The emergence of digital devices, learning platforms, and applications promises easier access to a variety of content, increased productivity, and realization of personalized learning. Unfortunately, the reality is that it is a major challenge to make productive use of digital resources to meet the diverse learning needs of students without involving time-consuming and costly custom integrations. This session will share how leading institutions are collaborating with leading technology providers to establish an open foundation in an age of cloud-based computing that is revolutionizing how digital content, mobile devices, learning platforms and student systems come together to enable personalized learning and student success.

Presentation

Paolo Ciccarese
Biomedical Informatics Research & Development Instructor of Neurology
Harvard University & Massachusetts General Hospital

A year ago the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) and the Annotation Ontology Initiative joined forces to found the W3C Open Annotation Community Group. The group has refined and merged data models and ontologies for describing scholarly annotations of web-accessible resources. The Community Group released a late beta version of the reconciled data model in May 2012; the 1.0 release is expected in January 2013. This briefing will provide an update on data model and ontology work done over the last 18 months and summarize results that informed this work from nine annotation demonstration experiments sponsored by the Open Annotation Collaboration (institutions participating in these experiments include: Alexander Street Press, Brown University, Cornell University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Meertens Institute, New York University, Stanford University, University of Colorado, University of Illinois, University of Maryland, and University of Queensland).

The presentation will also include a preview of plans for Spring 2013 public rollouts of the Open Annotation specifications. Concrete illustrations of the Open Annotation data model in action will be presented, and participants will be encouraged to ask questions about how to apply the data model to their specific scholarly use cases.

The Open Annotation Collaboration is supported by a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/
http://www.openannotation.org/
http://code.google.com/p/annotation-ontology/wiki/Homepage

Presentation (Cole)
Presentation (Ciccarese)

Fran Berman
Professor
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is to global data infrastructure what the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is to the Internet. The RDA vision (paraphrased here) is “research data exchange for everyone” and its mission is to “use voluntary cooperation and consensus to run an open, global research data infrastructure.” The RDA Secretariat has been established through Australian Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education (IISRTE) support of the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), European Commission support for International Collaboration on Research Data Infrastructure (iCORDI), and US National Science Foundation support to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. This session will focus on RDA structure and planning for an interoperable, global data infrastructure.

http://rd-alliance.org/
Presentation

Driek Heesakkers
Project Manager
University of Amsterdam

Modern universities are becoming loose conglomerates of (inter)disciplinary expertise that have a high degree of connectedness with society in the broader sense. 21st century universities may also be regarded as ‘knowledge servers’ in which a number of communities create, share, publish and apply knowledge. Learning and research, in other words, is becoming a community-wide activity. For the University of Amsterdam, SURFconext, a nationwide Dutch initiative by SURFnet (the Dutch National Research and Education Network), has many of the key features for next generation collaboration infrastructure that create new opportunities for online collaboration. SURFconext combines several key infrastructures based on open standards for federated identity and group management (e.g. saml, grouper), Open Social as widget library, and access to collaboration services. The University of Amsterdam is working on examples of institutional implementation (UvAConext) as a way to set up virtual research environments for researchers by opening up the UvA Sakai and Uportal-based collaboration tools. In this session, topics discussed will include organizational, political and financial as well as technical issues.

http://www.surfnet.nl/en/Thema/coin/Pages/default.aspx
Presentation

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.

The Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE) project continues to look more broadly than standard learning management system functionality to engage and connect learners around their academic activities, enhancing the contexts for content authoring, sharing, and discovery, and emphasizing authentic assessment. With broad support for the creation and sharing of templates, offering a Widget Standard Development Kit (SDK) and Widget Marketplace, and supporting IMS Learning Tools Interoperability standards, OAE continues to push the boundaries for ways for anyone to straightforwardly contribute new capabilities.

This presentation will discuss New York University’s current pilot implementation of the Sakai OAE. It will also detail the roadmap for development of the Sakai OAE as well as give background information on the bodies of community representatives developing it, the OAE Steering Group, the OAE Technical Reference Group (TRG), and the OAE User Reference Group (URG).

https://oae-community.sakaiproject.org/
http://chartingatlas.blogspot.com/
https://oae-community.sakaiproject.org/content#l=page1&p=ker9TYL5aa

Access to image-based resources is fundamental to research, scholarship and the transmission of cultural knowledge. Digital images are a container for much of the information content in the Web-based delivery of images, books, newspapers, manuscripts, maps, scrolls, single sheet collections, and archival materials. Yet much of the Internet’s image-based resources are locked up in silos, with access restricted to bespoke, locally built applications.
The British Library and Stanford University, with a half dozen of the world’s leading research libraries and funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, have embarked on a one-year effort to collaboratively produce an interoperable framework for image delivery. With shared technology, common application programming interfaces (APIs), and rich user interfaces, this framework has the promise to surpass the current crop of image viewers, page-turners, and navigation systems, and to give scholars an unprecedented level of uniform and rich access to image-based resources. The IIIF charter institutions are: Stanford University, the British Library, the Bodleian Libraries (Oxford University), the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Nasjonalbiblioteket (National Library of Norway), Los Alamos National Library, and Cornell University.
This presentation will lay out the need and opportunity for an interoperable framework for image access, expose the work done on APIs and tools to date, and explore opportunities for extending the institutions, resources and tools covered by the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF).

http://lib.stanford.edu/iiif

Presentation

Stephen Paul Davis
Director, Libraries Digital Program
Columbia University

Personal name ambiguity for correct attribution of scholarly work is a persistent, critical problem in academic research. ORCID, Inc. aims to solve the author/contributor name ambiguity problem in scholarly communication by creating a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers, and an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID and other current author ID schemes. These identifiers, and the relationships among them, can be linked to the researcher’s output to enhance the scientific discovery process and to improve the efficiency of research funding and collaboration within the research community. The ORCID initiative represents a community-wide effort to establish an open, independent registry of identifiers that is adopted and embraced as the de facto standard.

Accurate identification of researchers and their work is also one of the pillars for the transition from science to e-Science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the ever-growing volume of scholarly literature. A disambiguated set of authors will allow new services and benefits to be built for the research community by all stakeholders in scholarly communication: from commercial actors to non-profit organizations, from governments to universities.

The ORCID initiative officially launched as a non-profit organization in August, 2010 and is moving ahead with broad stakeholder participation. Nearly 200 organizations are registered participants already, including major commercial and society publishers, universities, funders, large digital archives, and a variety of other stakeholders. The researcher name ambiguity problem affects every part of the scholarly communication ecosystem and ORCID is the first initiative to bring that large and diverse community together around a shared solution. The presentation will cover the scope, vision and status of ORCID, the registry infrastructure options, the data proposed for inclusion, and the plan for future growth and sustainability. A discussion of the academic community’s needs for this registry and how academic organizations can participate will be facilitated as part of the session.

http://orcid.org/

Presentation