News listed by date

ResourceSync update is ANSI/NISO Z39.99-2017

The ResourceSync Framework Specification v1.1 was approved as ANSI/NISO Z39.99-2017 on February 2, 2017. Approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), this 1.1 revision improves a web standard that details various capabilities that a server can implement to allow third-party systems to remain synchronized with evolving resources. Such synchronization is important in the current landscape where Web-based content is constantly changing.

ResourceSync is an ANSI/NISO standard

The ResourceSync Framework Specification v1.0 is ANSI/NISO Z39.99-2014, an American National Standard developed by the National Information Standards Organization. Approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) April 21, 2014.

April 2008 - OAI-ORE Roll-out at OR2008

A meeting was held on April 4, 2008 at the Open Repositories 2008 meeting at the University of Southampton to roll-out the third alpha release of the OAI-ORE specifications. These specifications describe a data model to identify and describe aggregations of web resources, and the encoding of the data model in the XML-based Atom syndication format. Details.

March 2008 - OAI-ORE Roll-out at Johns Hopkins

A meeting was held on March 3, 2008 at Johns Hopkins University to roll-out the second alpha release of the OAI-ORE specifications. These specifications describe a data model to identify and describe aggregations of web resources, and the encoding of the data model in the XML-based Atom syndication format. Details.

Augmenting interoperability across scholarly repositories

A meeting sponsored and supported by Microsoft, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Coalition for Networked Information, the Digital Library Federation, and JISC on April 20-21 2006 will explore agreement on the nature and characteristics of a limited set of core, protocol-based repository interfaces (REST-full and/or SOAP-based Web services) that allow downstream applications to interact with heterogeneous repositories in an efficient and consistent manner; compile a concrete list of action items aimed at fully specifying, validating and implementing such repository interfaces; and devise a timeline for the specification, validation and implementation of such repository interfaces. For more information see http://msc.mellon.org/Meetings/Interop/ (03/06)

Guidelines for encoding identifiers in Dublin Core and IEEE LOM metadata

A document providing guidelines for encoding a number of commonly used identifiers in Dublin Core (DC) metadata and IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) records is available at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi-ieee/identifiers/. (03/05)

Google and OAI-PMH Down Under

Google is using OAI-PMH to harvest information from the National Library of Australia (NLA) Digital Object Repository. For more information see http://www.nla.gov.au/digicoll/oai/(03/05)

November 2004 -- CiteSeer OAI-PMH Compliant.

CiteSeer, a public digital library and search engine in computer and information science, is now OAI compliant. Currently, CiteSeer has over 700,000 documents, all from web crawling or author submission and is being hosted at Penn State's School of Information Sciences and Technology. For more details on harvesting the OAI metadata from CiteSeer please see: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/oai.html

May 2004 -- Static Repository Specification.

A Static Repository provides a simple approach for exposing relatively static and small collections of metadata records through the OAI-PMH.. A Static Repository is an XML file that is made accessible at a persistent HTTP URL. The XML file contains metadata records and repository information. A Static Repository becomes accessible via OAI-PMH through the intermediation of a Static Repository Gateway. The specification can be found at http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-static-repository.htm.

April 2004 -- mod_oai Project Aims at Optimizing Web Crawling.

The Computer Science Department of Old Dominion University and the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory announce the launch of the "mod_oai" project. The aim of the project is to create the mod_oai Apache software module that will expose content accessible from Apache Web servers via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The mod_oai project is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. More information about the mod_oai project can be found at http://www.modoai.org.

March 2004 -- OLAC Archive on board European Space Agency mission.

