Charles Henry
Vice Provost and University Librarian
Rice University

As scholars in the humanities and social sciences use digital tools and technologies with increasing sophistication and innovation, they are transforming their practices of collaboration and communication. New forms of scholarship, criticism, and creativity proliferate in arts and letters and in the social sciences, resulting in significant new works accessible and meaningful only in digital form. Many technology-driven projects in these areas have become enormously complex and at the same time indispensable for teaching and research. What kind of infrastructure—cyberinfrastructure, that is–will be needed to support these activities as they grow in scale, complexity, and potential for transformation? And how will the cyberinfrastructure change the relationship between disciplinary communities and the general public, extending the reach of Humanities and Social Science resources and practices deep into non-academic audiences?

 In 2004, the American Council of Learned Societies formed a national commission to investigate and report on these issues. The Commission is charged to:

• Describe and analyze the current state of humanities and social science cyberinfrastructure

 • Articulate the requirements and the potential contributions of the humanities and the social sciences in developing a cyberinfrastructure for information, teaching, and research

 • Recommend areas of emphasis and coordination for the various agencies and institutions, public and private, that contribute to the development of this cyberinfrastructure

This briefing will provide an update on their work and a preview of their findings and recommendations.

Web Sites:
http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/cyber.htm

It is sometimes said that a network’s weakest point is its users. By having mandatory review sessions for all staff and student employees who access any of your networked resources, you can strengthen your network security. This briefing will share what was learned when the UNL Libraries started their annual computing review process that covered both the rules and the reasoning behind the rules that promote a more secure networked environment.

Handout (MS Word)

Aquifer emerged as the re-awakened strategic direction of the Distributed Open Digital Library initiative of the Digital Library Federation in May 2003. According to the original 1995 Digital Library Federation mission statement, the DLF was established to “bring together — from across the nation and beyond — digitized materials that will be made accessible to students, scholars, and citizens everywhere, and that document the building and dynamics of America’s heritage and cultures.” DLF has progressed towards this strategic goal since its inception through support, coordination and participation in the development of prototypes, proofs of concept and test-beds that will form the foundation of the Aquifer Digital Library initiative. This project briefing will review the status of the DLF initiatives upon which Aquifer is being built and outline the project plan for the coming year. The update will focus on organizing for collaboration, leveraging existing collections and technical developments and defining the Aquifer Digital Library problem space.

http://www.diglib.org/aquifer/

PowerPoint Presentation

The world is currently experiencing an explosion of remotely sensed imagery available from civilian and private satellites. Driving much of this explosion in data is a growing awareness of the utility of satellite data in a wide variety of disciplines including agriculture, cartography, education, forestry, geology, and urban planning among others. However, the ever-widening array of data products available for purchase and acquisition presents a daunting collection development challenge for libraries. One approach that can be used is for a library to directly collaborate with research faculty at multiple institutions to build and manage a shared collection where the funding can come from multiple sources including the researchers themselves. The Miami University Libraries have taken this approach to build a shared satellite data collection as the core collection of the Ohioview research consortium. This now nearly 10-year collaboration has resulted in a widely used and successful data archive that provides a core research resource for Ohio faculty who use remote sensing data. This briefing will discuss the development of the OhioView Digital Archive including a mixed data funding model, how the archive continues to impact remote sensing research in Ohio, and the nature of the partnership between Library and research lab.

http://www.ohioview.org

Handout (PDF)

James P. Michalko
President
Research Libraries Group (RLG)

Lorcan Dempsey
Vice President of Research
Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)

Standards are an essential, but often unacknowledged, part of the infrastructure upon which digital content projects depend.  The nature of the standards process has changed radically in recent years.  This session will provide an opportunity for a CNI community discussion of the implications of these changes.  As a point of departure, we’ll describe the results of two efforts.  The first is a review of the future prospects and directions of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), which was chaired by Clifford Lynch.  (The report, along with a response by the NISO board, should be publicly available by the time of the CNI meeting or shortly thereafter). The second is the outcomes of a meeting jointly sponsored by CNI, RLG, OCLC and ALA, which examined emerging standards development initiatives that have developed outside the traditional framework, and their implications for the established system of standards development.

The Fedora project contains a vision of the future of digital libraries, one that argues that interoperability, standards and service-oriented architectures will be central to meeting the archival and dissemination needs for digital collections in the coming years. But this flagship product and framework presents significant, on-the-ground challenges for smaller colleges who generally do not have the resources to implement Fedora. This project briefing will describe our research into closing this gap through consortial software development (via the Elated product: http://sourceforge.net/projects/elated/) as well as dissemination of information about other options available to small colleges in approaching Fedora, including other open-source and commercial efforts. The goal of the discussion part of this briefing is to examine potential collaborations and resources that can assist with dissemination of the Fedora technology to these smaller institutions.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/elated

Handout (MS Word)

Community Source has been described as “institutional investments for institutional outcomes” based on open source principles. This session examines how the Community Source model used by Sakai, OSPI, Kuali, and others is similar to and different from other collaborative models. The session will examine models of shared investment, rapid distributed development, governance, leveraged support, and structures for post-grant sustainability. Audience interaction will address the challenges of the Community Source model for the longer term and its applicability to new projects.

Web Links:
http://www.sakaiproject.org

Ann Apps
Senior Analyst, Research and Development, MIMAS
University of Manchester

Amanda Hill
Team Leader, Archives Hub and IESR
University of Manchester

The OCKHAM Initiative and the Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) are two efforts which are building digital library services registries. OCKHAM, through a National Science Foundation (NSF)/National Science Digital Library (NSDL) grant, is building a distributed services registry targetting both the NSDL and academic library communities. IESR is building a centralized registry focusing on the JISC community.

This program will present both projects, detail their activities, and demonstrate how the two projects are collaborating and looking long-term to how their separate approaches could eventually converge to an approach that works for all of their respective communities.

http://ockham.org
http://iesr.ac.uk

PowerPoint Presentations:
Introduction to the Information Environment Service Registry (Hill & Apps)
The OCKHAM Project And Digital Library Services Registries (Frumkin)

J. Timothy Sprehe
President
Sprehe Information Management Associates, Inc.

This presentation discusses research the authors completed for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and a number of federal agencies in implementing electronic records management systems (ERMSs). Based on four case studies, the highest quality, most accurate and complete ERMS is achieved when records management is non-intrusive to the desktop end user, and does not interfere with the work routines of professional staff in the enterprise. The presentation discusses findings, issues, implementation techniques, and suggests applications for ERMS in a range of organizational settings.

Handout (MS Word)

Peter Brantley
Director of Technology
California Digital Library

The launch this spring of its digital archival repository pushes the California Digital Library (CDL) further toward a new library service model and toward the fundamental re-engineering of its underlying technology. The presentation reveals these changes, the rationale behind them, and the comprehensively re-engineered technologies that underpin them, and it will do so with reference to specific new services that include digital preservation, publishing support, and so-called “site building.” The presentation aims to solicit community feedback and critical commentary that will help assess the generalizability of our approach, its longer-term viability, and the potential for its use with other solutions.

At its inception, the CDL focused on the delivery of bibliographic and content services directly to individual end users. Today, it places a far stronger emphasis on services that enable and empower libraries and other information organizations to build and maintain the high-quality online services that meet their local users’ very particular needs.

http://www.cdlib.org

Handout:
Digital Library Building Blocks (MS Word File)

PowerPoint Presentation