26-03-2008
No time in your first life? Meet mEDRA in Second Life
Your agenda is overcrowded during bookfairs?
Can't spare a minute to stop by mEDRA official booth?
No problem. You can always visit us in Second Life.
mEDRA opened its own showcase in the Book and Publishing Islands, where the second edition of SLBF (Second Life Book Fair) will take place from April the 25th to the 27th.
You can also take a stroll to the DOI Village made up of 8 small cottages, each one representing the existing DOI Registration Agencies, with their activities, services and application profile.
An unconventional and smart way to get in touch with the inworld dynamic community of publishers and librarians and let them know more about the DOI.
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This is our address:
mEDRA and DOI Village
ISBN Terrace 65
Publishing Island
Second Life
To reach us click on the slurl
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05-03-2008
Save the Parents
The seminar on the theme: "Discover Rightholders and identify Orphan Works" will be held on Tuesday, April 15th at the London Bookfair.
Download the invitation
05-03-2008
Browse into mEDRA and DOI
11-02-2008
Europeana launched
Europeana , once European Digital Library, will break new ground by bring together millions of digitised resources from Europe's archives, museums, libraries and audio visual collections through a single portal.
The site model was previewed at a conference in Frankfurt on February the 1st to holders of digital content, including curators, archivists, publishers and librarians. They were shown how a user would be able to use sophisticated browsing and searching to find paintings, photographs, objects, books, newspapers, archival records, films and sound that have been digitised by Europe's heritage organisations.
Users' responses to the demonstration site are being surveyed online and in focus groups around Europe. This is being done to ensure that when the prototype is launched in November 2008, it will give users all the functionality that they expect.
The demo of Europeana can be seen and evaluated at www.europeana.eu
18-10-2007
Multiple Resolution is now online
mEDRA customers can now experience the Multiple Resolution, a DOI-based service allowing publishers to manage multiple information resources and services related to the content identified.
Multiple Resolution allows publishers to choose, for each publication identified with a DOI, the information provided to the final user, aggregate it according to thematic areas and make it retrievable from a single one-click access point.
Once resolving a DOI, the user will be presented with the different resource options through a friendly and smart interface.
Multiple Resolution increases the value of using the DOI in the communication process along the publishing value chain.
Through the Multiple Resolution service, publishers will be enabled to communicate to all the commercial partners a set of reliable resources on each publication, keeping the control on the information and services associated to the content.
Through the Multiple Resolution service, commercial partners and final users can rely on valuable and up to date information and can directly access to the services provided for a publication.
To learn more, visit the MR service area of mEDRA website.
17-05-2007
New release of ONIX for DOI schema
Version 1.1. of ONIX for DOI metadata schema has been released: thanks to the inclusion of new metadata elements, the new XML schema allows publishers to provide a richer description of their publications when registering DOIs and related metadata on mEDRA system.
The new schema, jointly developed by mEDRA and EDItEUR in collaboration with Nielsen Book Data, has also been adopted by OPOCE, the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, which also employs mEDRA technology for its Registration Agency.
To encourage publishers to easily adopt the new schema, version 1.1. has been developed as to be fully backwards compatible with the previous one.
To download the new release of ONIX for DOI schema, click on the doi: 10.1392/onix_doi_schema_v1.1
25-10-2006
DOI adopted as standard identifier by DigiScuola Publishers
DigiScuola (www.digiscuola.it), the project promoted by the Italian Minister of Innovation and Technologies and the Ministry of Education to foster the use of digital content in secondary schools, decided to adopt the DOI as the standard identifier for the learning objects.
The project will involve more than 550 schools, 3.300 teachers and 33.000 students.
It foresees the creation of a marketplace among content providers and schools, based on a LOs repository and a collaborative learning platform.
As the adoption of DOI will enforce the interoperability between DigiScuola and other standard-based platforms (such as e-learning systems and LOs databases), DigiScuola content providers will achieve a greater level of visibility and searchability for their educational contents at national and European level.
Thanks to the cooperation between AIE (the Italian Publishers Association, www.aie.it), DigiScuola and mEDRA, publishers taking part to DigiScuola will be enabled to register DOIs onto their contents for free during the start up period of the project.
This initiative has been undertaken within the context of Eleonet (European Learning Objects Network, www.eleonet.org) project, aimed at developing the first European catalogue of learning objects based on DOI identifier.
02-10-2006
mEDRA is in charge of technical realization of back office services for the EU Publications Office DOI Registration Agency
The Office for Official Publications of the European Communities (Publications Office) is the publishing house of the institutions and other bodies of the European Union (EU). It is responsible for producing and distributing EU publications in the 20 official languages of the EU Member States, on all media and by all means.
mEDRA technology, which is already used by UK and German DOI Registration Agency, will allow PO to register DOIs onto EU official publication.
Through PO, DOIs will now be assigned for some 62 EU bodies (institutions, offices, agencies and other bodies).
07-06-2006
mEDRA technical provider for Italian ISBN Agency
mEDRA started to provide technical services and assistance to the Italian ISBN Agency, recently returned to AIE (Italian Publishers Association).
Within the framework of the "In-Standard" project, mEDRA developed a friendly web-interface allowing the the ISBN Agency staff to access and edit the complete database of the Italian Publishing Houses with their associated imprints; manage the assignment of ISBN prefixes and codes; automatically convert the 10-digit ISBN into the new 13-digit ISBN (mandatory since January 1st, 2007); monitor all the actions carried out within any defined period.
