Herbert Van de Sompel

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Herbert Van de Sompel
Herbert Van de Sompel.jpg
Herbert Van de Sompel speaking at the Evolving Scholarly Record and Evolving Stewardship Ecosystem workshop in Amsterdam
Born (1957-03-20) March 20, 1957 (age 66)
Nationality Belgium-American
Occupation(s) librarian, computer scientist
Years active2000-present
Website hvdsomp.info

Herbert Van de Sompel is a Belgian librarian, computer scientist, and musician, most known for his role in the development of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and standards such as OpenURL, Object Reuse and Exchange, and the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.

Contents

Career

Van de Sompel was born March 20, 1957, in Ghent, Belgium. [1] His PhD dissertation in 2000 developed the idea of context-sensitive and dynamic linking of scholarly information resources. In this work, he developed the "concepts underlying the OpenURL framework for open reference linking in the web-based scholarly information environment." [2] Van de Sompel's OpenURL framework allowed for the development of software known as link resolvers which take metadata about a source and attempt to find its full text. Link resolver web services have become widely used within academic libraries. [3] His Ph.D dissertation and later development of the OpenURL standard led to the development and commercialization of the SFX link resolver and a series of products for libraries using this approach pioneered by Van de Sompel. [4]

In 2006 Van de Sompel was named the first recipient of the SPARC Innovator Award by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) for starting the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and the open reference linking framework (OpenURL). [5] In 2017, Van de Sompel received the Paul Evan Peters Award [6] from the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI).

From 2002 to the end of 2018, Van de Sompel held positions at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, including as the Lead of the Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team. [1] Notable work includes the Memento Project, which aims to make accessing archived web content as easy as visiting current web pages. From 2019 to early 2021, he served as chief innovation officer of Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) in The Netherlands. Following his wife after her appointment to a position in Vienna, he resigned at DANS while keeping professional connections to both DANS and Ghent University. [1]

Though best known for his work as a computer scientist, Van de Sompel also made music in his earlier life, including two albums, "Unploughed" and "Not a Festschrift- Geschnitzte Figuren," with his group, Young Farmers Claim Future. [7] [8]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dublin Core</span> Standardized set of metadata elements

The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), is a set of fifteen main metadata items for describing digital or physical resources. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is responsible for formulating the Dublin Core; DCMI is a project of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), a non-profit organization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Archives Initiative</span>

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was an informal organization, in the circle around the colleagues Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson and Simeon Warner, to develop and apply technical interoperability standards for archives to share catalogue information (metadata). The group got together in the late late 1990s and was active for around twenty years. OAI coordinated in particular three specification activities: OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE and ResourceSync. All along the group worked towards building a "low-barrier interoperability framework" for archives containing digital content to allow people harvest metadata. Such sets of metadata are since then harvested to provide "value-added services", often by combining different data sets.

CiteSeerX is a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science.

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI-PMH must support representing metadata in Dublin Core, but may also support additional representations.

An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published works to increase their visibility and collaboration with other academics However, most of these outputs produced by universities are not effectively accessed and shared by researchers and other stakeholders As a result Academics should be involved in the implementation and development of an IR project so that they can learn the benefits and purpose of building an IR.

An OpenURL is similar to a web address, but instead of referring to a physical website, it refers to an article, book, patent, or other resource within a website.

An Open Archival Information System is an archive, consisting of an organization of people and systems, that has accepted the responsibility to preserve information and make it available for a Designated Community. The OAIS model can be applied to various archives, e.g., open access, closed, restricted, “dark”, or proprietary.

mod_oai is an Apache module that allows web crawlers to efficiently discover new, modified, and deleted web resources from a web server by using OAI-PMH, a protocol which is widely used in the digital libraries community. mod_oai also allows harvesters to obtain "archive-ready" resources from a web server.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public Knowledge Project</span> Metadata reservation project for e-journals

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a non-profit research initiative that is focused on the importance of making the results of publicly funded research freely available through open access policies, and on developing strategies for making this possible including software solutions. It is a partnership between the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, the University of Pittsburgh, Ontario Council of University Libraries, the California Digital Library and the School of Education at Stanford University. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments.

