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The Library of Congress (LC) has kicked off a process called the Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME) to develop a new communications vehicle for bibliographic data, a cornerstone of libraries. The library and cultural heritage institution environment has and is changing, with the Web and the Internet becoming central factors for sharing both bibliographic data and resources themselves. The result page number on Google is a statistic of concern as it means visibility for the resources that libraries can supply to the community. While MARC has served well beyond the original expectations, there are aspects of the current community that could function better and enable libraries to be more central and relevant if the bibliographic description exchange tools were “retooled.” This presentation will describe the BIBFRAME steps taken thus far and the current expectations for this development with an aim of stimulating interest and concerns from attendees.

http://bibframe.org
http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition

Annette Bailey
Assistant Director for Electronic Resources and Emerging Technology Services
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

The LibX project was launched in Fall 2006 to provide libraries worldwide with the ability to integrate librarians and their services into users’ webflow, providing help with information seeking and discovery at the point of need. In early 2013, the leading faculty on the LibX project developed a real time visualization of user activity in Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University’s discovery system. This presentation will discuss how disruptive organizational change at the University Libraries and strategic collaboration across the University has lead to rapid, successful technology innovation that benefits the development and adoption of new services in libraries.

 http://libx.org/

]]> http://www.cni.org/topics/information-access-retrieval/collaboration-to-innovation/feed/ 0 http://www.cni.org/topics/information-access-retrieval/discovery-turned-inside-out-using-schema-org-and-google-site-search-with-library-digital-collections-2/ http://www.cni.org/topics/information-access-retrieval/discovery-turned-inside-out-using-schema-org-and-google-site-search-with-library-digital-collections-2/#comments Mon, 18 Mar 2013 15:51:50 +0000 sharon http://www.cni.org/?p=13418 Sean Aery, Duke University
]]> Will Sexton
Digital Collections Coordinator, Libraries
Duke University

Sean Aery
Digital Projects Developer, Libraries
Duke University

Duke University Libraries has begun embedding structured metadata within the source code of the Web pages that display the Libraries’ digital collections. This practice follows the recommendations of the schema.org initiative, an effort by commercial search engine developers to use structured data to enrich the user’s experience. The initiative has led, for example, to Google’s display of contact information for retail outlets in search results, or its enhanced options for filtering recipe searches. Duke’s objectives in adopting schema.org relate both to the ways that an exterior service like Google might represent the institution’s materials, and how the organization will offer services to researchers. Usage analysis suggests that systems outside of Duke’s library, largely consisting of the commercial search tools, drive traffic to University collections, and the institution wants to increase its own systems’ interoperability with them.

Duke is also piloting a local instance of Google, via its Site Search API, with the potential to enhance and replace the discovery services offered to users. Generally speaking, the library sees embedded structured data as a way to extend the impact of the time and resources spent on discovery tools for the content that we manage. This presentation will show how Duke Libraries is using schema.org, it will include a demonstration of a localized Google experience, and it will include discussion of how this new emphasis on structured data changes how Duke Libraries envisions the future of discovery.

 http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/

Presentation (Sexton)
Presentation (Avery)

LiAM (Linked Archival Metadata) is an Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded planning project focused on facilitating the application of linked data approaches to archival description. Despite the standardization and automation of archival description since the 1990s, primarily through the development and wide adoption of Encoded Archival Description (EAD), archivists still struggle with the challenge of describing complex archival collections. In particular, archival finding aids are not well suited for describing either records produced by complex organizations or composites of organizations, or electronic records and digital objects managed in digital environments such as databases and social network sites.

The distributed and dynamic nature of contemporary archival materials mirrors the evolving network of documents that is the World Wide Web. The architecture of the Web, in particular the approach described by linked data, a rich, semantically related data environment built into the Web’s architecture, provides a powerful set of tools for modeling complex relationships and providing dynamic and flexible access to information.

Most finding aids, archival collection descriptions often encoded in EAD, are hierarchical and linear narrative documents that take a top-down approach to archival description. The linear flow of the traditional finding aid closely mirrors the physical arrangement of the documents in hand, serving both as a description of the collection and as a map to where records are physically located on the actual shelves or within the actual boxes and folders.

LiAM envisions a different approach by leveraging the powerful reliance on linking inherent in the architecture of the World Wide Web itself. The approach of linked data uses the technology of the Web to define relationships between myriad resources. The LiAM Planning Project got underway in October 2012 and has laid a roadmap that is focused on identifying a graduated approach for archives at all levels to begin to expose their descriptions using linked data. The purpose of this session will be to present the outline of LiAM’s deliverables, share progress to date, and seek feedback.

 http://go.tufts.edu/liam

 http://network.bepress.com/

Presentation

David Lindahl
Director of Strategic Initiatives and Planning, Libraries
University of Missouri-Kansas City

Roger Schonfeld
Program Director
Ithaka S+R

Oren Beit-Arie
Chief Strategy Officer
Ex Libris Group

The Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) is a National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Working Group formed to develop a recommended practice in the area of index-based library discovery services. These single search services, ever-more relied upon as a primary basis for accessing a library’s collections, have improved the research experience immensely, but they remain firmly seated in a heterogeneous ecosystem consisting of diverse players with individual interests. With the intent of streamlining communications and processes in order to better serve library end users, ODI is investigating the stakeholder landscape in the following areas: data format and data transfer; communication of libraries’ rights to specific content; level of indexing performed for content; definition of fair linking to published content; exchange of usage data between discovery providers and information providers. This session will report on the progress of the group’s research work, including interviews and surveys of stakeholders, and preview the Draft ODI Recommended Practice, expected to be released for public comment soon after the Coalition for Networked Information spring 2013 membership meeting.

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/

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

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