without slideshare accounts:
- Demystifying Digital Deposit: What It Is and What It Could Do for the Future of the FDLP, by Rebecca Blakeley and Jim Jacobs, Fall DLC Meeting – Arlington, VA, October 20, 2009.
Purls vs handles
Building on yesterday’s post on Critical GPO systems and the FDLP cloud, I’ve done a little digging into GPO’s proposed migration from [w:Purl]s to the use of “handles.” According to RFP 3650 “Handle system overview,”
The Handle System includes an open protocol, a namespace, and a reference implementation of the protocol. The protocol enables a distributed computer system to store names, or handles, of digital resources and resolve those handles into the information necessary to locate, access, and otherwise make use of the resources. These associated values can be changed as needed to reflect the current state of the identified resource without changing the handle. This allows the name of the item to persist over changes of location and other current state information. Each handle may have its own administrator(s) and administration can be done in a distributed environment (my emphasis). The Handle System supports secured handle resolution. Security services such as data confidentiality, data integrity, and non-repudiation are provided upon client request.
Purls and handles do roughly the same thing: they’re link resolvers. But, as Larry Stone’s 2000 article for MIT’s Persistent Naming discovery project, “Competitive Evaluation of PURLs” points out, there are differences that make handles a better choice for long-term operation and persistence. Without getting too technical, handles are not connected to any protocol (i.e., [w:HTTP]) or domain (i.e., .gov) and can therefore work regardless of the network design or protocol used. This is extremely important for scalability and persistence over the long term. In addition, handles can do more than resolve to URLs. “The Handle System design allows for various other types of resolution objects, metadata, and extensible addtions to each Handle object record.”
In short, handles are more persistent, more scaleable, and can do more. But most importantly in my mind, handle administration, “can be done in a distributed environment.” This makes handles perfect for the FDLP cloud because the work of resolving links can be done in a distributed environment. So I say, kudos to GPO for moving to the handle system.
Oh, hold that applause for a moment. My search also turned up the following document from Fall 2007 Depository Library Council meeting entitled, “Handles Council Briefing Topic” (PDF). This briefing document basically describes what I’ve just said above and describes a gradual transition/migration from purls to handles with an anticipated timeline to, “coincide with Release 1-C of FDsys in 2008.” There’s a March, 6 2008 report, “Report on the handles beta test” that calls the handles beta test “satisfactory.” But no information is available after that report. So what happened?
I know the building of FDsys has been no easy task and that GPO staff have worked really hard to keep to their published release schedule; but I’d like to know why the handles migration didn’t occur in 2008. If more testing is involved, I’m sure there are libraries that would be willing to be beta-beta testers for handles. Perhaps this is an opportune time to finally implement the migration to the handles system.
–that is all.
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