Allan Bell
Director, Library Digital Initiatives
University of British Columbia

Chinese Canadian Stories (CCS) uses technology to bring the past to life and preserve digital objects for the future. In doing so, it has fostered innovative research that connects students with elders, developed educational materials for Grade 5-7 students across the country and helped an array of Canadian community groups tell their fascinating yet often overlooked legacies. Highlights of the CCS project, led by the University of British Columbia Library and Simon Fraser University Library, include interactive kiosks that present visually powerful narratives in three languages (English, French, Chinese); a searchable Chinese Head Tax Register of 97,000 digitized records, along with interactive modules that visualize the data for users; an educational video game entitled Gold Mountain Quest; and more. This cutting-edge project presents history for the digital age in a way that truly engages students and communities.

http://ccs.library.ubc.ca
http://ccs.library.ubc.ca/en/videos/ccs_trailer.html
http://ccs.library.ubc.ca/en/GMQ/trailer.html
http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/project.php?id=1049

Mark Baggett
Assistant Professor
University of Tennessee

Ken Wise
Associate Professor
University of Tennessee

The Database of the Smokies (DOTS) is an open access database developed by a team of subject specialists, systems librarians, and information science students at the University of Tennessee Libraries. The database, constructed on the open-source Drupal platform, is designed as a successor to the scholarly print monograph and to capitalize on the wealth of both digital and traditional content specific to the Great Smoky Mountains region from 1935 to the present. It is a complement to “Terra Incognita: An Annotated Bibliography of the Great Smoky Mountains, 1544–1934,” due to be published by the University of Tennessee Press later this year.

DOTS includes citations to published items, digital photographs, websites, and manuscripts with links to scanned surrogates (where copyright permits). The database is an outgrowth of the Great Smoky Mountains Regional Project, a fifteen-year effort by the University of Tennessee Libraries to promote research and collections about the Smokies region. As well as providing access to written material, it will also provide links to the thousands of images that form a part of the University of Tennessee’s digital collections of Smokies photographs. Value resides in access to the rare, obscure, and difficult-to-locate Smoky Mountain material and in the comprehensiveness of the database content. Comprehensiveness is reinforced by the DOTS project’s implementation of a “crowd-sourcing” mechanism as a means for gleaning content from an established clientele of sophisticated users accessing the bibliography as a research tool. Crowd-sourcing assimilates the knowledge and expertise of a diversity of users and thereby generates an independent outside prestige for the database itself.

This presentation will focus on the model of database creation that allows a library to leverage subject and technology expertise along with student labor to create a product useful to both a general and specialized clientele.

 http://dots.lib.utk.edu

Timothy Logan
Associate Vice President, Electronic Library
Baylor University

Darryl Stuhr
Assistant Director for Digital Projects, Electronic Library
Baylor University

The Riley Digitization Center at Baylor University manages many projects throughout the year, digitizing thousands of items and hundreds of thousands of pages ranging from medieval manuscripts, hand-written correspondence and journals, historical maps, 19th century sheet music, rare gospel music recordings, and more. This presentation will focus on the use of rigorous standards and data formats in a structured project management environment to ensure that all data and metadata are created and stored in a sustainable, replicable, interoperable, and extensible system. The management of numerous parallel projects at the individual item level with an infrastructure built to handle quality control, data flow, multi-format processing and preservation, with staff ranging from interns, graduate and undergraduate students, project-specific temporary workers, and a few full-time positions, requires the use of robust project management tools available for reporting and data entry at all digitization and processing workstations.

To handle high-volume throughput, track project status, manage source materials, and ensure a high level of quality, the Digital Projects Group developed and maintains a distributed project infrastructure that supports extensive and complex workflows. Unable to identify a single tool that met all of the needs and requirements, the Riley Center utilizes a collection of tools, many of them free, such as Google Docs (Spreadsheets and Documents), Linux utilities, BaseCamp, Evernote, and DropBox. This presentation will address Baylor’s implementation of the variety of tools and procedures used to manage digitization projects at the Riley Digitization Center, including lessons learned and opportunities for growth, to help others build a framework of inexpensive tools to organize and manage digitization projects large and small.

http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu
http://blogs.baylor.edu/digitalcollections/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/baylordigitalcollections
https://www.facebook.com/BaylorDigitalCollections
http://www.baylor.edu/lib/digitization/

