External Evaluations

Information for External Reviewers

Research Statement (Show) (Hide)

My research is in the area of digital libraries and digital preservation. Current areas include the intersection of information retrieval and digital preservation (proposal pending); recovering lost resources from the "web infrastructure" (Warrick); enhancing resources with best-effort metadata at dissemination time (mod_oai); and creating "resource maps" for web resources (OAI-ORE), the representation, responsibilities and interfaces between repositories and stored objects and the implications of these relationships to digital preservation (NSF CAREER Award).

Some of the general questions that motivate me include:

My focus has always been on middleware and infrastructure for the construction of higher-level services. This puts me at a disadvantage when visitors come and demonstrations are given: middleware is only successful when it is invisible. As an editor of the OAI-PMH, there is satisfaction in the fact that although many people use OAI-PMH-based systems every day, few have actually seen it. I am hoping for similar success with the OAI-ORE (Object Reuse and Exchange).

In the 2003 NSF Post Digital Library Futures Workshop, Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel identified the gap between digital library community and the general web community. This is a situation that I am working to address. Some examples of this include bringing OAI-PMH to the general web community via an Apache module (the mod_oai project), and the other direction through bringing digital rights expressions such as the Creative Commons into the OAI-PMH through the OAI-Rights project. For the foreseeable future, I will devote my research to bridging this gap between the two communities.

Representative Publications (Show) (Hide)