The Johns
Hopkins Sheridan Libraries have been awarded a $185,000
grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for
a groundbreaking effort to create a prototype system that
will capture and preserve the massive digital datasets
generated by large-scale astronomy projects for the Virtual
Observatory.
The Virtual Observatory is a Johns Hopkins-led effort
to develop a common set of standards in a Web framework for
digital astronomy. Hopkins will establish a collaboration
of publishers, libraries and the National Virtual
Observatory to give astronomers universal access to the
specially processed digital images, spectra and time series
that are graphically represented in scientific
literature.
"This initiative moves libraries from the periphery of
projects such as NVO to the center of digital archiving and
data curation efforts, thereby enabling the creation of the
cyberinfrastructure required for the long-term preservation
of data sets," said Sayeed Choudhury, associate director of
library digital programs at the Sheridan Libraries and
principal investigator for the grant.
Digital archiving to ensure long-term access was one
of the key priorities cited in the 2003 report of the
National Science Foundation's Blue Ribbon Panel on
Cyberinfrastructure. The system created by Johns Hopkins
and its partners, the University of Washington and the
University of Edinburgh, and based on the open-source
Fedora digital repository system software, will help ensure
that important scholarly resources from the scientific
domain are not lost in a "digital dark age."
Robert Hanisch, NVO project manager, said, "The
National Virtual Observatory is a natural partner in this
project, given its capabilities for distributed data
discovery and access. We can build on the NVO
infrastructure and include research libraries in the arena
of data providers," said Hanisch, who is a senior scientist
at the Space Telescope
Science Institute, located on the Johns Hopkins
Homewood campus. "Such a partnership will help assure
permanent access to the scholarly research record."
The project team will develop a set of Web services
that link literature and reference materials to
astronomical datasets and provide methods for long-term
digital archiving of content that can be used in publishing
research in astronomy. Deposited data will ultimately be
archived within the library, which will serve as a digital
annex for publications.
Winston Tabb, Sheridan Dean of University Libraries at
Johns Hopkins, said, "Our vision is to create a cooperative
system among astronomical researchers, libraries,
publishers, editors and the National Virtual Observatory in
which the literature, the associated digital data and the
underlying data archives connect seamlessly.
"While the proposed work focuses on astronomy, a
discipline that is at the forefront of data-intensive
scholarship, the results of this effort will provide a
blueprint for other disciplines and a model for what
research libraries must do if we are going to fulfill our
long-standing mission of supporting the research, teaching
and learning needs of our customers," he said.
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