Beta Release of ORE Specifications and User Guides

You've probably seen this announcement on various mailing lists by now, but yesterday Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel announced the publication of "beta" versions of the specifications being developed by the OAI ORE project:

Over the past eighteen months the Open Archives Initiative <http://www.openarchives.org/> (OAI), in a project called Object Reuse and Exchange <http://www.openarchives.org/ore/> (OAI-ORE), has gathered international experts from the publishing, web, library, and eScience community to develop standards for the identification and description of aggregations of online information resources.  These aggregations, sometimes called compound digital objects, may combine distributed resources with multiple media types including text, images, data, and video.  The goal of these standards is to expose the rich content in these aggregations to applications that support authoring, deposit, exchange, visualization, reuse, and preservation.  Although a motivating use case for the work is the changing nature of scholarship and scholarly communication, and the need for cyberinfrastructure to support that scholarship, the intent of the effort is to develop standards that generalize across all web-based information including the increasing popular social networks of "web 2.0".

I'm a member of the "editorial group" of the Technical Committee which worked on the documents. To be honest, I've struggled to find the time to make as much input as I'd have liked in the couple of weeks, so I'm grateful to the other members of that group for getting content into shape for this release.