ContextObjects in Spans (COinS) is a method to embed bibliographic metadata in the HTML code of web pages. This allows bibliographic software to publish machine-readable bibliographic items and client reference management software to retrieve bibliographic metadata. The metadata can also be sent to an OpenURL resolver. This allows, for instance, searching for a copy of a book at a specific library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BASE (search engine)</span> Academic search engine

BASE is a multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly internet resources, created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany. It is based on free and open-source software such as Apache Solr and VuFind. It harvests OAI metadata from institutional repositories and other academic digital libraries that implement the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and then normalizes and indexes the data for searching. In addition to OAI metadata, the library indexes selected web sites and local data collections, all of which can be searched via a single search interface.

SFX was the first OpenURL link resolver or link server. It remains the most widely used OpenURL resolver, being used by over 2,400 libraries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition</span> Collection of research libraries promoting open access

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is an international alliance of academic and research libraries developed by the Association of Research Libraries in 1998 which promotes open access to scholarship. The coalition currently includes some 800 institutions in North America, Europe, Japan, China and Australia.

PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) is the de facto digital preservation metadata standard.

The Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of web resources. The OAI-ORE specification implements the ORE Model which introduces the resource map (ReM) that makes it possible to associate an identity with aggregations of resources and make assertions about their structure and semantics.

A resource map (ReM) is a concept of the ORE Model for associating an identity with compound digital objects and making assertions about their structure and semantics. Compound objects combine distributed resources, including multiple media types.

The Handle System is the Corporation for National Research Initiatives's proprietary registry assigning persistent identifiers, or handles, to information resources, and for resolving "those handles into the information necessary to locate, access, and otherwise make use of the resources".

Umlaut is an open source front-end for a link resolver for libraries, which deals with advertising services for specific known citations. It runs as Ruby on Rails application via an engine gem. Umlaut accepts requests in OpenURL format, but has no knowledge base of its own, and is intended to be used as a front-end for an existing knowledge base. Currently only SFX is supported, but other plugins can be written.

Johan Lambert Trudo Maria Bollen is a scientist investigating complex systems and networks, the relation between social media and a variety of socio-economic phenomena such as the financial markets, public health, and social well-being, as well as Science of Science with a focus on impact metrics derived from usage data. He presently works as associate professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics of Indiana University Bloomington and a fellow at the SparcS Institute of Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands. He is best known for his work on scholarly impact metrics, measuring public well-being from large-scale social media data, and correlating Twitter mood to stock market prices. He has taught courses on data mining, information retrieval, and digital libraries. His research has been funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Science Foundation, Library of Congress, National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In his free time, he DJs at the Root Cellar Lounge in Bloomington, Indiana. He specializes in Deep House and Techno.

The Open Knowledge Repository is the official open-access repository of the World Bank and features research content about development. It was launched in 2012, alongside the World Bank's Open Access Policy and its adoption of the Creative Commons Attribution license for all research and knowledge products that it publishes, which collectively made the World Bank the first international organization to completely embrace open access. The repository collects the intellectual output of the World Bank in digital form, disseminates it, and preserves it long-term.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Van de Sompel, Herbert. "Herbert Van de Sompel – bio" . Retrieved 9 August 2021.
  2. Van de Sompel, Herbert; Beit-Arie, Oren (March 2001). "Open linking in the scholarly information environment using the OpenURL framework". D-Lib Magazine. 7 (3). ISSN   1082-9873.
  3. Breeding, Marshall (2012). Knowledge Base and Link Resolver Study: General Findings (PDF). Retrieved 19 July 2013. Between February 20 and May 1, 2012 534 libraries have responded to the survey. An additional 22 libraries responded indicated that they do not employ a link resolver.
  4. Cummings, Joel and Ryan Johnson (2003). "The use and usability of SFX: context-sensitive reference linking." Library Hi-Tech. 21 (1): p 70-84. http://www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/07378830310467418
  5. "SPARC Innovator: Herbert Van de Sompel (April 2006)". Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition . Association of Research Libraries. April 2006. Archived from the original on 2015-10-20. Retrieved 20 October 2015.
  6. "Herbert Van de Sompel to Receive Peters Award at December CNI Meeting". www.cni.org. Jul 26, 2017. Retrieved Nov 18, 2022.
  7. "Young Farmers Claim Future". Sub Rosa. Retrieved 19 June 2016.
  8. "Geschnitzte Figuren / Not A Festschrift". Discogs.

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