On March 2, the Rosetta Disk left Earth on board an Ariane-5 rocket from the European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guyana. The mission's target is the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which will be reached in 2014 after a "billiard ball" journey through the Solar System lasting more than ten years. The Rosetta Disk is a modern version of the Rosetta Stone. The 2-inch nickel disk is micro-etched with 30,000 pages of information covering over 1,000 languages. For each language there is a simple dictionary, a guide to pronunciation and counting, and a traditional story with translation. Additionally, to help language decipherment in remote futures, a translation of a common text (the first three chapters of the book of Genesis) is provided in all languages. The disk can be read with the aid of an optical microscope. The materials on the disk come from the Rosetta 1000 Language Archive, an OLAC repository.

March 2004 -- U-M expands access to hidden electronic resources with OAIster.

A repository of information that provides links to previously difficult-to-locate electronic scholarly resources is widely available under a new agreement between the University of Michigan and Yahoo! Inc. The repository -- developed through Michigan's University Library OAIster Project -- is now available through Yahoo!'s Content Acquisition Program (CAP) and accessible through Yahoo! Search. OAIster offers information that links to hidden digital resources such as the complete contents of books and articles, technical reports, preprints (unpublished works that have not yet been peer reviewed), white papers, images of paintings, movies and audio files of speeches. See the complete press release at http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2004/Mar04/r031004.

January 2004 -- OAI Access to PubMed Central Records.

The PubMed Central OAI service (PMC-OAI) provides access to metadata of all items in the PubMed Central (PMC) archive, as well as to the full text of a subset of these items. PMC-OAI is an implementation of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), a standard for retrieving metadata from digital document repositories. Visit the Open Archives Initiative site for more information about the protocol and other activities of the OAI group. PMC-OAI supports OAI-PMH version 2.0. Compatibility with earlier versions of the protocol is not guaranteed. The base URL for the service is http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/oai/oai.cgi. Complete information is available at http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/about/oai.html

November 2003 -- Third Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI3).

The third CERN workshop will bring together librarians and information specialists, publishers, scientists and university managers who want to bring the benefits of open archives technology and open access publishing to libraries. The conference's action-focused agenda will prioritize initiatives to be undertaken, in order to increase the impact of OAI on the process of scientific publishing. The workshop announcement is at http://info.web.cern.ch/info/OAIP/Practical.html

October 2003 -- Guide to Institutional Repository Software.

OSI is pleased to announce the release of the Guide to Institutional Repository Software. The guide describes the five open source, OAI-compliant systems currently available. As many institutions are developing repositories, OSI thought it would be helpful to produce such a guide so that each institution could select the software best suited to meet its needs. Included in the guide is a brief narrative overview of each system followed by a summary of the systems technical features. The guide will be updated as additional systems are developed. To view the guide, see: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/software/.

October 2003 -- Static Repository Specification.

The Open Archives Initiative announces the beta release of the Specification for an OAI Static Repository and an OAI Static Repository Gateway. A Static Repository provides a simple approach for exposing relatively static and small collections of metadata records through the OAI-PMH. A Static Repository becomes accessible via OAI-PMH through the intermediation of one Static Repository Gateway. Read the full press release.

October 2003 -- OAI Registry at UIUC.

A new experimental registry of OAI providers is now available. The registry can be found at http://oai.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/ The registry was constructed by collecting the baseURLs of all the providers we could from various ListFriends sites, Hussein's repository explorer, etc., as well as a search tool developed using the Google SOAP API to search for possible baseURLs (surprisingly this yielded 30+ new provider sites).

September 2003 -- Open Archives Initiative and Project RoMEO Initiate OAI-rights.

The Open Archives Initiative and Project RoMEO announce the formation of OAI-rights. The goal of this effort is to investigate and develop means of expressing rights about metadata and resources in the OAI framework. The result will be an addition to the OAI implementation guidelines that specifies mechanisms for rights expressions within the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Read the full press release.

June 2003 -- DLESE OAI Software.

