Tuesday 24 April 2012

Collection of the Month: IGRS Visiting Fellows

For May it is the turn of the collection of research papers from Visiting Fellows to the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies.

As one might expect, it is an eclectic mix, with work on topics as diverse as student protest in Italy, Muslim identity in contemporary German fiction, and 'The Wicker Man.' During 2011, papers were downloaded on average 40 times each, with the most popular item, on the operettas of Franz Lehar, being accessed some 93 times. The collection is an excellent demonstration of the range of research that is carried out in association with the School.

Further information on the Visiting Fellowships at the IGRS is available on the Institute site.

Thursday 5 April 2012

Using the repository for data: LIPARM

We've always taken a catholic view of the format of material that SAS-Space should hold, but the bulk of our holdings is still nonetheless 'traditional' PDF files. I'm very pleased to note a recent deposit of data from the LiPARM (Linking Parliamentary Records through Metadata) project in the IHR.

Funded by the JISC, the project will allow for the first time the federated searching and browsing of UK and Ireland Parliamentary papers by defining and implementing a unified metadata strategy for historical and contemporary parliamentary digitisation projects. The project has defined a generic XML schema for parliamentary metadata, along with controlled vocabularies for key components of this metadata, and will produce a platform for a union catalogue of these materials based on the records created. Key collections will be enhanced to allow their content to be accessed via the catalogue.

The project has recently deposited the XML schema, an example file, and XML lists of constituencies, Acts and members for Westminster and Stormont. View the data here.

As well as this particular data being now available and in the public domain for reuse, it gives us food for thought about ways and means of providing more dynamic ways of using data that is already in SAS-Space.