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News and History

News and History

The International Open Public Digital Library (also known as, IOPDL) model was proposed by a graduate student on 2008. The main purpose of IOPDL is to make digital libraries’ collections all over the world freely accessible to the universal public, by providing a single international digital library platform and the multilingual service. It is also to provide a learning center for the public, especially for the disabled, in order to enlarge their educational opportunities at home, school, or elsewhere, anytime.

To realize the purposes, International Open Public Digital Library (IOPDL) Inc. was initiated on January, 2015 and filed at the office of the Secretary of State on November 12, 2015. IOPDL was proved as a tax-exempt organization, exclusively charitable, scientific, and educational organization, by Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on January 11, 2016. The effective date of exemption is on November 12, 2015.

The planned tasks will be conducted during 2016-2019 are described in the preliminary proposal.

Recent Activities

 

2025

  • The board meetings held on 02/28/25 and 10/24/25 at 1pm.
  • File the IOPDL required documents to IRS, Attorney General, and state.
  • Maintain iopdl.org and ct.iopdl.org, blocking malware and harmful access and login, and cleaning the websites every week.
  • 166.208.70 attacked iopdl.org 1740 times in 2 hours on 06/23/2025.
  • Develop a program to find the blocked ips and to find which ips need to be blocked on 07/16/25, because many people tried to login at iopdl.org and blocking their ips and usernames were too many to do by hand.
  • Change user id and passwords for iopdl.org several times, but attacks are not solved.
  • Renew SiteLock asking malware evaluations. They have completed configuration of our SiteLock Trueshield WAF(Web Access Firewall) and malware evaluation. And they found malware on iopdl.org and cured them, and they recommended 3 steps to prevent malware, and the president finished their steps. Then, attackers are reduced a lot.
  • Renew the plus hosting for iopdl.org for 3 years until 2028.
  • Renew SAM.gov and privacy protection.
  • Keep bookkeeping.
  • A board member had an eye surgery and the other had a right leg injury and surgery.

2024

  • The board meetings held on 02/28/24 and 10/24/24 at 1pm.
  • File IOPDL required documents to IRS, Attorney General, and state.
  • Maintain iopdl.org and ct.iopdl.org, blocking malware and harmful access and login, and cleaning the websites every week.
  • There were a lot of attacks which were blocked by login security setting on January 12, 2024. For example, Iligan and Philippines with IP: 49.146.34.198 Hostname: dsl.49.146.34.198.pldt.net. were blocked by login security setting. It took two weeks to block and clean them all.
  • On November 18, 2024, there were 20 users locked out from singing in with invalid usernames such as ‘root’ from Italy and Calgary, Alberta, Canada, ‘Administrarot’ from France, which were blocked by login security setting.
  • Renew SAM.gov and SiteLock.
  • Keep bookkeeping.
  • IOPDL mission and benefits for charitable purpose are discussed again:
    • What kinds of benefits and needs are currently needs in the digital library fields.
    • Need more research about what kinds benefits current digital libraries are providing.
    • What kinds of technology IOPDL can provide for current end users.
    • What kinds of current needs of skills IOPDL can fulfill.

2023

  • The board meetings held on 02/28/23 and 10/24/23 at 1pm.
  • File IOPDL required documents to IRS (had some issues but solved), Attorney General, and state.
  • Maintain iopdl.org and ct.iopdl.org, blocking malware and harmful access and login, and cleaning the websites every week.
  • There are a lot of attacks on iopdl.org and ct.iopdl.org websites, because malicious IP address by bot can attack more than 1000 webpages or programs in a few seconds. Thus, the hosing compony warned the attacks.
  • Renew iopdl.org domain name registration for 3 years until 2026.
  • Renew SAM.gov and SiteLock.
  • Keep bookkeeping.

2022

  • The board meetings held on 02/28/22 and 09/28/22 at 1pm.
  • File IOPDL required documents to IRS, Attorney General, and state.
  • Maintain iopdl.org and ct.iopdl.org, blocking malware and harmful access and login, and cleaning the websites every week.
  • Renew plus hosting for iopdl.org for 3 years until 2025.
  • Renew SAM.gov and SiteLock.
  • Keep bookkeeping.

