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/

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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

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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Laura Akerman
Technology and Metadata Librarian
Emory University

This session will include a presentation of Emory University Library’s first-hand experience in interlinking Civil War-related materials and other online resources by leveraging open linked data principles. The library has been actively evaluating linked data’s potential to replace current library processes and services (bibliographic services, finding aids, cataloging, and metadata work) as a more efficient and sustainable means, and one that could bring greater benefit to end users for research and learning. The Library’s initial focus was on workforce education and hands-on learning through real-time experiments: the Connections project was begun to prepare staff to work with linked data, a process that has culminated in a 3-month hands-on pilot to build and convert some data. The pilot introduced the concept to a wide range of staff, including subject liaisons, archivists, metadata librarians, and programmers. Emory’s “silos” of data were interlinked with other open data sources as a way to enhance user discovery and use of library materials on a very limited scale.

The presentation will include an assessment on the readiness of the entire linked open data ecosystem for libraries to cross-link disciplines, and the possible roles of libraries in a linked world. Suggestions for staff involvement in this new paradigm of information curation and dissemination will also be discussed.

https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/connections/
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This update from CNI leadership includes discussion of several recent conferences:  the International Workshop on Contributorship and Scholarly Attribution, an ORCID (Open Researcher & Contributor ID) Outreach Meeting, the “Designing Libraries for the 21st Century” conference in Calgary, and others.

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.

This update from CNI Director Clifford Lynch includes discussion of the following topics and events:

• The Obama Administration’s announcement regarding a new “big data” initiative
  (http://www.cni.org/news/administration-big-data-research-and/)
• An e-journals summit hosted by the National Academies
• Developments in scholarly identity management, author ID’s, and related matters
• A new report from JISC on text mining
  (press release, containing link to the report:  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2012/03/textmining.aspx)
• OCLC’s study on social metadata
  (http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-01r.htm)
• The recent Sage Bionetworks  Commons Congress on bioinformatics (http://sagecongress.org/)

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.

Creating data in the field of meteorology is laborious; some data is generated in the course of a climate simulation, while other data is measured during a weather observation experiment. As a result, meteorologists are developing a culture of publishing and reusing data. This presentation will include a research project aimed at simplifying the meteorological data publication process through the use of a Web-based workflow software which is hosted at the site of the long-term archive World Data Center for Climate. This software solution helps to prepare publications by guiding the meteorologist through the necessary metadata review, including details about scientific quality assurance, and by supporting the publisher by carrying out technical quality assurance. The publication procedure ends with the assignment of a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which is automatically registered using DataCite Web-services.

This project is funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; project partners are the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University oAS, the University of Bonn, and the German Climate Computing Center (Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum).

http://umwelt.wikidora.com

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The platform for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is being built to make maximally available what libraries and other curatorial institutions know about works, ideas, relationships, usage patterns, and more. This description is broad and general because the DPLA is a loose federation of major institutions (as well as smaller ones) that has not yet come to full agreement about what specifically it wants to present to end users. The group’s charge is to build a metadata server with open APIs that will enable and encourage developers to create applications that cannot be anticipated. The metadata may eventually include records for millions of items and many thousands of collections, all of which do not adhere to established standards. The service becomes more valuable as it is able to present developers with richer and deeper responses that make sense of the jumble of content at which the server points. The problems are large and knotty in every direction.

http://dp.la/dev
http://dp.la/dev/wiki
http://dp.la/dev/blog

Handout (MS Word)

Linked data has the potential to transform every aspect of how we create, acquire, and discover information. By creating simple assertions in Resource Description Framework (RDF) and linking them together, a semantic web of data is created. Current library metadata encoded in Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) is an ideal place to begin this transformation. Its consistency and quality will immediately enrich the Semantic Web and position our data where people are now searching for it.

Linked data is poised to replace MARC as the basis for the new library bibliographic framework. For libraries to fully benefit from linked data, they must learn about it, experiment with it, demonstrate its usefulness, and take a leadership role in its deployment. The eXtensible Catalog Organization (XCO) facilitates these activities by providing open-source software for libraries that is “linked-data-ready”. XC software prepares MARC and Dublin Core metadata for exposure to the Semantic Web using a platform based upon the OAI-PMH protocol, incorporating registered vocabularies for Resource Description and Access (RDA) elements and roles, and enabling the creation of linked data that represents Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) Group 1 entities. XC can play a key role in transitioning libraries from their current record-based system infrastructure to linked data by facilitating the repurposing of metadata, without disrupting existing business processes.

This presentation will include a software demonstration, proposed software architecture for creation and management of linked data, a vision for how libraries can migrate from their current metadata environment to linked data, and an update on XCO progress toward linked data goals.

http://www.eXtensibleCatalog.org

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Raul Guerra
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Maryland

Museums and libraries have growing collections of digital images of their art works. Traditionally to enable access, experts create authoritative metadata for these images.  About five years ago, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded steve.museum project explored the use of social tagging by non-experts to create image labels.  At about the same time, the Computational Linguistics for Metadata Building (CLiMB) project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, explored ways to extract terms from text on those images. The results of steve.museum along with CLiMB enabled researchers at the University of Maryland, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Susan Chun, consultant, to consider how to combine these valuable sources for access.

This session will include a presentation of the results of this IMLS-funded research, the Text, Tags and Trust (T3) Project. The presentation will focus on two fundamental issues in using user-created metadata. The computational linguistic processing, morphological and semantic analysis techniques used to process and analyze the large steve.museum tagset will be discussed first. Tags and terms will be compared to show how each covers different types of issues and vocabularies. While tagging tends to be by the non-expert, terms from text may be more authoritative, but the volume of irrelevant phrases impacts overall usefulness. The computational techniques used in this project enabled the examination of tags and phrases of importance for browsing, and discriminate useful multi-word phrases with high descriptive value.

Results of a comparison of social tagging patterns in two languages will also be presented, and exploitable strengths for providing multilingual support in digital libraries and museums will be explored.  Additional text metadata could be leveraged for effective image browsing, e.g. by reducing noise, filtering of results, suggesting terms, recommending images, and clustering of these images for browsing.

Project contributors include Judith Klavans, Jen Golbeck, Susan Chun, Rob Stein, Ed Bachta, Irene Eleta, Raul Guerra, and Rebecca LaPlante.

http://umiacs.umd.edu/research/t3/

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