The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) is pleased to announce its latest version of OAI software. The DLESE OAI software is designed to be simple to install, configure and use and includes both a data provider and harvester. The data provider serves metadata from XML files, automatically updating what is provided whenever the XML files change. The harvester likewise saves harvested metadata to files. The software supports the OAI-PHM v2.0. In addition, the data provider exposes its metadata to outside clients as a web service through an Open Digital Libraries (ODL) search interface. Remote clients can perform keyword search queries over the metadata using the ODL search interface and receive an ordered list of matching records within the standard OAI-PMH XML response. The software is packaged as a Java WAR file for use in a servlet environment such as Tomcat and will run on UNIX, Windows and Mac OS X. The software is available under the GPL open source license. A full list of features and information is available at: http://dlese.org/oai/docs/index.html The software can be downloaded from: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=23991.

June 2003 -- NASA Technical Report Server.

The NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS; http://ntrs.nasa.gov/) has been reimplemented and now uses the OAI-PMH. The OAI-based version replaces the former distributed-searching based NTRS. NTRS is a public service that provides access to "unclassified, unlimited" NASA-authored scientific and technical information. In addition, NTRS also harvests from a select number of non-NASA OAI repositories. In total, NTRS holds > 540k metadata records. NTRS is also an OAI-PMH aggregator and re-exports its holdings. The baseURL for NTRS is http://ntrs.nasa.gov/. The development of NTRS was sponsored by the NASA Scientific and Technical Information Program Office. For additional information, please contact JoAnne Rocker (Joanne.Rocker@nasa.gov).

April 2003 -- Internet Archive.

In an effort to participate and exchange information with other digital libraries and research groups, the Internet Archive, <http://www.archive.org>, has implemented the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), <http://www.openarchives.org>. The base URL for the repository is <http://www.archive.org/services/oai.php>.

March 2003 -- California Digital Library.

The California Digital Library announced that its groundbreaking eScholarship Repository has reached several major milestones. The eScholarship Repository (http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/ ) offers University of California faculty a central online location for depositing working papers, technical reports, research results, datasets with commentary and peer-reviewed series. It is free for scholars to upload papers and free to users to download them. Compliance with the Open Archive Initiative (OAI) metadata harvesting protocol allows eScholarship Repository content to be discovered from centralized search services. http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/

November 2002 -- DSpace.

HP Labs and MIT Libraries are pleased to announce that version 1.0 of the DSpace institutional repository software platform is available for download, evaluation, and use. DSpace is an open source digital asset management software platform that enables institutions to capture and describe digital works using a submission workflow module; distribute an institution's digital works over the web through a search and retrieval system; and store and preserve digital works over the long term. DSpace runs on a variety of hardware platforms, and supports OAI-PMH version 2.0. MIT Libraries has deployed DSpace 1.0 in full production at MIT and is actively working with seven other institutions in the US, Canada and the UK to explore federation models and services that build on the DSpace platform. DSpace at MIT is a registered data provider with the Open Archives Initiative. http://www.dspace.org.

November 2002 -- DARE Project.

With the award of a NAP grant of 2 million euros for the period 2003-2006, the Dutch government is giving a strong boost to innovation in the provision of academic information in the Netherlands. DARE (Digital Academic Repositories) is a collective initiative by the Dutch universities to make all their research results digitally accessible. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek [Royal Library], the Koninklijke Nederlandse Academie van Wetenschappen [Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences] and the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) [Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research] are also collaborating on this unique project. Coordination is being taken care of by the SURF Foundation, the ICT partnership organisation for higher education and research in the Netherlands. In the present situation, the visibility of and access to Dutch academic research leave much to be desired. In the fast-changing world of academic research and communications, changes are needed if the Netherlands wants to maintain its position in the academic world. Linking up with international developments in this area, such as the Open Archives Initiative, is crucial. A national effort to achieve this is needed.

November 2002 -- Open Archives Forum Survey.

The results of an initial survey by the EU-funded Open Archives Forum project are available at http://www.oaforum.org/resources/tecvalq1.php. The OAI community is now invited to participate in a second survey that is available at http://www.oaforum.org/resources/tecvalq2.php. These results will be published in D-Lib in January 2003.