Presentation

Stephen Davison
Head, UCLA Digital Library Program
University of California, Los Angeles

http://livingstone.library.ucla.edu
http://livingstone.library.ucla.edu/livingstone_archive/

Presentation

Brian Tingle
Technical Lead
California Digital Library

Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information

This session will feature two related archival identity management projects: Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) and Building a National Archival Authorities Infrastructure. SNAC (2010-2014), a project to create a test bed of archival authority records and demonstrate their potential for user discovery, comprises a three-part process. First, personal, corporate, and family names (and related historical data) are extracted from finding aids (descriptions of archival records). Next, these names and data are assembled into contextual authority records, which are compared against each other, and against authority and historical data from other sources (e.g. VIAF and DBpedia). The resulting set of authority records serves as the basis of a prototype interface that provides integrated access (through the names and descriptions of people) to related but distributed primary and secondary resources. By virtue of the connections displayed between authority records and related sources, the prototype also provides a visualization of the historical social networks in which the people depicted lived and worked.

Among the primary objectives of the Building a National Archival Authorities Infrastructure (2011-2013) project is to transform the groundwork completed by SNAC into a sustainable national archival authorities cooperative program that is similar to, but distinct from, the Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO). The project has convened a series of meetings comprising archivists, librarians, scholars, and allied professionals, with the goal of developing a blueprint for the cooperative. The emerging consensus from these meetings is that the National Archives and Records Administration will host the cooperative, collaborating with the archival and allied communities in its governance, development, and maintenance.

 http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/
http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/xtf/search
http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/NAAC_index.html

Helen Agüera
Senior Program Officer
National Endowment for the Humanities National Endowment for the Humanities

Brenda Gunn
Associate Director for Research and Collections, Briscoe Center for American History
University of Texas at Austin

Mark Phillips
Assistant Dean for Digital Libraries
University of North Texas

More than 200 libraries, museums, archives, and scholarly research centers collaborated to create the statewide Portal to Texas History over a 10 year period. This rich resource now contains millions of files comprising more than 220,000 titles, many of which are extensive back-runs of historic state newspapers. The Portal is now used millions of times per year by both academic and public researchers. This panel will discuss the Portal to Texas History as a case study in large-scale collaboration to develop networked information content. Issues that will be discussed by panel participants include the national context of digitization efforts, scholarly guidance in content selection, community engagement, standards-based technology for content aggregation at scale, assessment of usage and impacts, and strategies for long-term sustainability.

http://texashistory.unt.edu/

Katherine Skinner,
Executive Director
Educopia Institute, MetaArchive Cooperative

Matt Schultz
Program Manager
Educopia Institute, MetaArchive Cooperative

Gail McMillan
Director, Digital Library and Archives
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Providing the ETDs of Today for the Researchers of Tomorrow (Halbert, Skinner, Schultz)

This briefing will highlight and discuss the early findings from an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded project hosted by the University of North Texas that is researching and documenting a range of life cycle curation and preservation practices for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). An accompanying workshop is planned for summer 2013 in conjunction with United States Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association (USetdA) 2013 conference. This project briefing will solicit advice on proper delivery formats. The briefing will also discuss developments toward a series of micro services that will assist ETD programs with enhancing the curation of their ETDs; implementation use cases will be discussed. Partners on this project include Educopia Institute, the Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations, and the university libraries of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), Pennsylvania State University, Boston College, Indiana State University, Rice University, and the University of Arizona.

http://metaarchive.org/imls

Do Open Access ETDs Effect Publishing Opportunities in the Sciences? Findings from the 2012 Survey of Academic Journal Editors (McMillan)

Although open public access to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) has been widely implemented in higher education, some faculty advisors and graduate student authors are still concerned that unfiltered access to their ETDs could diminish future publishing opportunities. This presentation will discuss a survey of academic journal editors about their attitudes towards ETDs that was conducted under the auspices of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. At the fall 2011 Coalition for Networked Information meeting, results of a survey of social science and humanities editors and university press directors were reported. This presentation will share the latest survey findings regarding the policies of science journals in light of open access ETDs. It will also compare the results from the social science and humanities survey and the science survey as well as the 2012 and 1999 surveys of science editors’ attitudes towards ETDs.

Survey authors: Gail McMillan, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Marisa L. Ramirez, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo; Joan Dalton, University of Windsor; Ann Hanlon, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Heather Smith, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo; Chelsea Kern, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

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/