Sean Quimby
Senior Director, Special Collections Research Center
Syracuse University

Jeremy Morgan
Information Technology Analyst
Syracuse University

As Syracuse University Library reported at the spring 2011 Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting, it planned to develop a custom PHP/MySQL database driven application as part of its National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Marcel Breuer Digital Archive project. The application generates METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) encoded objects and EAC (Encoded Archival Context) authority records that are, in turn, indexed by the open source eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) platform developed by the California Digital Library.

In spring 2012, Syracuse University Library launched the Breuer web portal, which unites more than 35,000 digital objects from nine institutions located in three different countries relating to the influential Bauhaus-trained modernist architect. The project was a model of institutional collaboration, particularly in the realm of copyright policy. Now, Syracuse is extending both the copyright policy and the technological infrastructure developed for the Breuer project to all of its digital collections, migrating them from CONTENTdm to the new custom application. In the process, it will make much of its “dark” archive (content digitized at the request of individual patrons) publicly available for the first time.

This presentation will include an overview of the University’s custom database application, a demonstration of the completed Breuer portal, and a detailed description of the process for migrating the library’s digital objects and metadata from a proprietary system to an open source repository that allows faceted browsing and, eventually, dynamic interoperability with encoded archival description (EAD)-encoded archival finding aids.

http://breuer.syr.edu/
http://plastics.syr.edu

Handout
Presentation

James Shulman
President
ARTstor

Bill Ying
CIO and Vice President of Technology
ARTstor

This session will describe the inter-organizational collaboration of Columbia’s Avery Library, ARTstor, and the Getty Research Institute towards building the Built Works Registry (BWR), an open, shareable data resource for architectural works and the built environment. In 2010, the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded a three-year grant to develop BWR. The project brings together these three institutions (each experienced in doing big data projects and each with separate and unique strengths) to collaborate on policies, standards, content aggregation, technical infrastructure, geo-location, and data exchange protocols. As a networked, distributed environment, BWR will allow contributors to participate in development and maintenance of this community-generated data resource. This large-scale inter-institutional collaboration is a model for how organizations can do more together now and in the future. By investing collective efforts and resources on common problems, we participate in crafting a future data system that will more efficiently and effectively meet community-wide needs.

 http://builtworksregistry.wordpress.com/

Beth Sandore Namachchivaya
Associate University Librarian for Information Technology Planning and Policy and Associate Dean of Libraries
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

Robert McDonald
Associate Dean of Libraries and Deputy Director of the Data to Insight Center
Indiana University

This panel will feature collaborative partners from the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) and will focus on HTRC and its unique cross-institutional partnership (Indiana University/University of Illinois, University of Michigan). Furthermore, the presentation will focus on work that is being accomplished in the first two years of the existence of the HTRC with the mission of enabling computational access to nonprofit and educational users for the mass-scale digital corpus of the HathiTrust Digital Library (13 million volumes and growing).

Following a brief overview of the mission and history of the HTRC, the HTRC partnership will be described, including information on how it is working to deliver computational access to the HathiTrust digital corpus for the research community. Additionally, a detailed view of the work plan over the first two phases of the HTRC towards the evolving long-term plans and sustainability for the center will be discussed. Emphasis will be on:
• HTRC Phase 1 Demonstration and outcomes of the first HathiTrust Research Center UnCamp
• Current status of the HTRC non-consumptive research methodology prototype
• Status of HTRC current research proposal partnerships
• Focus of HTRC Phase 2 and the implementation of the demonstration prototype into a production operations environment

 http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc
Twitter: @hathitrust

Text mining and data analytics are of increasing interest to the international scholarly community. They promise to enable researchers to deal with an ever-increasing amount of publication and information, and to develop new research based on existing materials. Despite this promise, wider uptake of text mining is currently hampered by a range of barriers, most notably on the legal side. To assess these barriers as well as the potential benefits of text mining in education, JISC has commissioned the study, “Value and Benefits of Text Mining.” This session will introduce the study, with a particular focus on the potential of text mining for innovation, notable barriers, and the legal context.

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2012/value-and-benefits-of-text-mining.aspx

Deanna Marcum
Managing Director, Ithaka S+R
Ithaka

Over the past year, Ithaka S+R has conducted studies of the changing research methods and practices of scholars in two major fields: history and chemistry. At the spring 2012 Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting, researchers shared background information about this new program of work. This presentation will include the comprehensive findings regarding the needs of scholars in these fields to facilitate discussion about implications for the CNI community.