November 2002 -- Project RoMEO survey.

The UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights metadata for open-archiving) is performing a survey of OAI Data and Service Providers regarding the IPR issues they face. If you are a Data or Service Provider - no matter how new - we would be very grateful if you could take the time to complete our online questionnaires at http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~lbeag/Data-provider-questionnaire.htm or http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~lbeag/Service-provider-questionnaire.htm. For further information about the RoMEO project please see the web pages at http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/index.html

November 2002 -- EPRINTS 2.2 Released.

This version adds support for subject editors (who may only approve and edit items which match a certain subject or type), support for the XML::GDOME module (which makes it faster). There is also a number of small configuration options people have asked for, and bugfixes. For more details see the New Features page.

October 2002 -- Digital Library of Information Science and Technology (DLIST) Launched.

The School of Information Resources and Library Science and the Arizona Health Sciences Library at the University of Arizona have launched DLIST, the Digital Library of Information Science and Technology. DLIST is available at http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu. The objective of DLIST is to serve as a repository of electronic resources in the domains of Library and Information Science (LIS) and Information Technology (IT). DLIST is running on Open Archives Initiative (OAI) compliant Eprints v.2 software developed at the University of Southampton. Eprints software, recently heralded as the future of scholarly communication, facilitates the development of institutional and subject archives and self-archiving practices.

ctober 2002 -- CIMI Releases SPECTRUM Schema.

The CIMI Consortium is pleased to announce the public release of Version 1.5 of the CIMI XML Schema for SPECTRUM, and the launch of an Open Implementers call to participate an Alpha Test Period. The CIMI Schema will enable museums to encode rich descriptive information relating to museum objects, including associated information about people, places and events surrounding the history of museum objects, as well as information about their management and use within museums. The CIMI Schema will be useful for migrating data, the sharing of information between applications, and as an interchange format for OAI metadata harvesting.

September 2002 -- Scirus adds 4 additional OAI sources.

Scirus.com, the web search engine for scientific information launched by Elsevier Science in 2001, has now made 4 additional OAI sources available to its users. Next to arXiv.org, already available since the beginning of this year, Scirus now includes NASA (incl. NACA and LTRS), CogPrints, The Chemistry Preprint Server (CPS), and The Mathematics Preprint Server (MPS). The data were added by using the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting of the Open Archive Initiative. Scirus now offers its users 107 million science specific pages, including over 17 million proprietary records that cannot be found using generic search engines.

September 2002 -- OCLC's XtCat available through OAI-PMH.

The Experimental Thesis Catalog is now available for OAI-PMH v2 harvesting from baseURL http://alcme.oclc.org/xtcat/servlet/OAIHandler. This repository contains 4.3 million thesis and dissertation records extracted from OCLC's WorldCat Database and is available in oai_dc and NDLTD's oai_etdms (http://www.ndltd.org/standards/metadata/current.html) formats. A subset of about 8000 electronic theses and dissertations is available by specifying the set "ETD".

September 2002 -- Arc available through SourceForge.

The Digital Library Group in Old Dominion University is pleased to announce the availability of Arc through SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/oaiarc/). Arc is released under the NCSA Open Source License. Arc is a federated search service based on the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). It includes a harvester which can harvests both OAI-PMH 1.x and 2.0 compliant repositories, a search engine together with a simple and advanced search interface, and an OAI-PMH layer over harvested metadata. It is based on Java Servlet technology and requires JDK1.4, Tomcat 4.0x, and a RDBMS server (tested with Oracle and MySQL).

September 2002 -- Project RoMEO.

The JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) has funded a one year (1 August 2002 - 31 July 2003) project to investigate the rights issues surrounding the 'self-archiving' of research in the UK academic community under the Open Archive Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. For more information see http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/index.html.

August 2002 -- Institute of Physics implements OIA-PMH.