2021

  • The board meetings held on 03/03/21 and 08/28/21 at 1pm.
  • File documents for IOPDL to IRS, Attorney General, and state.
  • Maintain the websites for charitable purpose websites, iopdl.org and ct.iopdl.org, blocking ip addresses and users IDs that threat or try to upload.
  • Keep bookkeeping.
  • Renew the Sales tax exemtion.
  • Renew SiteLock protection.
  • Renew SAM.gov.
  • Renew iopdl.org domain name until 2024.

2020

  • The board meetings held on  02/28/20 and 09/28/20 at 2pm.
  • Maintain iopdl.org and ct.iopdl.org websites, blocking ip addresses and user ids that threats or tries to upload something, according to Wordfence reports.
  • File documents for IOPDL to IRS, Attorney General, and State.
  • Keep bookkeeping.
  • Renew SAM.gov and grants.gov.
  • Renew SiteLock protection and domain names.

2019

  • The board meetings held on 02/18/19 at 2pm and 09/27/19 at 2pm.
  • The website, iopdl.org, had migrated to a different hosting compony on July 17, 2019.
  • To use the developed Common Terminology (CT), the idea of updating regularly metadata of IOPDL and the cooperation libraries was suggested.
  • Seek supports for developers to build a portal (search engine) of IOPDL.
  • The used device for iopdl.org had problems and replaced with warranty.
  • Keep bookkeeping.
  • Renew SAM.gov and SiteLock.

2018

  • Board meetings on 02/18/18 at 2pm and 09/28/18 at 2pm.
  • IOPDL website was hacked on April 16, and the websites were cleaned and recovered with Sitelock protection.
  • Our Research direction changing was suggested to use all cooperated digital libraries own search tools that use their linked open data, from building a linked open data and a search engine for all cooperated digital libraries.

February of 2017.

January of 2017.

December of 2016.

  • EuropeanaEDMtoCTConversion is developed from September, 2016 to convert Europeana Data Model (EDM) records of Europeana into the developed Common Terminology (CT). There were some difficulties in the conversion, EuropeanaEDMtoCTConversion. The main reason of the difficulties comes from the diversity of values that providers described.
  • Europeana offered ways to access their data at http://labs.europeana.eu/api. Thanks to their kind offer, the HarvestEDM program was developed, which harvests their metadata records via their OAI-PMH Service by sets. However, harvesting 42 million objects of Europeana was not straightforward, because of
    • lack of appropriate equipment to harvest speedily with enough storages. After harvesting 31 sets out of 1871 sets, the storage of the used device was out of space. Harvesting was temporarily stopped until a device that has enough storage was purchased by a board member.
    • unstable internet connection. No matter which device we used, harvesting program could not keep running, because the Internet was often disconnected.
  • Using the first harvested 31 sets, the element/term usage of their records is analyzed on January of 2016 and CT SKOS crosswalk is developed based on the analyzed usage on March of 2016.
  • Thanks to GOD, in the beginning of December 2016, all sets of Europeana EDM records were harvested in rdf/xml form. The harvested EDM records were converted into the developed Common Terminology (CT) in rdf/xml form in the beginning of December 2016.

September of 2016.

  • NLKMODStoCT Conversion is developed to convert the provided MODS records for the ancient rare resources of National Library of Korea on August of 2015 into the developed Common Terminology (CT). The statistics of the conversion shows excellent performance of CT: converted rate as 100%; SKOS semantic exact match rate as 85.7%; narrow match rate as 14.3%; broad match rate as 0%; and non converted rate 0%.

August of 2016.

  • MITQDCtoCT Conversion is developed to convert the harvested MIT DSpace records on September of 2015 into the developed Common Terminology (CT). The statistics of the conversion shows excellent performance of CT: converted rate as 100%; SKOS semantic exact match rate as 89.5%; narrow match rate as 10.5%; broad match rate as 0%; and non converted rate 0%.
  • HarvardtoCT Conversion is developed to convert the provided library of cloud dataset of Harvard library into the developed Common Terminology (CT). The statistics of the conversion shows excellent performance of CT: converted rate as 100%; SKOS semantic exact match rate as 83.7%; narrow match rate as 16.3%; broad match rate as 0%; and non converted rate 0%.

