I’m really hoping that we are in the market for a Digital Object Repository in the next 12-18 months. We are currently implementing Moodle, and I’m keen to see this underpinned by a good repository. Of course, being an Ex Libris customer, DigiTool is one possibility on my mind.

In this session, it is interesting to see some uses of DigiTool in the real world (links should go to the DigiTool instance where possible):

E-Theses, E-Prints (Liverpool John Moores) – this includes what looks like a nice work flow and user interface for E-prints
Online exam papers (University of Melbourne)
Online photos (Coldharbour)
Cultural Heritage collections (quite a lot of places – Spertus College, Boston College, Boston Public Library, AIATSIS, BVB)

The Cultural Herigate collections have a huge amount of variety – books (METS), pictures (tiff, jpeg), audio and video

EAD – not to manage the archive, but to store and present the information from the archive.

Catalog enrichment (HBZ) – they are using it to scan and store the Tables of Contents for more than 300,000 books and then use these to enrich the metadata available via the catalogue. (looks like this is in test at the moment – http://193.30.112.126:8881)

Preservation (HBZ again) – using it to store web pages in an archive (also looks like it is in test – http://193.30.112.125:8881 – search for “loreley”)

Overall this has been a good overview of real life uses of DigiTool – it’s good to see a real body of use developing. I have a particular interest in how DigiTool might integrate with VLEs or Course Management systems – for example, to work as a repository for SCORM or IMS CP objects.

In terms of future developments, Ex Libris are currently working on an improved OAI interface, synchronisation between Aleph and DigiTool, Versioning, improved METS viewer, URN and persistent identifiers, additional metadata support – e.g. VRA and MODS.