Institute of Physics Publishing has recently implemented the Open Archives Initiative technical framework for our Electronic Journals service. We are pleased to confirm that we have adopted this standard here at Institute of Physics Publishing and metadata records for our article abstracts are now available in Dublin Core. They can be ‘harvested’ from our server on request. For more information see http://www.iop.org.

July 2002 -- OAIster Search Interface.

The University of Michigan Libraries Digital Library Production Service is pleased to announce the launch of the OAIster search interface, version 1. (http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/cgi/b/bib/bib-idx?c=oaister;page=simple). OAIster has harvested a large number of records from a variety of institutions -- 274046 records from 55 institutions -- that have made these records available using the OAI protocol. Each of these records leads to an actual digital resource hosted at an institution. You can learn more about a particular institution's collection we are harvesting at http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/viewcolls.html. We are also committed to improving our service -- see our future plans and the progress we are making at http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/phase2.html. We are very interested in gathering more records, OAI-enabled or snapshots of records that aren't yet OAI-enabled, to include in our service. The more records we serve, the more valuable this service becomes for the end-user. Please get in touch with khage@umich.edu to discuss this further.

June 2002 -- OAI-PMH Version 2 Release.

The version 2 specification is now the production release. Included in the release are migration instructions, implementation guideline, and an updated FAQ. Read the press release for full information.

May 2002 -- JISC FAIR Awards

The JISC has now awarded funding to 14 projects, comprising partnerships between more than 50 institutions and teams and involving universities, libraries, JISC services, art galleries, colleges, museums and commercial companies. This programme is inspired by the vision of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), that digital resources can be shared between organisations based on a simple mechanism allowing metadata about those resources to be harvested into services.

May 2002 -- Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

The version 2 specification is now available for public review and experimentation. This new release is the a refinement of the 1.x protocol based on over 16 months of experimentation and technical discussion. Production release is scheduled for June 2002.

May 2002 -- Perseus Open Archives Initiative Services

The Perseus Project is pleased to announce the first release of its Open Archives Initiative service provider. . The Perseus system harvests registered OAI repositories and incorporates the information into its search interface.

April 2002 -- UIUC Cultural Heritage Repository.

The Illinois OAI Protocol Metadata Harvesting Project repository is now available for searching. http://oai.grainger.uiuc.edu/search. This project is testing the viability of using the OAI Protocol for harvesting metadata, and exposing it with a search interface to enhance resource discoverability for materials that represent cultural heritage. The repository includes metadata records donated by over 26 institutions.

April 2002 -- CDL eScholarhship Repository.

On April 3rd, 2002, the California Digital Library announced the launch of a web site and associated digital services to store and distribute academic research results and working papers. The eScholarship Repository (http://repositories.cdlib.org/) includes a set of author and reader services for the rapid dissemination of scholarship authored or sponsored by faculty from the University of California. Its initial focus will be on working papers from the humanities and social sciences.

March 2002 -- my.OAI Search Engine.

my.OAI is a full-featured search engine to a selected list of metadata databases from the Open Archives Initiative project. my.OAI can be tailored by the user to suit individual interests and provides the following features: Forms based query formulation; Automatic display of summaries when viewing search results; Automatic display of similar document when viewing a document; Automatic mark-up of retrieved document with search links; Search history; Saving searches for later re-use (with an SDI option); Saving document in folders. Read about it at http://www.myoai.com.

February 2002 -- OAIster Project

The Digital Library Production Service at the University of Michigan announce the launch of the OAIster Project, one of the Metadata Harvesting Initiatives funded by the Mellon Foundation. The goal is to create a wide-ranging repository of free, useful, previously difficult-to-access digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone. Read about it at http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu.

February 2002 -- Eprints Version 2

The Eprints software is open source software allowing organizations to create web based archives with documents and metadata. The archives support the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Read about it at http://www.eprints.org.

February 2002 -- JISC FAIR Programme

The UK Joint Systems Programme Committee (UK) has issued the call for the Fair Access to Institutional Resources Programme "inspired by the vision of the Open Archives Initiative". Read about it at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub02/c01_02.html.

