Blacksburg, VA -- VTLS Inc. is pleased to announce the availability and delivery of VITAL 2.0. VITAL is used by institutional repositories to manage their digital collections. The Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) Project, led by Monash University has just completed the acceptance testing of VITAL 2.0. This acceptance of VITAL 2.0 paves the way for the software to be installed at Monash University, University of New South Wales, National Library of Australia and Swinburne University. These installations are in progress. Other Australian universities are negotiating to acquire and install the software early in 2006.
VITAL 2.0 has been enhanced to provide the following functionality:
- Web Submission open-source web tools allow faculty and others to contribute metadata and datastreams which make up digital theses and dissertations. They may be submitted directly to the repository, or to an intermediary for review prior to ingestion into the repository. An expansion of this model including a range of additional resource types has been developed and is currently being tested.
- Google Exposure facilitates the discovery of VITAL resources by the larger Internet community. The VITAL indexing module provides a means to ‘publish' summaries of Fedora repository content for harvesting by Web search engines.
- Audio Support Provide for the ingestion of audio files (wav, mp3) including metadata extraction to Fedora using VITAL.
- Video Support Provide for the ingestion of video format (avi, mpeg) including metadata extraction and frame extraction to Fedora using VITAL.
- Metadata Extraction Web Service As a first step to preservation, provides a Validation/Extraction Web Service interface to JSTOR/ Harvard Object Validation Environment (JHOVE) and VTLS' TIFF extraction service.
- Metadata Transform Web Service allows data entered by content authors in MARCXML or ETD-MS to Dublin Core. Other crosswalks may be implemented.
- Document Navigator allows for viewing of multi page documents in PDF.
- Batch Process allows system administrators to ingest larger quantities of content into the VITAL repository via command-line tools and XML-based configuration files.
- Fedora 2.0 Integration updates VITAL to support new or changed features in Fedora 2.0.
- Language Support supports the display of Arabic and Hebrew text with right-to-left directionality.
"VITAL 2.0 continues the track record of VITAL representing the leading edge of repository thinking and offerings." Said Carl Grant, President and COO of VTLS, "This is a direct result of our dedication to working closely with the ARROW Partners to define the state-of-the- art solution."
Other VITAL customers include National Libraries (National Library of Wales and Slovak National Library), universities (Princeton University, University of Delaware) and research organizations (Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research.)
About VTLS Inc.
VTLS Inc. (www.vtls.com) is a leading global company that creates and provides visionary technology in library solutions. We serve a diverse customer base of more than 900 libraries in over 35 countries. VIRTUA is our premier ILS solution. VTRAX is our RFID technology offered through partnerships with Tagsys, TI and FKI Logistex. VITAL is our institutional repository solution provides cutting edge software and services for Digital Libraries. VTLS is also one of the few ISO 9001:2000 quality certified companies within the library industry.
About ARROW
The ARROW project (www.arrow.edu.au) is funded by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training, under the Research Information Infrastructure Framework for Australian Higher Education to identify or develop and test software to support best practice institutional digital repositories comprising e-prints, digital theses and electronic publishing.