Community Standards

Libraries and library systems at Harvard use community standards and best practices to establish quality baselines, facilitate cooperation among libraries and between libraries and other organizations both within and outside the university, and enable the exchange of data between systems.
Types of standards include metadata dictionaries, content standards, protocols, reformatting guidelines, controlled vocabularies, file format definitions, application profiles, APIs and others. Key standards used in the Harvard libraries and in related parts of the university include those for

Metadata Standards
File Formats and Digital Reformatting Guidelines
Protocols for Searching and Harvesting

File Formats and Digital Reformatting Guidelines

• Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials
  Developed by the Digital Library Federation, the benchmark is used to set minimum quality levels for the conversion of printed texts.
• JPEG2000
• PDF/A
  Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) has rapidly become a de facto standard for the dissemination and presentation of electronic documents on the web. Unfortunately, the feature-rich nature of PDF permits tremendous variability in the internal structure of these documents. Further, it allows documents to be dynamically composed at the time of their display from disparate external resources, which leads to significant difficulties in ensuring their long-term viability. In order to address these concerns, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) convened a Joint Working Group to produce a constrained version of PDF suitable for archival preservation, known as PDF/A. Stephen Abrams, then LDI's digital library program manager, was the project leader and document editor for the initial version of the PDF/A standard. The PDF/A standard defines the features that should be required, recommended, restricted, or prohibited in order to make electronic documents more amenable to long-term preservation.
• TIFF (Tagged Image File Format)
  From a family of public domain raster file formats, TIFF 6.0 has been commonly used at Harvard for digital master images, and is considered an archival file format suitable for long-term preservation. Increasingly, libraries are turning to JPEG2000 to fill that need, but TIFFs are still being created as archival versions in many digitization projects.

Protocols for Searching and Harvesting

• Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)
  Using OAI-PMH, data providers expose metadata about their resources, and service providers harvest that metadata in order to provide value-added services.
  Harvard makes metadata for several of its databases generally available through OAI, uses OAI to provide metadata to ARTstor, and uses OAI to build Harvard Virtual Collections.
• OpenURL
  The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services defines a model for identifying a resource and requesting a service. OpenURLs package metadata about a resource into a URL and point to a user-specific resolver. OpenURLs are commonly used to link to an appropriate copy for a given user, although they are used to provide other services.
  OpenURL underlies FindIt@Harvard, which uses SFX technology to link from citations to full text resources.
• Z39.50
  The Z39.50 protocol defines procedures and formats for a client to search a database on a server, retrieve database records, and perform related information retrieval functions. Technical services staff use Z39.50 in Aleph to search for metadata in other databases, and authorized outside organizations can use Z39.50 to search HOLLIS