February 2002 -- Scirus includes arXiv ePrints

Scirus.com (http://www.scirus.com), the web search engine for scientific information launched by Elsevier Science last April, has now made 180.000 e-prints from arXiv.org (formerly xxx.lanl.gov) available to users. The e-prints of arXiv.org were harvested using the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting of the Open Archive Initiative. (2/02).

February 2002 -- Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).

The Budapest Open Access Initiative aims to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the Internet. Participants in the creation of the BOAI include SPARC and SPARC Europe. Recommendations of the BOAI include deposit of all scholarly articles in archives supporting the OAI-PMH. Read more at http://www.soros.org/openaccess/.

February 2002 -- OAI in the Museum Community.

CIMI announces the release of v1.0 of its OAI-compliant repository code. For more info see http://www.cimi.org/publications.html#oai.

February 2002 -- OAI Technical Committee announces OAI v2 features.

Version 2 of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting will be released in May 2002. A description of features is available at http://www.openarchives.org/pipermail/oai-general/2002-February/000130.html.

December 2001 -- Cocoa and "Open Archives in a box"

(OAIB) are available as an alpha release. OAIB is an easy-to-use application for exporting metadata stored in a relational database management system (RDBMS) over the Open Archives Initiative protocol for metadata harvesting. http://emerge.ncsa.uiuc.edu/documentation_oaib.html

December 2001 -- DP9 An OAI Gateway Service for Crawlers

DP9 is a gateway service that enables indexing of an OAI data provider by an Internet search engine. DP9 allows a web crawler to retrieve records in an OAI collection by executing OAI requests and translating XML responses into HTML format on behalf of a web crawler. http://arc.cs.odu.edu:8080/dp9/index.jsp

September 2001--OLAC, the Open Language Archives Community

announces a cross-archives searching service OLAC currently harvests 9000+ metadata records from 10 participating archives. http://www.language-archives.org

September 2001--The future of electronic scientific literature

Nature reports on the transformation of scientific communication and the role of the OAI in the transformation. Read the article at http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/opinion2.html.

July 2001--Metadata Harvesting Initiative of the Mellon Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is funding 7 institutions with grants totaling $1.5M to create gateway or portal services that will use the OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol. More information at http://www.arl.org/newsltr/217/waters.html.

July 2001--Digital Library Federation Encourages Use of Open Archives Initiative

The Digital Library Federation (DLF) is supporting the development of a small number of Internet gateways through which users will access distributed digital library holdings as if they were part of a single uniform collection. The gateways will be built using the OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol. DLF gateways will contribute to a practical evaluation of the OAI's harvesting technique and its application within libraries to encourage digital collection managers to expose metadata and build services. More information at http://www.diglib.org/architectures/testbed.htm

July 2001--Updated Repository Explorer

Hussein Suleman announces a beta version of Hussein's Repository Explorer that automatically tests for the new OAIMHP. Manual browsing works for both versions and will silently issue and Identify if that is not your first request.

July 2001--NEW The Kepler Framework

Kurt Maly, Mohammad Zubair, and Xiaoming Lui, Old Dominion University, announce The Kepler Framework, an "OAI Data/Service Provider for the Individual." Reference implementation for the Kepler framework is referred to as a digital library of many "little" publishers. Key features include: (a) An easy-to-use archivelet that is downloadable and self-installing. The archivelet is an OAI compliant data provider for an individual publisher. (b) An automated registration service to support tens of thousands of publishers. (c) A simple service provider to harvest metadata from archivelets. The service provider also supports caching. The Kepler archivelet is available for Windows, Linux, and Unix Operating Systems. Download at http://kepler.cs.odu.edu/. Testing is encouraged. You may try the Kepler archivelet and would appreciate any feedback that you can provide. Additional information on Kepler is available from the paper: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april01/maly/04maly.html