Sara Snyder
Webmaster
Smithsonian Institution

The University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) Libraries, recipient of a 2009 two-year Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant, is building the socially constructed Grateful Dead Archive Online (GDAO) website using Omeka open source software. The Grateful Dead Archive (GDA) represents one of the most significant popular culture collections of the 20th Century and documents the band’s activity and influence in contemporary music from 1965 to 1995.

Donated to the UCSC Library in 2008, the GDA contains over 600 linear feet of material including business records, photographs, posters, fan envelopes, tickets, video, audio (oral histories and interviews) and 3-dimensional objects such as stage props and band merchandise. With the release of GDAO in July 2012, the Archive will actively begin collecting artifacts from an enthusiastic community of Grateful Dead fans.

This presentation will discuss the donation of the collection to UCSC; the challenges of merging a traditional archive with a socially constructed one; rights clearances issues and the intellectual property strategy; crawling and harvesting strategies employed for collecting web resources; plugins and workflows supporting data exchange between CONTENTdm and Omeka; and integrating “the crowd” in the curation of user-submitted content preserved by the California Digital Library’s Merritt repository. Future directions, such as the integration/development of better curation tools and what the Libraries hope to learn from opening the archive to contributions from a large community of fans, will also be discussed.

http://library.ucsc.edu/gratefuldeadarchive/gda-home
http://deadcentral.blogspot.com/

Handout (PDF)
Presentation PDF)

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/

Handout (PDF)

Presentation

Recent activity has flattened somewhat, raising issues regarding the public’s appetite for these projects. More importantly, the menus project raised hard questions about the quality of the crowd sourced content, the longevity of the data, and the disposition of the data (e.g. What is it? Is it good enough for our purposes? Should we keep it? If yes, where does it belong?).

This presentation will discuss these issues and propose some alternative views on metadata, user-generated content, and the intersection of the two.

http://menus.nypl.org/

Allyson Mower
Scholarly Communications
and Copyright Librarian
University of Utah

Sylvia K. Miller
Project Director
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success (Speer, Mower)

In 2007, 65% of ARL members were reported to be either offering or developing publishing services (Hahn, 2008). A new survey, conducted by Purdue University, Georgia Tech, and University of Utah Libraries, as part of a research project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, suggests that 78% of ARL members are now offering publishing services and that this is also an active area of interest in Oberlin Group (liberal arts college) and medium-sized institutions. It also provides a richer picture of an increasingly mature area of academic library service provision, well aligned with issues of emerging roles and new models of scholarly communication.

This session reports on this important year long research project surveying the state of “library publishing services” in 2011 and provides case studies of different strategies being adopted, from collaboration between libraries and existing university presses, through organic single institutional library services, to the creation of multi-institutional consortial publishers. As many larger university presses move even further away from alignment with their parent institutions and wrestle with business models, the new “university press” may well be based in the library. This presentation will provide information about opportunities to become involved in providing publishing services from within the library, practical tips on growing existing programs from librarians active in this space, and some assessment of the challenges institutions involved in this area of new entrepreneurship have faced and how they have overcome them.

The LCRM Project (Miller)

Funded since 2008 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, the “Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement” collaboration (the “LCRM project”) challenges UNC Press, the UNC Library, and the Southern Oral History Program at the Center for the Study of the American South to expand the boundaries of civil rights scholarship and to explore new modes of scholarly publishing. Developed under the grant and hosted by the Library, the LCRM Online Publishing Pilot collected 87 full-text monographs, journal articles, conference papers, and reports online. Components of the system were designed to support ingest of structured content, registration/access, searching, and user commenting at the paragraph level. The pilot’s test period ran 15 months, April 15, 2010-July 18, 2011.

The pilot tested a new online relationship between published humanities scholarship and the primary sources that inform it:  the historian’s “data set.” It suggested a new role for archivists in the scholarly publishing process, and it tested the possibility that a press-library publishing collaboration could guide archival digitization projects. Scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers, and students were invited to contribute annotations at the paragraph level and links to online multimedia primary sources. In addition, the pilot featured multiple outbound linking strategies (OpenURL, DOIs, and WorldCat links) to enable seamless discoverability and linking of related published scholarship online and in print.

The project team will report on usage statistics, user behavior, and lessons learned, and will share plans for a future implementation of the pilot as a library subscription product, as well as plans to publish spinoff enhanced e-books with outbound linking (“portal books”).

https://lcrm.lib.unc.edu/blog
https://lcrm.lib.unc.edu/blog/index.php/works/

Oct. 14, 2011

In this podcast, CNI director Clifford Lynch reports on several recent conferences:

• A plenary presentation given by Steve Kelling at the ASIS&T annual meeting on eBird (http://ebird.org/)
• The Internet2 fall meeting
• Theory & Practice of Digital Libraries Conference (TPDL), formerly European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL)
  http://www.tpdl2011.org/
• ARL-CNI Fall Forum 21st-Century Collections and the Urgency of Collaborative Action
  http://www.arl.org/events/fallforum/forum11/index.shtml

Joan Lippincott, CNI’s associate director, talks about the Net Gen and generational differences in the use of technology, and regarding assessment, the importance of knowing your use communities.  Joan references the following sources in her discussion:

• NPR Story

  http://www.npr.org/2011/09/26/140813332/political-ads-target-tv-but-not-everyone-is-tuning-in

• Pew Internet & American Life report

  http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Cell-Phone-Texting-2011/Main-Report/How-Americans-Use-Text-Messaging.aspx?src=prc-number

• Char Booth’s blog “info-mational”
  http://infomational.wordpress.com/
• Project Information Literacy.  October 12, 2011 report.
  http://projectinfolit.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.

Listen to the June 22, 2011 CNI Conversations.

[28:06 min.]

June 22, 2011
This latest report from CNI, recorded June 22, 2011, includes discussion of the recent Digging into Data conference, an overview of a meeting on persistent identifiers and identifier interoperability, recent developments at the DFG (the German Research Foundation), and the symposium “Crowdsourcing:  Improving the Quality of Scientific Data Through Social Networking” hosted by the National Research Council’s Board on Research Data & Information (BRDI).

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.

Listen to the June 1 CNI Conversations: http://wp.me/pGewu-44

CNI Conversations is available at http://conversations.cni.org/ (to subscribe to the audio feed add http://conversations.cni.org/feed to iTunes, or any podcatcher).  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.

Todd Presner, University of California Los Angeles