29/30 July 2002
Hans J. Becker (becker@mail.sub.uni-goettingen.de)
Heike Neuroth (neuroth@mail.sub.uni-goettingen.de)
Göttingen State and University Library, Germany (SUB)
http://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de
Platz der Göttinger Sieben 1
D-37073 Göttingen
In the nineties the SUB started to enhance the printed collections by electronic documents and databases. In 1995 a quality-controlled Subject Gateway (MathGuide: http://www.MathGuide.de) has been developed, which provides access to more than thousand mathematical relevant online resources in the Internet. In 1997 the SUB got a first grant from DFG to build up ERAM (Electronic Research Archive for Mathematics). Today we dispose of more than 500.000 scanned images of journals, dissertations, monographs, and multi-volume works. Within the next years we will have more than 1.6 M scanned images in the field of Mathematics. Partners in the project are the European Mathematical Society, the Zentralblatt für Mathematik, and SUB Göttingen. Cooperation partners are BertelsmannSpringer and other publishing houses, Mathematical Societies, and other scientific institutions. We are about to finish the digitization of the Mathematische Annalen, the Mathematische Zeitschrift, a lot of the journals of the EMS server, several hundred dissertations, monographs and multi-volumen works. We are continuing to scan Springer journals, books of the serial Grundlehren der Mathematik and other selected materials. All documents which have been and will be scanned during the ERAM project have been selected by mathematicians.
Taking into consideration our experiences with ERAM and projects which we initiated around ERAM we would like to remark the following:
There is one model which is worldwide accepted: the OAIS model (Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System, version January 2002). We would like to stress that metadata for electronic resources have to be formulated during their whole life-cycle. Therefore developing metadata schemes will be an important task. In this context the usual metadata (bibliographic metadata) are only a small part of the necessary metadata set. New types of metadata are e.g. administrative, structural, consistency, fixity, and provenance metadata. There are some internationally cooperating projects in progress whose results should be considered while developing the DML metadata application profile.
Long-term archiving
Developing DML implies the need of long-term archiving. Up to now there is no universally valild definition or evidence on how the future mechanism of the long-term archiving process should be. The only thing which seems to be evident is that two mechanisms could be important: emulation and migration.
Some experimental projects have already been finished and now especially national coalitions are starting to master those huge management and technical problems, e.g. the UK Preservation Coaliation initiative, the LZA initiative in Germany, etc. In addition some statements have been formulated, see e.g. Council of the European Union (Draft Council Resolution on "Preserving tomorrows memory preserving digital content for future generations", April 2002), IFLA/IPA (Joint Statement on the Archiving and Preservation of Digital Information, January 2002), OCLC/RLG (Preservation Metadata for Digital Objects, January 2001) etc.
As it seems that some of the DML members will be partners of these initiatives they could integrate the results of these efforts in DML activities/developments.
Because of the difficulties especially within the mathematical literature (formulars, graphics, etc.) a working group of the DML should be established which is connected with the different projects all over the world dealing with these special problems.
Access
In the ERAM project the SUB started by developing a database for the first comprehensive mathematical review journal (Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik) where every entry is transformed into a database entry together with a new abstract and new MSC classification codes. At the same time a lot of the reviewed material is digitized and linked to the database entries. Thus there is a subject based access system for the mathematicians which can be used soon after the beginning of the project. This system is highly accepted by the mathematical community.
Therefore we would like to propose the databases Math, MathRev, Ref. Zhurn. Mat., and Jahrbuch as linking instruments. There could be the possibility to cross-search all these databases by a single search request. Additionally we propose to create as soon as possible the possibility to search each database seperately.