Digital Library Building Blocks

The California Digital Library provides software, best practices, and other tools to facilitate digital library operations.

Best Practices and Standards

• CDL guidelines for digital objects, version 2.0: September 2007 [HTML]
[PDF]

• CDL guidelines for digital images, version 2.0: April 2008 [HTML] [PDF]
• CDL Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) encoding guidelines: [HTML]
• OAC best practice guidelines for Encoded Archival Description (EAD), version 2.0: February 2005 [HTML] [PDF]
• Minimal level OAC MARC records for CDL, Version 1.1: January 2004 [HTML]
• Standards for minimal level MARC bibliographic records for University of California Libraries: January 1, 2003 [DOC]
• Standards for UC Union catalog input records: April 22, 2003 [RTF]
• Archival Resource Key (ARK): naming scheme for persistent access to digital objects. [HTML]

Submission Agreements

• CDL/UC libraries digital assets agreement: February 22, 2006 [PDF]
• CDL/UC libraries digital assets submission inventory: September 24, 2003 [RTF]

Software and Services

• Pairtrees for Object Storage: A filesystem hierarchy for holding objects that are located by mapping identifier strings to object directory (or folder) paths two characters at a time. The mapping is reversible, so a receiver can walk a pairtree and reliably enumerate all contained object identifiers. Also available as an Internet-Draft.
• BagIt File Package Format: A hierarchical file package format suitable for the exchange of generalized archival content via the network or hard-disk. The "bag" has just enough structure to safely enclose its payload but does not require deep knowledge about its internal semantics. Also available as an Internet-Draft.
• UC-eLinks OpenURL resolution: The CDL allows UC campus libraries to customize and localize the SFX OpenURL resolution service, UC-eLinks. For detailed operational information about campus instances of UC-eLinks, go to the UC-eLinks Campus Liaisons page.
• CDL Access and Preservation Repositories: Provides information about the CDL's digital object repositories.
• eXtensible Text Framework (XTF): Flexible indexing and query tool that supports searching across collections of heterogeneous data and present results in a highly configurable manner.
• 7train: An XSLT 2.0-based tool for generating METS files from standardized XML inputs (e.g., CONTENTdm Standard XML exports, OAI records, etc.).
• Date Normalization Utility: Java code that outputs machine-readable date strings to enrich collections that weren't originally encoded with machine-readable dates.
• Noid (Nice Opaque Identifier) Minting and Binding Tool: overview and technical specification [PDF], and latest noid software release (download).
• Markup data dictionary: Encoding strategy for the data dictionary used for processing of all U.S. census studies.

Guidelines

• Style Guides and Documentation at CDL: a consolidated source for CDL staff needing style guides for report or web writing, and to support those writing technical documentation
• Suggestions for linking into CDL web-based services: Provides guidelines for how to link into CDL web sites.
• CDL user interface principles: Used by the CDL when evaluating a vendor interface, these principles also apply to any digital library search interface.

References

• Glossary: Includes definitions for CDL and UC terms, crawling and harvesting, digital objects, metasearching, and more.
• Digital objects and digitization: selected resources
• Encoded Archival Description (EAD): selected resources