For history, even when research methods remain fairly traditional, new practices are transforming the needs of historians. For chemistry, thinking about the needs of the laboratory group and not just the individual chemist may open up new avenues for research support. This session will include recommendations for possible service models to address these needs, and it will also include extended discussion about the feasibility of these service models and others that may build on our findings.

Presentation

Declan Fleming
Chief Technology Strategist
University of California, San Diego

Lois Widmer
Chair, Digital Services and Shared Collections
University of Florida

Libraries around the country have evolved digital library infrastructure, workflows, and service from startup, grant-funded initiatives into core functions that define a research library in the 21st century. This shift has challenged our thinking about offering new services, moving projects into programs, and evaluating initiatives which may or may not deliver the expected outcomes. At the same time, researchers and other campus entities are looking to libraries as supporters and collaborators for research in the age of “big” research (meaning distributed, collaborative, and resource intensive research, and often referred to as e-research, e-science, research cyberinfrastructure, digital humanities, big humanities, digital scholarship, data science, etc.). Libraries now have many opportunities to leverage the infrastructure and programmatic support for digital libraries to serve also as a core component of the larger scholarly cyberinfrastructure.

This panel will discuss the challenges that three university libraries have experienced with institutionalizing digital library infrastructure and how they continue to adapt their services to meet a changing set of requests and needs from across their institutions. Each member of the panel will present a brief background of their institution and the unique collections and services which have shaped their institution’s thinking about digital library services. An overview of new initiatives each library has chosen to support and how they fit into the overall strategic direction of the institution will also be presented. Finally, all speakers will discuss challenges and opportunities in areas such as technical infrastructure, scaling of services, training and retention of professional staff to support both technical and nontechnical aspects of running repository infrastructure and services at scale.

http://ufdc.ufl.edu
http://digital.library.unt.edu
http://libraries.ucsd.edu/digital
http://rci.ucsd.edu/data-curation/index.html

Bill Mischo
Head, Grainger Engineering Library Information Center
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

Beth Sandore Namachchivya
Associate University Librarian for Information Technology
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

Tyler Walters
Dean, University Libraries
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Julie Speer
Associate Dean, Research and Informatics, University Libraries
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Technology Innovation in Support of Institutional Priorities: Exemplars at the University of Illinois Library (Hahn, Mischo, Namachchivya)

This briefing describes two innovative approaches to developing discovery and access tools in a library. The two programs featured are:
• A program focused on design and implementation of federated search and discovery systems that incorporates research and mentoring of librarians, information professionals, and graduate students in library and information science (LIS) and computer science.
• A library technology prototyping service that employs and mentors undergraduate computer science minors from diverse backgrounds.

The panel takes an in-depth look at key products that have emerged from this work, what has fueled their success, and how lessons learned can shape future technology innovations that support the important organizational themes of effective discovery and growing diversity in technology design and development.

The Future is Now: Capacity Building and Partnership Development to Advance eResearch Programs (Walters, Speer)

Research universities are adapting to a changing environment where networked open research, cyberinfrastructure, and cyberlearning approaches are transforming them. Organizational change is inevitable and the pace of this change moves more quickly with each new disruptive development in the economic, policy, technological, and social realms. This milieu calls for entrepreneurial approaches and intra-organizational strategies that produce new technological and organizational platforms through which new partnerships of information and technology professionals with researchers, instructors, and learners are created. The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VT) Libraries has developed two sets of strategies for advancing eResearch partnerships and programs within the university: 1) Internal strategy: developing new positions such as the Associate Dean for Research and Informatics, Research Environments Librarian, and other specialty positions such as the Engineering Informatics and Data Librarian and Art & Design Informatics Librarian; designing work units with a new, flexible model: the hub. The library-based hub fosters capacity-building to support eResearch and digital scholarship practices, processes, and technologies; 2) External strategy: establishing a research center (the VT Center for Digital Research and Scholarship [CDRS]) that also serves as a services center for mapping and integrating the Libraries into the research enterprise. The Center monitors and assesses changes in the university environments in which research and scholarly knowledge is produced. It offers tools and services that address the many research and scholarly environment needs of VT researchers. The Center partners with researchers and others to solve information/data/content-related academic problems and serves as a consultant on digital curation processes.