01-06-2006
IDF Meeting 2006 and open seminar "Digital Objects and the management of information"
The 2006 International DOI Foundation Members Meeting will take place on Tuesday 20th June 2006 in Oxford, c/o the Said Business School.
See the 2005 Meeting report, organised by mEDRA in Bologna.
Following the Meeting, IDF presents the half-day seminar "Digital Objects and the management of information", organised in conjunction with the Oxford Internet Institute and the e-Horizons Institute. The seminar, with a range of international speakers, is open but requires advance registration. Further info: http://www.doi.org/doi_presentations/seminar_20Jun06/agenda.html
26-04-2006
APE Conference 2006 in Berlin
The last 4th and 5th of April took place in Berlin the new edition of the International Conference Academic Publishing in Europe, dedicated to the role of Information in Science and Society. The conference was initiated by Börsenverein (the German Association of Publishers and Booksellers) and ALPSP (the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) and co-sponsored, among the others, by mEDRA.
Along the two-days debate, crucial matters for publishing and scientific information markets were dealed, as multilingualism, standards, tech platforms, digital libraries, research, starting from the basic issue that the economy of knowledge may only rest on a quick and efficient information exchange.
The Conference Report: doi 10.1477/5.814
20-04-2006
DOIs assigned to medical case studies
DOI Registration Agency TIB has begun to assign DOIs to medical case-studies, in co-operation with the European Congress for Radiology (ECR). The service offers a further example of the utility of DOI as an identifier not only for publications but for all entities managed in a digital environment.
Further info at www.eurorad.org
19-04-2006
A new DRM standard from IDF: the Rights Data Dictionary
The International DOI Foundation has launched the MPEG-21 Rights Data Dictionary (RDD) international standard ISO/IEC 21000-6.
This dictionary provides the basis for a resource to create widely understood, consistent meaning for Digital Rights Management systems and other systems requiring semantic interoperability of terms. Rights are complex and many metadata schemes are already in use; the deployment of a standard dictionary provides a solution to cope with this real-world diversity.
In order to mantain interoperability, the RDD has been designed to be extensible and will expand through registration of new terms.
The ISO/IEC 21000-6 Rights Data Dictionary is publicly available at the web site www.iso21000-6.net.
22-02-2006
Metadata Manager - Online version 1.1
Version 1.1 of mEDRA Metadata Manager has been released.
Compared to the previous version, new release main features are:
a) improved controls on different fields to prevent wrong data entries;
b) revision of the XML file for ISBN registration, now validable as ONIX-for-Books message.
09-02-2006
ELEONET project started up
On January 1st 2006, the ELEONET (European Learning Objects Network) project - co-funded by the eTEN programme of the EU Commission - officially started.
The project aims at extending the scope of the DOI to European eLearning environment, implementing a specific DOI Application Profile for Learning Objects, in order to build up a searchable European repository of LOs metadata and enable immediate retrieval and re-use of educational content at different levels of granularity.
ELEONET sets up an effective cooperation among the three mayor European DOI Registration Agencies, represented within the consortium: mEDRA (through its funding partners AIE and Cineca), Nielsen BookData and TIB (through L3S research centre).
The project presentation:
doi: 10.1392/eleonet_pres
20-12-2005
New DOI registrants: Istat, Egea, Brepols
Three relevant companies recently signed the agreement with mEDRA to start registering DOIs: Istat, the Italian National Institute of Statistics; Egea, the economics publishing house of Bocconi University; Brepols, eminent belgian academic publisher.
22-11-2005
New project for medical scientific publishers
At the presence of some of the most representative publishers of the sector (the Italian branches of Springer, Elsevier, McGraw Hill among the others), mEDRA presented a new project finalized to the creation of an online bibliographical database about Italian medical content.
Reference model is Medline, the widest online database of medical articles. Compared to it, however, mEDRA project will include monographs and online courses too, and will identify contents through DOI, utilizing DOI resolution to supply users with immediate informations for full-text recovery.
16-11-2005
DOI figures update
Over 20 million DOIs are currently assigned through 7 major
Registration Agencies worldwide (Copyright Agency Limited, CrossRef, mEDRA, Nielsen BookData, OPOCE, R.R. Bowker, TIB) using over 1200 naming authority prefixes.
Over 9 million DOI resolutions are made each month.
(source: International DOI Foundation)
25-10-2005
mEDRA at Frankfurt Bookfair 2005
mEDRA took part at Frankfurt Bookfair 2005 (19-23 October) and had its own space in the Italian national stand managed by Associazione Italiana Editori.
Besides promoting DOI to an international audience, mEDRA presented Metadata Manager, the new software for the administration of publishers' catalogue metadata, also providing an easy interface for DOI and ISBN registration.
27-09-2005
Metadata schema for multimedia products
mEDRA signed an agreement with Telecom Italia to develop a new metadata schema for multimedia products, aimed at identifying and describing different content types (video, audio and textual items).
The work plan encompasses a full mapping of the current ONIX schemas in strict cooperation with EDItEUR, comparing them with the most spread metadata standards for audio (GRid, ISRC, ISWC) and video contents (ISAN, CABLELABS).
On this basis, the new schema will comprehend a core-set of ONIX metadata common to all digital objects, plus a specific list of metadata for every single kind of content.
The project also involves the use of DOI as main identifier for Telecom Italia digital resources.
05-08-2005
mEDRA represented within IDF Board
mEDRA director Piero Attanasio has been elected member of the renewed International DOI Foundation Board.
This is a new acknowledgement of the role mEDRA is assuming at international level.
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