July of 2016.

DPLAMAPtoCT Conversion is developed that converts Metadata Application Profile(MAP) of DPLA into the developed Common Terminology (CT). The statistics of the conversion shows very high performance of CT: converted rate as 96.5%; SKOS semantic exact match rate as 62.7%; narrow match rate as 35%; broad match rate as 2%; and non converted rate as low as 3.5%.

March of 2016.

CT SKOS crosswalks are developed to enhance understanding and usage of Common Terminology using the found usages of element names/terms of the provided metadata records.

January of 2016.

The planned activities are started. Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) crosswalk is being developed for MARC, MODS, QDC, and DC. Europeana 18 million Europeana Data Model records are harvested and the usage of their element names in 31 sets of 1827 OAI list sets are analyzed with a new device, which is cheap but has enough storage. A limitation of the device, unstable connection with the Internet, is found, thus, the harvested 18 million records will be used instead of harvesting Europeana full sets.

December of 2015 ~ January of 2016.

  • Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) crosswalk is being developed for MARC, MODS, QDC, and DC.
  • Europeana 18 million Europeana Data Model records are harvested and the usage of their element names are analyzed in 31 sets of 1827 OAI list sets. The usage are found at http://iopdl.org/metadata/usage/Europeana_usage.csv.
  • January 11, 2016. IOPDL is proved as a not for profit and tax-exempt organization by  Internal Revenue Service.
  • Register IOPDL Inc. at Attorney General Office.
  • A desktop to save all harvested and provided metadata records was purchased, and data was transferred.

November of 2015.

  • Article of Incorporation of International Open Public Library (IOPDL), Inc. is filed at the office of the Secretary of State on November 12, 2015.
  • Bylaws of IOPDL Inc. are adopted by the board of directors on November 16, 2016.
  • The board meetings of IOPDL Inc. were held on November 16 and 18 of 2015.
  • 1023 Form to be proved as a tax-exempt organization was submitted into Internal Revenue Service.

May ~ December of 2015.

  • Europeana offers ways to access the data at http://labs.europeana.eu/api. We are harvesting their 43 million multilingual records of Europeana Data Model. But, we faced limitations in speed and storage of the device used in harvesting. Thus, the harvesting has been temporally stopped due to the limitation after harvesting 30 sets out of 1827 OAI list sets. We hope it can be resumed soon so that the harvesting can be finished by December 31, 2015 for starting the planned activity from 2016.
  • Digital Public Library of America cooperates in IOPDL project. Under recognition of  the chair of the board and other Directors, we are analyzing their DPLA Metadata Application Profile (MAP) metadata in json form and investigating their element usage. The task will be fundamental to design CT SKOS crosswalk and conversions for the developed Common Terminology (CT).
  • National Library of Korea cooperates very positively in IOPDL project. They provided their MODS metadata of old rare books, maps, old selected classic novels in xlsx form. Based on the element usage found by an empirical experiment, we are developing CT SKOS crosswalk and conversions for the developed Common Terminology (CT).

Before May, 2015.

  • 2012-2014 A prototype to build a Common Terminology of existing standards has conducted to fulfill the technical requirement under the supervision of Professor Dave Dubin, support of Dean Smith and Dean Renear of GSLIS in UIUC.
  • 2010 – 2011 A prototype evaluation of existing digital libraries had conducted to fulfill the general requirement under the support and supervision of Professor McDonough, Dean Linda Smith, and Dean Allen Renear of GSLIS in UIUC. The evaluation is limited regionally almost in the USA and on 2010.
  • 2008 – National Open Public Digital Library was proposed for the USA and people all over the world by Boaz Sunyoung Jin who believes this is a calling from GOD. The proposal to establish NOPDL had developed. Especially, unifying language requirement was suggested by Professor Jerome McDonough of Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

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