 http://minrvaproject.org/
https://github.com/minrva
http://minrvaproject.tumblr.com/
http://goo.gl/BxCuu
http://goo.gl/r7pyY
http://uofi-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com:1701/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?&vid=UIU
http://search.grainger.uiuc.edu/linker/
http://hades.grainger.uiuc.edu/guy/pip3.asp?geology

Neil Jefferies
Research & Development Project Manager, Bodleian Libraries
Oxford University

Research data are at the heart of scholarly advancement. They are increasingly made available on the Internet as underpinnings of research publications or directly exposed as primary research outputs. These emerging trends in scholarly communication are now backed by policy: The UK government is committed to opening up public sector data. The Research Councils UK (RCUK) Common Principles on Data Policy state that “Publicly funded research data are a public good, produced in the public interest, which should be made openly available with as few restrictions as possible in a timely and responsible manner that does not harm intellectual property.”

The challenge for institutions is that research methodologies and the consequent data management practices vary widely across academic subjects and departments. As a consequence, supporting services for researchers have to be generic enough to scale but take into account subject specific requirements.

Support services at Oxford University have been thoroughly studied and prepared in a series of projects, most notably funded by JISC and the University Modernisation Fund. The service family is designed to support researchers in applying best practice and providing e-infrastructure to store and subsequently curate research data, consistent with the University’s research data policy.

The service family at Oxford University foresees a multi-agency approach with the University’s Research Services, IT Services and the Bodleian Libraries working in partnership with the academic divisions. It defines ‘help-not-hinder’ services for different parts of the research life cycle:
•    Inform: The Data Management Hub website is the center of information and support. It links to personal help, policies and subject specific training (including through Oxford’s Doctoral Training Centers).
•    Plan: Data management plans, as increasingly required by funders, can
be generated with DMPonline, a widely used tool that is adapted to Oxford’s needs and integrated with other services.
•    Work: The actual work with data during a research project is the area showing the most diverse use of services inside and outside of the University. Generic tools at Oxford include an easily deployable database (ViDaaS) and the drop-box like DataStage. These are available for embedding in the local research context.
•    Archive: DataBank provides a durable home for research data that is produced and to be held at the University of Oxford. DataBank supports various formats, including software, and different access conditions, ranging from a dark archive to publishing data with a locally minted digital object identifier (DOI).
•    Find: DataFinder enables data generated at Oxford to be discoverable. DataFinder also keeps records of externally available data that represent Oxford’s research results.

Researchers will have a seamless experience when using the research data services at Oxford University. For example, information provided in DMPonline reappears in DataFinder and DataStage automatically transfers data into DataBank, when a durable version is required. Most services are operational individually and the launch of the complete service family is planned for 2013.

Contributors to this work include Paul Jeffreys, Sally Rumsey, Neil Jefferies, David Shotton, Glenn Swafford, James Wilson, Wolfram Horstmann, and others.

 http://cdn.hm-treasury.gov.uk/autumn_statement.pdf
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/Pages/DataPolicy.aspx
http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/rdm/
http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/rdm/managedata/policy/
http://damaro.oucs.ox.ac.uk/
http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/rdm/

Robert Horton
Associate Deputy Director for Library Services
Institute of Museum and Library Services

Kathleen Williams
Executive Director
National Historic Records and Publications Commission

Joel Wurl
Senior Program Officer
National Endowment for the Humanities

Representatives of four funding agencies will initiate a conversation on trends and priorities in their fields. The goals are to identify the opportunities librarians, archivists and museum professionals could address in the near future; how they might better collaborate; and what attendees of the session feel the agencies should consider.

January 18, 2012

In this report, CNI director Clifford Lynch discusses a wide range of issues:

• Plenary speakers for the upcoming CNI membership meeting on April 2-3 in Baltimore
• Bamboo Project
• His presentation at the National Library of Medicine on the broad array of health information and the enormous opportunities for linking and data mining
• Names and lives in the scholarly record
• The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) calls for responses to public access to articles and data generated from federally funded research
• The new National Science Board (NSB) policy document on data
• LITA’s announcement of making their key journal open access and online only
• His new position as co-chair of the Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI) and an announcement of their first meeting

Joan Lippincott, CNI’s associate director, talks about digital research, teaching and learning from her experiences at the Modern Language Association conference and a campus visit to Loyola University Chicago.

We hope you enjoy this program and we welcome your feedback.  For questions or comments related to CNI Conversations, please contact CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott at joan@cni.org.